Vance said “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants”
My understanding is that this is pretty much how everyone does it, no? Not to say that I'm surprised that they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes, of course, nor to say that I necessarily agree / disagree with this tactic.
>It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.
It does say in the law [1]: "there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the United States and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor".
The rules of DOL are just guidelines how they are going to determine this but they are not the law. I will argue that if you are planning to publish your job ads in a small town newspaper you do not believe yourself that there are no "able, willing, qualified and available" Americans for your job.
You, or the government in this case, should argue that in a court of law. So far, the government has not won any of these cases in a court of law. And I mean over the last 2-3 decades. The number of successful prosecutions will be in single digits. It's a bit like voter fraud when it comes to actual numbers.
Which cases? What prosecutions? Are you seriously saying that there are no qualified, willing and available workers for random PM or front end jobs and only this particular Indian person, who just graduated from an American college a few years ago is the only one who is able to do the job? I'd love to see a single case like this, got any links?
The cases where the government has proved in a court of law that a company is in violation of the statute or regulation. I am not aware of any successful prosecutions here other than maybe Cognizant which was in the news some time ago.
What prosecutions of the 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(5)(A)(i) do you mean? It's a clause that says that aliens looking for a job are inadmissible unless there are no qualified, willing and available workers as certified by DOL. It is not prosecuted, aliens are just not admitted. But if you have seen it being prosecuted somehow I am still waiting for a link.
PERM is approved at a rate in high 90s. The government - this government - has approved PERM for all these corporations that it is slandering now. Here's a deposition from a DOL employee [1]:
"Q Are any PERMs denied for fraud?
A Not to my knowledge."
There is a PERM process, the government overwhelmingly approves it, it does not take anything to court or win. I am not sure what you are trying to argue.
You claimed that government does not successfully prosecute this, implying it prosecutes and fails. If you wanted to say it does not prosecute then you should just said so when I asked what prosecution did you mean. Also what are you arguing here? We both agree that inadmissibility does not require prosecution, so what's your point again?
No, I never implied that they fail. They do not prosecute or deny any PERM certifications. PERM is anyway not tied to inadmissibility of an alien as PERM is an employer driven certification process. Recall that PERM is administered by the Dept. of Labor. Specifically for PERM, they need to prove in a court of law that the company is violating civil rights, labor laws, discriminating against a protected class, doing fraud, etc. They do not do that at the administrative level (by denying PERM) or at the judicial level (by winning a court case). All they do is make speeches on the campaign trail, and occasionally settle out of court as some other sibling comments' examples in Apple, META, etc. show.
Okay, then I read you reply wrong and have no idea what are you trying to say. The law I quoted is about inadmissibility, PERM is a process to create an exception for an inadmissible alien as described in the law. Recall that the exception is created via DOL certifying that there are no sufficient able, qualified, willing and available workers. PERM is a way to conduct this certification. Read my first message you have responded, it has the link to the law. I am also not sure what you mean by this "They do not do that at the administrative level (by denying PERM) " because the news item you are commenting under is exactly about the blanket PERM denial.
Yes, the present blanket ban is unlawful which will be overturned by the courts as arbitrary and capricious (similar to tariffs, 100k fee, and countless other things that this admin has done). I mean that historically PERM approval rates have been above 90%.
That's, like, your opinion, dude. For what it's worth, these bans are routine and had been issued many times before, none was declared "unlawful" by an actual court, nor it had been overturned. Usually what takes for the ban to be lifted is the company getting into compliance with the law and stopping the cute "nobody told us we should not ad in the Podunk Monthly Herald, we honestly thought this is the best place to source PMs!".
> "Q Are any PERMs denied for fraud? A Not to my knowledge."
This is misleading. "Fraud" is a legal term, and it's difficult to prove. However, DoL can and will do an audit to verify that the PERM application is correct. If the audit fails (and they fail them often) they just deny the petition.
> Specifically, the department’s investigation found that Apple did not advertise positions Apple sought to fill through the PERM program on its external job website, even though its standard practice was to post other job positions on this website. It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions.
Of course court itself could have arrived in different result.
Yes, they all settle out of court. Everybody makes money and headlines. Companies write it off as the cost of doing business, politician uses it on the campaign trail. Biden sued SpaceX because they weren't hiring asylees. Same shtick.
Some of these requirements are so ridiculous that they create the need for everyone to do what Vance is accusing Microsoft of.
Many companies fulfill the intent of the law. They run a real hiring process — where they advertise online and interview people with work authorization/citizens and people who would require sponsorship.
But if someone requiring sponsorship was the best candidate for the job, then they have to run an additional “fake” process that fulfills these requirements, since no one actually hires tech workers from the newspaper.
Considering how many of these adds have more than a hundred of local applicants, and still end up hiring people that are not from North America it is quite clear they do not intend to follow the intent of the law.
Let's be honest they want a captive workforce that depends upon them to stay in the USA and build a life.
There has to be a better way to does not make them captive, and allows Americans to be the first ones, and even after that the priority should be people in North America, even International students.
But the fact they keep hiring mostly and overwhelmingly people from the same five countries that are desperate to come to the USA is an indication these companies are profiting formt he desperation of people.
> Considering how many of these adds have more than a hundred of local applicants, and still end up hiring people that are not from North America it is quite clear they do not intend to follow the intent of the law.
You’re assuming without evidence that for any given job, that there will be qualified Americans willing to perform that job who aren’t already happily employed. You haven’t established that.
Hell, ask restaurateurs. They frequently have difficult hiring qualified local labor, too, even though the bar isn’t nearly as high as for a technologist, in major cities.
> requirements are so ridiculous that they create the need
It's the other way around. The "need" creates the ridiculous requirements. Companies get the laws they want and the laws they want are those that give them an excuse to do what they want to do.
Is that really the intent of the law? From here it looks like the intent is to favor citizens to people who would require sponsorship, but a hiring process that selects the best candidate from a single set of citizen and foreign candidates doesn't do that.
It also doesn't say that the paper needs to be widely read, just circulated, right? I mean, why pay for a job ad in the SF Chronicle when you can put a cheap ad in the (now defunct?) SF Weekly free paper? When it was still around, SF Weekly would have met the threshold for being widely distributed...
Why pay to reach many thousands of people with a widely read paper when you can pay pennies to reach dozens of people that you don't want to apply to the job anyway?
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
> The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.
Based on that I would expect that if you advertise in small town newspaper, the job needs to be located in that small town. Want them to work in your big office next to big city, then it must be a newspaper widely distributed in that city not a small town on the opposite side of continent.
I've seen these ads. Not the latest, some things might have changed, but circa 2015-2018, this is how they rolled:
1. You choose newspapers that are least likely to actually reach people looking for tech jobs.
2. You post an small ad specifying the role in the most vague and unappealing terms.
3. There is some weird and inconvenient way to apply (e.g., fax- or snail-mail-only) that goes to /dev/null.
You can argue that it follows the letter of the law, but as a practical matter, the outcome is always that there are no US-based applicants for any H-1B SWE role, so something is wonky, right?
Yup someone started to aggregate those. Corp lawyers probably laughed at their cuteness and then proceeded to obscure the process even more. Say, only publish in newspapers without an online presence, so someone has to physically scan it. Or find a small town where few people in tech live. Also notify the HR department to ensure to flag out all US applications for some other "unrelated reason" that look plausible on paper.
I'm not American and I don't live in the US, and I pretty hate Trump and his allies but this ad is just...wow.
I think this is a loophole that should be closed.
Do note there are similar practices in many (all?) countries. Recently there was one case in Finland where job posting was extremely specific saying "We require, and by that we mean require, not recommend, experience in Leader and EU funding as well at least 14 years and 5 months of relevant experience". Their CEO admitted publicly that it was just done due to them being to public funding and that requires job postings to published. One of the articles (in Finnish): https://www.hs.fi/alueet/art-2000012282918.html
I recently saw the job posting in Finland (Suunto, I believe) that had diving experience as an imperative requirement for an embedded software engineer role. I've applied and never heard back. HR contact that they posted also never replied. The job was closed a couple weeks after. I never even got a rejection email.
So yeah, everyone do that, that's kind of the de facto way of hiring specific people when there is a requirement to post jobs. That doesn't make it ok though.
That’s a frustration. People project their hopes and dreams onto Donald Trump, but the president isn’t t a king. The same neoliberal order remains, another war crushing global trade, but still no action taken. Donald Trump did make a lot of crypto money though.
I'm not sure there is any advantage in publishing this in a remote town rather than NYC and SF.
Any tech savvy person in NYC or SF would not be scouring newspapers for tech jobs and even if they are, they are most likely to be H1B or Greencard themselves.
A small town newspaper may actually make people apply to those roles.
But either way, people who likely to come through these ads can be easily disqualified just by adding a few technology stacks
What's the point of bringing in workers into US just to have them work remotely from home? At that point why not have them work remotely from other side of ocean.
It takes a lot of trust (on both sides) and complexity to establish a working relationship across two jurisdictions, if at all possible.
For instance, what labor laws apply? And who enforces them? And how, given parties in two different countries?
Does the company want to subject itself to some arbitrary country’s tax man or labor law enforcer prosecutions? Does the employee want to work under effectively zero labor protection? Possibly, but rarely.
It’s not even always possible, it’s very complicated to work remotely in France, for instance. The state cracks down on one person one client companies, and EoRs beyond being impractical (as they must adhere to drastic labor laws compared to the US) are in a legal gray zone.
The laws of the worker's locality is generally how it works. In the film industry, a production company based in LA might do a shoot in NYC- they have to follow NYC's labor laws since that's where the workers are and the work is being done.
The workers at the home base in LA have the LA laws applied to them.
Exactly, and those answers are why it’s a hurdle and a leap of faith.
The company has to adhere to labor laws in foreign countries (most likely plural if this is a general policy). That’s quite the overhead and opens you up to legal trouble.
The employee has to trust their government can prosecute or otherwise coerce a foreign company with no entity on their territory (otherwise they’d just get hired normally through the subsidiary).
LA and NJ remain two states of a common country and I'm sure that simplifies a lot of things.
Although none of this applies if the company is a multinational with offices in the employee’s country. But then that is offshoring rather than remote work.
Cultural and timezone alignment. We’ve been here before with the outsourcing wave 20 years ago. The answers are still the same, remote is just a job perk.
Before Covid-19, when you asked tech folks about outsourcing to central American countries (or even within the US to places with lower wages than the bay area), the answer would always be "nothing can replace in-person meetings around a real whiteboard"
(B) Advertisements in newspaper or professional journals.
(1) Placing an advertisement on two different Sundays in the newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment most appropriate to the occupation and the workers likely to apply for the job opportunity and most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers.
(2) If the job opportunity is located in a rural area of intended employment that does not have a newspaper with a Sunday edition, the employer may use the edition with the widest circulation in the area of intended employment.
(3) The advertisements must satisfy the requirements of paragraph (f) of this section. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by furnishing copies of the newspaper pages in which the advertisements appeared or proof of publication furnished by the newspaper.
(4) If the job involved in the application requires experience and an advanced degree, and a professional journal normally would be used to advertise the job opportunity, the employer may, in lieu of one of the Sunday advertisements, place an advertisement in the professional journal most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by providing a copy of the page in which the advertisement appeared.
I'm more speaking to the point that the options are "newspaper or professional journals" in the-year-of-our-lord 2026. Job sites are under a section that gives a pool of other options of which the employer must pick three. Those requirements should be flipped (job sites are the requirement, newspaper and journals are one of the extra options) if the DoL wasn't asleep at the wheel.
Edit: And thats not a R vs D thing. The requirements have been this way under multiple administrations, and newspapers have not been a primary way of sourcing candidates for two decades.
Like many things in US law, they have been deliberately ignored as time moves past them to ensure the laws no longer constrain them.
Most governments actually have no difficulty doing "Keeping the lights on" work like updating laws to reflect the times changing. Even here in the US, Republican state governments will have no difficulty keeping the lights on and running day to day tasks, and it usually moves at a reasonable clip.
Another good example of this is any time something comes up that a government body is very very for, it takes almost no time to actually get done. In principle, the turnaround time for a government to react to something can be a single day if necessary. Or less.
But the US Federal congress, explicitly Republicans, has purposely and explicitly and publicly made it a part of their platform to prevent the government from doing anything, including day to day tasks. The modern federal congress does so much less than it used to. On purpose.
Somehow the things that were trivial to do back with ink and quill are suddenly impossible to do in a timely manner. Because it's entirely by choice. Democrats aren't innocent, and are perfectly willing to not do their job when they can get away with it.
That's a systems question. We've had comments on HN before from people who post those ads because they're legally required to do so. The comment that I recall said (in my paraphrase):
- If you apply, you will not be hired, because we're only looking to hire the guy we already have in mind, who we're already working with under some other relationship.
- But, if you apply, that guy also won't be hired, because we proved to be able to fill the role locally.
- This annoys us and him and you.
From a systems perspective (and taking this description as accurate), if people make it their business to apply to those ads, it really will stop companies from using this method to get green cards for foreigners they'd like to employ. The downstream effects are open to question; maybe a given company will employ more domestic employees and maybe it will just keep using the same foreign contractors it's already using.
Please use more than one brain cell in order to consider the intent behind those guidelines, and whether what Microsoft (and similar companies) is doing is actually within the bounds of what voters and the representatives who wrote the relevant laws wanted. Do you really think the purpose of making companies advertise the job opening in a newspaper was just to give companies a bunch of busywork? or might there have actually been an intent behind it? Are you capable of ascertaining what that intent is? (note: this question has a right answer that all people arguing in good faith are capable of stating)
Is that supposed to be a downside? I honestly don't see why that would matter. If someone is working for a US company, then they're working for a US company. The flag sticking out of the ground where they sit shouldn't be relevant.
But if the job is located in Redmond, does that mean widely distributed in Redmond itself, or the Eastside, or all King County, or the whole Puget Sound area?
Anyway, I went checking and I wasn't able to find any opening in Microsoft in the Seattle times online version. Which is definitely not a nice optics and would play unfortunately well with the current allegations
Yeah, the rules are designed to facilitate fraud. They let you put job ads for web developers in a newspaper instead of, you know, on the Internet.
If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud, they would have required the company to advertise the position in the same places they advertise their other jobs.
> If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud
I wouldn't default to assuming malice. These laws were written by extremely old people who are still living in the 1950s, where they think the paper boy still rides up on his bicycle on Sunday to deliver the news paper to them, and that's the only way to read about jobs.
Imagine if they changed the law to reflect what they wanted instead of randomly punishing companies that most likely are doing the same thing everyone else is, but they angered the admin by telling them "no" on some topic.
Yes, these are literally the guidelines provided by the DOL. And the government seems to want to punish companies for following the exact published guidelines.
Oh come on, if a company is placing job ads to comply with the letter of this law in 2026 they're 100% exploiting the process Vance outlines and would undoubtedly try to exploit whatever the replacement process was as well.
Are we referring to the same administration that is met with immediate resistance from an activist judiciary whenever it tries to do literally anything?
No, just selective enforcement and maybe sending a message that if you don't behave, the administration may look a bit harder into you than it normally would.
Just vote bank politics. Microsoft is not a cheap sweatshop. If it is a sweatshop and still producing what it produces then that defies logic. We can only expect more of these as mid terms approaches.
If anyone needs an example of this happening, here is one from yesterday. Netflix is advertising a fully remote $750K software engineering job in the Seattle Times classifieds but the same job isn't listed on their career website: https://x.com/JobsNowPR/status/2107816460634784094
Exposing the corporate fraud is political?
Or is it just political because it uses US symbolism to expose US jobs at US companies being kept from US citizens?
The ads on Netflix' own website look quite different. No salary range but much more information about the job. And there is an application form to be filled out. The job ID has a different format.
AFAICT, the email address usresumes@netflix.com only appears online in conjunction with these very brief job ads on small job sites. It seems quite obvious that these ads are not really meant for serious candidates.
If one sends an email to usresumes@netflix.com, one receives the following automated reply. That does not necessarily mean that Netflix posted the above ads.
----------------------------------------
Thank you for your interest in Netflix!
So what happens now? Our hiring team is currently reviewing your application and should we find your background to be a fit for this role, we will be in touch.
We are always looking for stunning colleagues to join our team and do amazing work. So remember to check out our job site regularly as we are growing and adding openings often!
Not sure what to make of this.
Either Netflix is very brazen here - posting minimalistic job adverts where they don't want anyone to apply - or someone else is posting these to further their own agenda.
Let’s put our pitchforks down and think for a moment.
Do you really think that Netflix has a preference for non-Americans?
On one hand we say they chose Americans to pay less money on the other hand we see this absurd amount of money for a remote job
Why? Because this is not them looking to fill a position but rather trying to get a PERM for an employee that they are already happy with. We don’t even know if it’s H1B or L1
Not saying that the H1B program doesn’t have its problems, but this is not the case of let’s fill this job with non-Americans for less pay
Cognizant was found liable for engaging in ethnic nepotism and benching non-Indian labor disproportionately, so a preference for non-Americans is indeed plausible and dependent on the hiring team.
only place in earth that pays labor to these prices btw. Any other random western country pays max %25 of that maybe if they are really expensive city like Zurich.
I've seen it done in not even a small-town newspaper. A company I worked for put it into a print newspaper I cannot even find anywhere and I suspect the lawyers who we used to help in the process owned it themselves (but I can't prove this). I am not sure if there is a set definition of what a small-town newspaper is or "widely distributed". Like what if lawyers print it once a month/year and just distribute it around public parks or something? Is that widely distributed?
This isn't even a good basis. The question is what the purpose of visa to residence work programs achieves. No one ever questions the underlying assumptions. Like for example, could filling skilled roles actually cause a self fulfilling prophecy? If Americans assume immigrants will fill a role, they don't acquire the skill which actually creates a dependence on immigration to fill it.
That reminds me of the Richards Tip episode from Nathan for You, in which, in order to fulfill a legal requirement for a name change, they started printing a newspaper called The Diarrhea Times.
It’s because the companies are following a flawed process, not that they’re committing fraud.
The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.
In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.
I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.
This model assumes that the number of positions is fixed at any given time, but that is not true. Instead, it will fluctuate based on what must be paid. So, to extend your example, without H1B or a similiar program or de-facto state that does the same thing, then we'd get roughly the 900 jobs that are willing to pay the most to be filled, while the rest are not worth the cost of employing someone in this hypothetical market. The result, then, is a higher wage for those 900 citizens.
This is not to say that such programs are bad. To consider that, we must ask questions like:
- Is citizens being able to make much more than non-citizens a desirable outcome? (it's electorally incentivized, since citizens can vote in the relevant elections but non-citizens can not but that is not the same as being desirable in a more broad sense)
- How big is this effect?
- How badly do we (meaning society at large) want these final 100 jobs done?
- How will this affect competition with other countries?
- What about outsourcing?
A labor shortage has a temporary effect of creating an upward pressure on the 900 jobs, but there’s a ceiling and the long term effects are complex. I may have to pay 900 jobs 1.5x to attract and retain the talent as a business, but that cost will be eaten by other functions where there’s a surplus. Or long term, the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away.
Additionally there will be a loss in productivity for business and the 900 jobs will have more work on their plates, so in a way they could be underpaid for the job they do. This is just scratching the surface, but I assume there’d be a lot of second order effects.
> the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away
Both are acceptable terms for me compared to importing cheap labor. If they automate, then at least it creates new high end jobs, and if they ship jobs away then they now have to deal with foreign cultures, foreign courts and legal system, etc that will hamper their business.
That’s because you’re automatically assigning “cheap labor” tag to all workers on visa. Which in itself is not accurate. But these same workers after following the above process become permanent residents and citizens. (Which implies these are the people companies want to retain and move them off a visa by sinking 10s of thousands of dollars) The reality is much more nuanced.
Nope. Companies are just taking advantage of the system. Just look at who the biggest importers are. Tata Consulting? I mean that's clearly just cheap tech labor. I once was contracting and had to train my replacement from Infosys who was there on an H1b visa.
> This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
Especially because when such processes are broken they usually got that way not on accident, but because of sustained lobbying by the same forces that then take advantage of the broken system they helped to shape.
(I'm speaking generally, not necessarily claiming it applies to the particular policy being discussed here, which I'm not super familiar with the history of one way or the other).
100% happens. Microsoft is for sure an offender, but the biggest offenders are companies like Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, and IBM (among others).
There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.
IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.
If you are ever at a tech company and oddly see a piece of paper taped to the wall near the ceiling with microscopic font, that is a job posting. Its representing the tech company making their 'best effort' to hire an american. You can't make this stuff up.
Yes, exactly. I don't think Microsoft's hiring 6K foreign workers is really the problem. It's companies like Accenture and their shady practices. I've seen entire departments of American workers laid off only to be replaced by Accenture through H1Bs. This is just a publicity stunt from the administration. If they really cared about this issue, they would work with congress and update their antiquated immigration laws regarding foreign workers.
> They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks.
I really wish this was quantifiable in some way -- I have no way to tell if this statement is accurate.
I've worked with some very skilled H1B that definitely deserved to be here. If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem. Companies like these are not doing "highly skilled" work.
Edit: I kinda wonder if the "highly skilled" value judgement is a holdover from the era where people thought you were a genius if you touched a computer.
> "If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem."
It's hard to get data, but this is precisely what appears to me to be happening.
There's a limited number of slots by country. These companies specifically target those slots. I've worked with these folks (who are wonderful people, to be clear), and also had multiple friends with very niche, in-demand skills need to leave the country.
I don't have the data, but at a micro level, the system does appear to simply be set up backwards.
Remember that H1B is a lottery. If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery. But most of the jobs aren’t going to those people. The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
> If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery.
But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?
Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.
Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.
If H1b were about getting the most talented, it wouldn't be 75-80% from just one country and another 10% from a second country. I'd expect it to be very evenly distributed.
I would expect tons of H1Bs from former soviet bloc countries that have incredible math and science education. The fact that the H1B program isn’t clogged with Russians and Ukrainians is evidence something is amiss.
You'll notice it follows a population distribution of the world, with higher weighting from less developed countries. Soviet bloc people are not a high %age of world population and also tend to be captured more by europe since it's closer. People from developed countries tend to have less incentive to move on top of that. Indians have a further advantage of already knowing english on top of that and you get our current distribution of mostly people from india, china, canada (proximity, easy TN visa and english), europe with significant slavic representation and then everywhere else in the tech industry.
The relevant metric isn’t population, but educated population. India has 70% of H1bs while most other countries have under 1%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-h-1b-visa-approv.... India doesn’t have 70% of the world’s college graduates in developing countries.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
I mean that each employer petition on behalf of a worker is selected randomly. But, prior to the petition, the workers are hired by the companies in a non-random fashion. That’s important to keep in mind because I think a lot of people are like “oh the H1Bs I met working on AI at Google are super smart, so the program must bring over the best of the best.” But the system treats an H1B petition from WiPro the same as one from Google. Because the system is a lottery, it can be true that there are super smart H1bs working at Google and also that most of them are doing jobs many Americans could be doing. The lottery system makes the bar quite low and the spread very wide.
> The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
This actually changed this year. Applicant gets 1-4 tickets depending on their pay relative to job/area. So $500k Google engineer has quite a bit higher chance than $100k WiPro one.
Of course it still has issues (Google probably has 1-2 possible applicants for that position and would prefer all of them, Wipro has 100 and cares more about what % of them pass).
Fair. I think there's a discussion to be had on whether it should be a lottery, but I don't think that discussion is feasible in the current political zeitgeist.
The people that deserve the jobs are Americans. It doesnt matter if a foreigner is more skilled--the American people don't want to complete for jobs in a global labor market.
It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.
This happens. It’s the SOP, but it’s because they already have someone doing the job on a work visa and they don’t want to have to fire them and hire/train someone else.
It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.
I get it. Like 90% of the Republicans platform is the dumbest policies imaginable. It’s like saying you agree with a bunch of drunk, belligerent, clowns. You’d want people to know that you don’t paint your face and piss your pants too.
You really think that the democrats are much better? It seems like they are more concerned with their image than actually doing anything. Or if they do, it seems like they are more interested in the symbolic aspect of it and to perpetually keep the problem, such as how they deal with homelessness.
One should not have to disclose one's politics to make such a comment. IMO. That means that we should not think "smells like a Republican, so ignore them!".
One shouldn't pay heed to any comments one way or another that are prefaced with "I am X". They are thinly veiled attempts at appealing to people's base emotions.
Or -more likely- they reflect fear of being judged for their political views as inferred by others. But yeah, it could be manipulation! "I'm not an X but <opinion voiced by people who are X>" could be a purposeful way to push views held by people who are <X>.
"Hours after the [Microsoft H-1B] announcement, President Trump awarded Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a summit in Washington where Mr. Musk and other tech executives also were honored.
Mr. Nadella came to the United States for graduate school and joined Microsoft in 1992. Two years later, he wrote in his memoir, he turned in his permanent residency for an H-1B visa so that his wife could immediately join him in the United States."
The "replacement of an American" is where the narrative breaks down. Traditionally we haven't had large numbers of unemployed developers. One of the consequences of the the Dot Com bubble bursting is we lost an entire generation of native-born engineers. People weren't going in to CS. At the same time there was an explosion of software positions. This is part of what fed the increasing use of H1B talent. This was also one of the sources of the bootcamp phenomenon. Things are bit more dynamic these days. This is just a nativist, anti-immigrant move.
It's only kind of accurate. It has to be 2 newspapers in the area the person is employed in. Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.
> Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
Well if that's how one want to proceed. Fine. In that case these companies are not really prosecuted. Government is just doing fraud prevention out of abundance of caution.
A place I used to work advertised a job by posting the listing in the break room, where only people with badges could get in to see the advert. Maybe there were ads elsewhere, but if that was the only posting, it felt against the spirit of the law.
The entire H1B visa system should be scrapped until every American engineer has a well-paying appointment.
And companies need to advertise outstanding positions on their own website to prove they can't find any candidates. Seems to me that would be impossible and you could scrap the entire H1B Circus right away.
And employees with an H1B visa should leave the country after 4 years for at least 3 months to prevent them from applying for citizenship.
But to be real, does this really matter? Do any software engineers or other positions Microsoft is looking for in these examples look for jobs in the paper these days? Would they get more responses if they advertised in a larger paper?
Microsoft is banking on the fact that nobody looks for jobs in the paper. The point is to use the lack of response be able to write on paperwork that they've proven that no qualified jobseekers exist in the US. They are aware that advertising in the newspaper is not an effective way to fill a position; the goal is to lie about how much they tried.
> they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants
Wait but PERM process is precisely for getting that foreign person outside of the temporary "effective indentured servant" phase. It's to get a green card... Once you have it you can leave the company and work anywhere.
Where it gets maybe abused is only India/China pipelines, where they're stuck in that GC backlog for years. so it makes them in this limbo of renewable H1B until the GC is granted, which might be decades out.
Another way to look at it is that they are going after particularly notable fraudsters that have very high visibility and perhaps perpetrate it at a higher rate.
Based on its track record, I don't think the administration is "going after" anyone in good faith. This is just a way to compel Microsoft to do something beneficial to the guy in charge.
I remember years back, I was maybe 5 years into being a sysadmin and saw that Microsoft was hiring, at the time they said that they expected high proficiency in the following.... And listed every piece of software they produced. It was ridiculous then and probably the same thing is the case now.
The point is that only someone already working there would have proficiency with all the software they use internally, so by listing those as requirements they can ensure no external candidate is eligible for the job the green card applicant is doing.
Really a bizarre workaround. It's not even restricted to these massive entities.
I flew into a co-working space for a team onsite this summer. While walking the halls, I saw a job posting printed out and taped onto a glass door facing out from one of the single-occupant offices, surely to claim a similar approach.
Very on-topic, reminds me of some analysis of why Putin and Xi generally tolerate corruption among their subordinates: it allows them to purge anyone they want with plausible deniability, since everyone is on the take.
Is there any evidence of that claim by Vance?
I am not trying to be confrontational but this claim is so outstanding that it pulled my attention.
How did his people got it to a level that they prove it is systematically abused.
I am not saying it is being abused or not. I am literally curious on how anyone in the face of earth could do that to a point that you can prove it is not an isolated event.
Anyone, best of luck for people.
(Imo, anti immigration is the easiest way to cut ties with other nations if you plan to send your boys in there to get a trauma)
This is a very well known tactic in H1B factory like Tata and Cognizant, people has been complaining about this for years. Not sure about Microsoft though.
I'm sorry. I am not saying you are lying. Please don't take like this.
But if someone wants to audit this to prove it, how would they do?
Because if they are just exploiting a hole, why not fix the hole?
Why aren’t they trying to change the laws of h1b, etc. while they have control of the all branches of the government and instead just target certain companies? Why not just close the loopholes, assuming there is systematic abuse, so no one can abuse the system anymore?
This is one of those horrible moments that happen once every decade or two for me:
Somebody I believe is spiritually hideous, morally corrupt, and plain old incompetent, saying something I am in atomically perfect alignment with, using almost the exact same words I would.
This is why i voted for him and will keep doing so. The left is too weak to push through things like this with their “morally superior” voters. So, your welcome.
Those are literally the rules of what you need to do. Well, except the small-town newspaper part. Pick up the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle and you'll see pages of these ads.
Indeed. I had a friend who worked in freight forwarding - Japanese company, him a Japanese citizen, but based in US.
Once he got his green card via lottery, his pay went up and his mandatory overtime went down. His Japanese coworkers without green cards still had to work late.
This has honestly been one of if not the only thing I have agreed with the Trump administration on. It also seems like something that has had bipartisan support (at least among the general public), but nobody wanted to rock the boat on these companies that provide so much funding in the form of "donations" and lobbying.
Abuse of the H1B system is pretty widespread if you look at the types of roles that these companies submit applications for. I'm convinced that if you aren't looking for someone who is literally a PhD candidate, lead of their field you can probably find someone somewhere who can write a damn REST API.
Trump was defending H-1B a year ago even as his immigration crackdown was shifting into high gear. This is simply a pre-election move that will likely be reversed by the administration or the courts.
For nearly every job title that an H1B is brought in on, they are paid more than the prevailing average wage. The idea that they are coming in as underpaid foreign scabs is mostly a myth.
Burying job listings is part of the kabuki theater, but it's being misrepresented here. Usually companies already have a candidate in mind when they do this. It makes no sense to run a complete hiring process in the US, and then turn around and run a second one for international candidates. You may as well do a complete candidate search and then post the canned jobs again if you need to get Visa sponsorship.
> For nearly every job title that an H1B is brought in on, they are paid more than the prevailing average wage. The idea that they are coming in as underpaid foreign scabs is mostly a myth.
Source? But also what difference does that make? Just pay American workers more.
If we set aside software engineering - 40% of rural doctors in the US are here on H1B visas. There's not a "pay them more" button we can hit that generates more domestic doctors, especially not in under 10 years. All you'd do is compete amongst a limited supply.
> There's not a "pay them more" button we can hit that generates more domestic doctors, especially not in under 10 years.
That's literally how the button works. An undersupply in the market, increases prices.. kids and students deciding what they want to do with their life, see the wages and decide 10 years of school is worth it... and after 10 years you get more doctors.
If there's an undersupply, that's a clear indication that young people are looking at the field and deciding the wages don't justify the investment.
By short-circuiting the process of the free market, you're guaranteeing the shortage will continue.
As an American who grew up in one of these underserved markets, you couldn't pay me enough to work there. My mom works at a rural hospital and loathes every minute of it. The reality is, American workers value more than just dollars. Especially professionals with options.
Immigrant doctors may also hate working at these facilities, but the prospect of raising their family somewhere in the USA is a huge value add for them.
> As an American who grew up in one of these underserved markets, you couldn't pay me enough to work there.
Eh I think this is sort of BS. First yes literally you could be paid enough. Everyone has a price, including you, and you’re not fooling anyone. Second you can find arrangements that perhaps enable you to spend a few years doing what amounts to public service in exchange for maybe no debt or higher pay and then move on - this is a very common thing in the labor market.
Also, what does that say about you that you hate being around your fellow countrymen more than someone from outside of your country?
The problem is that the relationship is non-linear. The data shows that at a certain amount of comfort and income, most people really aren't willing to make drastically uncomfortable lifestyle choices for any amount of money. I'm not suddenly going to become a lineman even if it pays double what I make now.
How many kids in our culture are actually looking at earning potential as the #1 factor when they choose a career?
There actually is a pay them more button that the federal and state government controls, but I doubt they'd hit it. Many of those rural docs are compensated heavily by Medicaid (EDIT: have a high % of Medicaid patients - compensation is a separate story), but the reimbursement structure often penalizes those rural docs vs. those that take positions in suburban and urban environments. Some states permit a flat reimbursement structure where patient volume is the only difference, but other states further penalize the rural docs by "shaping" reimbursement rates such that more funding goes to the urban and suburban areas.
This administration could address that, but if anything, they seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
Rural medical specialists are compensated very well. In my experience the bigger obstacle to getting those roles filled is more social, for example, unless you are already married the dating pool in a rural area is a consideration for new doctors, or if you are married and your spouse has a career moving to a rural area may require them to give up that career which they may not be willing to do. Cities better support dual-career households b/c they have a density of industries. Also - after 10+ years of school a lot of new doctors want to live it up a bit in a place with things to do and see.
And stop degree inflation. A doctor with 4 years of med school and a year internship from 60 years ago can diagnose your sniffles or refer you to a specialist just as well as a doctor with an unrelated 4-5 year BS degree then 4 years in med school, then a year of internship followed by 3-4 more years of residency.
At the same time, the doctor with just 4-5 years of school and hundreds of thousands less debt can not only treat patients more cheaply, but will have more years of practice too.
> That would be like DEI for American workers, no?
No for a couple of reasons which you’re aware of. Plus liberals say DEI is good so they can’t be against it.
> Not to mention, discrimination based on nationality is illegal.
Sort of - but you’re taking a narrow view here. We discriminate (nothing wrong with that, all countries do it) who we let in to the US for example. Many universities had or have de facto race quotas, and by being an American you can’t be discriminated against as a nationality outside of being an American. Let’s say you are Chinese American. You’re American, not Chinese. There isn’t anything to discriminate against. Welcome to team USA. All the way baby. But if you aren’t an American then we just decide what we want to do with you and whether it fits our needs or we send you back home or whatever.
It is literally a requirement for that kind of Visa.
> Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater.
There are also tertiary effects in that bringing in young working families into the US is overwhelmingly good for the economy.
If bringing in workers shrinks an economy, then how does one go from a country of 40 million to 400 million without 360 million people being unemployed? Because wage earners actually contribute more to the economy than they crowd out.
No one in their right mind would argue that having kids is going to put downward pressure on the job market, and yet we have the idea that grown, educated adults will. (Not to mention these grown, educated adults cost us nothing in taxes in education or retirement, so overwhelmingly less of a burden on our economy)
I have not met a single one who was not over qualified for the job they were doing.
I have only met a couple who were (to some extent) getting screwed because of an agency in the middle. However I would not have found the wage unreasonable and the markup was well within the industry standard.
H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here... We need to fix the portion of the process where it is onerous to go from H1B to green card and citizenship.
> H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here...
There is truth to this, certainly. In software engineering or related positions? I don’t think so, generally. If this was the case we wouldn’t also outsource positions.
And this announcement changes nothing. Why only mention microsoft when they aren't even the worst of them? Tesla put out a tesla semi factory video a few days ago and most of the people in it were foreigners on visas.
This looks to be a shakedown for cash. Companies are retaining existing h1bs and not hiring new, so this "change" is coming at a meaningless time.
I think people should be asking why JD has eye shadow on as if he just came from a drag party. The guy looks like a clown and is making a meaningless announcement to fake out the maga base for the election. The h1b announcement from last year still hasn't changed anything. The lottery is still maxed out.
This would actually probably be acceptable to me if they multilaterally applied it across all tech companies, not just the ones who don't kiss Trump's butt.
Yes, that is an accurate statement by him. As with many things, corruption and fraud in the visa process have grown over time and are mostly unremarked upon.
Wages are absolutely lower and they can do that because you cannot switch employers.
For example, the high street bank in my case sponsored H1B/L1B holders for Green Card strategically. I, as a Polish national, was not sponsored, because I would receive Green Card within 6-12 months. Meanwhile Indian colleagues were all sponsored, but they wouldn't receive Green Card for years, so they had all of us pretty much "enslaved" by taking advantage of cut-off dates. My wages (~110k) were about 50% of what I could realistically earn with my skillset at the time (2015-2020).
Indian staff had it worse, thanks to how the system works, they could work on their H1B while "waiting" for GC for a decade and still not be able to move employers. In my case, at least, my H1B would run course and I'd have to leave the country. I knew I wouldn't get mine withing first couple months, after my director literally came to my desk at one point after my GC request and asked if I would indeed receive it within 6-12 months. I never heard back on the subject since, despite my repeated requests.
I am a liberal and absolutely hate what Trump admin does to the world, but they're also absolutely right on how companies exploit the system and it definitely affects actual wages and employment opportunities for US citizens.
It's not very accurate, they need to be newspapers where the person is employed. It's the government that is behind the times with respect to how people find jobs. And it's not really "fraud," it's simply companies working in their own interest within the existing outdated rules.
Besides newspapers, they have to be posted with the relevant state workforce agency and 3 other methods. It would not be hard to require that one of those needs to be the company career site or wherever the majority of recruiting comes from.
The article is lying by omission, it's not just Microsoft, which got suspended from PERM, FT has a list of few other companies (it's paywalled by searching for the article title and clicking the result link works [1]). Also, this is not something extraordinary: big companies get suspended from PERM all the time.
Yes, you are of course correct, lots of large businesses do this, and hopefully they extend this scrutiny to all businesses.
I'm not sure what about this made you question your intuition. Is there something about this story that made you think it might only be Microsoft doing this?
The US will do anything but have a sane worker visa program, with clear path to citizenship.
The lottery system is built to be gamed and so is the performative local "hiring" attempts.
On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers. I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it, but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots. Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back. Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
> with clear path to citizenship.
Or no path at all. Tying the citizenship carrot to the visa and letting the employers hold the stick is the worst of all possible outcomes.
The real rationale for the change isn't fraud at all. Does it make sense that the administration is specifically concerned about fraud regarding hiring in tech sector while at the same time pardoning convicted fraudsters where the victims lose out on billions of dollars?
Does it make sense to declare the "America is full" and deporting people who have been granted asylum while welcoming white South Africans with open arms?
> On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers
HN had its mask off moment some time around the 2024 election.
HN's shift from a group of plucky Wozniak-like technological enthusiasts to a group of unicorn focused wealth seekers tracked the broader change from engineers being primary staffed with hobbyists to wealth seekers across society.
That change FAR predates the most recent election.
This is not caring about their country, this is caring about their paycheck. They want higher salaries, damned' be what it does to competitiveness. It's nearsighted protectionism, that's what it is.
> Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back
So I think what some in this thread are saying is it quite literally 'will' bring American workers the literal jobs that the H1Bs aren't doing anymore.
> but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots
So two things can definitely be true here. They can be hardworking and well-intentioned, and they can still be used as a wedge between American workers and slightly better jobs
There is no guarantee that any American will be hired to fill any job vacated by a former H-1(b) holder. The firm could contract or fail against foreign competitors.
> I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it...
The contention is pretty clear to me: the law currently says hiring companies should look for Americans who can do the jobs first (not best), and only sponsor visas if they can't find them - but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.
Sure, immigration is hard, stressful and gruelling fight against an an uncaring system. But the damaging aspects of widespread illegal corporate[1] conduct shouldn't be ignored.
I'm saying this as someone who believes American should increase its immigration and end widespread gray-area tolerance that harms the immigrants - who have the least power of all parties involved, which employers love to exploit. Sadly, partisanship makes otherwise smart voters really dumb, with one party lying to its base and the other going along with it and avoiding hard discussions about why America needs immigration.
> ... but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.
> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.
> ...
> National origin-related disparate treatment in hiring related to job advertisement also can include an employer making it more difficult for applicants from one national origin to apply for positions (for example, subjecting U.S. workers to more laborious application methods than H-1B visa holders during the PERM labor certification process).
Part of the challenge here is that the EEOC tends to not be funded well and is limited to acting on tips rather than being able to investigate or audit.
> The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to investigate and litigate against businesses and other private sector employers for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.
> Congressional negotiators have reached a bipartisan deal to fund the EEOC at $435.4 million for fiscal year 2026. The funding level is the same as that requested by the White House, but nearly $20 million (4.3%) less than last year’s budget.
There’s not much point in coming to these threads and expecting anything. They’re only useful as low quality commenter honeypots. My auto filters have taken out 3/4th of the comments as habitual whiner parrots. I suggest you apply similar input data hygiene.
I have a Chrome extension there but I also have an iOS app that I use for myself alone (it’s really not production grade). The Chrome extension is pretty rudimentary so if you want to replicate it you can just tell your agent to do so and if it helps the source is on GitHub. The iOS app is vibe-coded entirely so perhaps you’re better off starting from scratch there.
It’s a pretty basic requirement to interact with social media these days, I think because the information feed is full of noise.
I use a combination of Hacker Smacker (seems roughly the same idea), and TrustSpark for HN, which I also vibed (pre-Opus, probably could be improved at this point).
Hacker Smacker in particular would be awesome if more users picked it up (since it's a web of trust, albeit 1 hop only).
I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down. There was very definitely a shortage of qualified SWEs pre-AI, during the boom times from 2010-2022 or so. Sure some American SWEs exist but big companies were desperate for talent and there definitely weren't enough SWEs that were
(a) competent enough to pass the hiring bar
(b) willing to move to places like Seattle / SF / NYC where these companies were hiring.
You only need to scroll back to a couple of years ago where people were turning their noses up at all forms of recruiter outreach and complaining about how aggressive the recruiters were. What privileged times we lived in.
Since 2022 / post COVID interest rate hikes / AI, the hiring dropped and college kids can't get jobs. The first bump in the economic road you hit, you want to scale down H1B capacity, cancel green cards, banish people. What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program? Or be resigned to getting high tax paying / high spending jobs shipped off shore? Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
IMO this is all very short term thinking / political theater to score brownie points with the republican base for the elections.
Nothing here is good policy. Sure there's fraud, fix the fraud. You don't like the ad process, make it better.
But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.
As far as I know there isn't any wage discrimination at these big companies like Adobe or Microsoft. Everyone gets paid basically in-line with what levels.fyi says as a band for their level.
> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.
I don't think this really holds up. They could offer the American engineers the opportunity to move divisions, but they don't because what they really want to do is what they did do: Fire Americans and hire foreigners.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
Then make H1B what it is supposed to be for: elite specialists, not infinite low cost non-American laborers. Then you won't even need to have this discussion.
> What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program?
Yes, why not? Or more practically: keep the program but adjust the quotas annually or even quarterly based on needs. When you see tech companies laying off workers by the thousands, as happened over the past few years, that's the sign that there is plenty of local talent to be hired.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
The solution to that is to separate visa renewals from new hires: allow companies to keep existing workers, while forcing them to hire new ones locally. This actually makes America _more_ attractive for immigrants because they know they cannot be replaced with a new generation of cheap workers from their home country when economic conditions worsen.
> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false.
In what sense is it false? Microsoft claims that of its 6,800 H1b filings 80% were “related to employees already working at Microsoft” (note no mention _which country_ those employees were working in) which translates to 20% to or 1720 new employees they hired.
And for pay, they only state that “international workers that Microsoft does hire through the H1b visa program are paid the same level of compensation that a worker from the US would receive”, but of course the point is that the average level of compensation for new hires today is significantly lower than it was 10 years ago, when there was a tech worker shortage.
So it can be simultaneously true that the current-year H1b hires are hired at the same rate Americans are, but that those rates are substantially lower than the negotiated compensation of the people Microsoft laid off. The fact that Microsoft declines to comment on this,
So the following are almost certainly all true:
- Microsoft fired (or laid off) over 1000 American citizens last year
- Microsoft applied for H1b visa for at least 1000 _new_ employees
- Those new employees will almost certainly receive lower compensation than the citizens that were laid off
Please, if you think this narrative is false, which of these facts are you specifically disputing?
> I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down
Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.
Perhaps you could attempt to steel-man why point-based immigration allocate and de-allocate points for certain professions over time? Or why temporary visas exist in the first place.
> If it does, then it won't be appealing to the class of person you're seeking to attract.
Such is the nature, complexity and self-contradicting character of any large-scale public policy; and it's "classes" (plural) because immigration cuts across social strata, not just your software and service industry "rockstar" geeks.
Why would there need to be a clear path to citizenship? If I go work in Amazon UAE for 2 year contract, why would I expect citizenship? The whole reason I'm there is for money. When the job is done, I go home.
Clear path or no-path to citizenship I guess. The fact that H1B is a dual-intent visa muddies the water and allows employers to string along people for decades.
I agree that the cruelty is disgusting and unnecessary, but you're going to have a very, very hard time convincing people that removing foreigners will not free up jobs for Americans.
> Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
How about sparing a moment for the anguish of American citizens and graduates that either lost their jobs, or cant find work, because they were replaced by foreign scab labor willing to work longer hours, for less pay, with no mobility?
Why should temporary workers have a path to citizenship? Come to the US, work in a high tech job, send your remittances back to your family, and then retire to your home country at a young age. Win-win.
A company that I worked for would hire foreign grads out of school on F-1 visas with zero experience; they’d come on board using the OPT extensions (good for up to 3 years) and then file for H1Bs immediately. If they didn’t get it they’d file again the next year and so on. If they get to year 3 of the OPT without getting an H1B they would be sent to an office in Europe where they work for a year and then get transferred back on an L1.
FWIW H1B recipients immediately get started on the PERM/GC process (if they wish), with only whatever new-grad level plus 0..2 years experience they have accumulated thus far.
Meanwhile job ads are posted in the kitchens as required by law (and I’m sure the local newspapers) with ~$80K salaries even though I that way way below what they paid even for new (US) grads [in the Boston area]. So no surprise no one ever applies for them (if they even see it).
Every H1B I know is both underpaid and unable to change jobs. The companies that use them the most are those that squeeze their employees the hardest. They work hard and are incredibly smart and capable, but they have no power to push back on the boss asks them to come in on nights and weekends.
It’s a fiction, like the idea that contractors would prefer contracts over full time employment. Its a less-privileged workforce with fewer protections to benefit the companies.
I’m pro immigration, and that means actually paying people for their expertise rather than semi-indentured workers. Too often companies get all the benefits of the workers without having to pay them. The fact of all the staffing agencies put in alongside Microsoft. Of course, the current admin couldn’t care less about any employee, citizen or migrant, they’re just using it to try to show their base they care. The dems have done absolutely nothing when they are in power either.
There are exceptions, but in 20 years in both SF and Seattle you can basically set your clock to this being what’s happening.
As an American I notice this also more broadly affects the company culture. Most of my peers (who are mostly non-Americans) are afraid to speak up. It even causes the (few) Americans to typically not speak up. So it just creates a culture where management is surrounded my yes men. I actually don't think that's good for anyone. Not the American workers, not the foreign workers, and not the company. Your job as an engineer is to talk back to your boss. They aren't the engineer, you are. Even if the boss is an engineering manager. We all know that there's a huge difference in how someone understands code between having written it and just read it (LLMs are certainly blurring this line now...)
IDK, with a lot of things it seems like big companies are just incredibly myopic. When I got my PhD people interviewing me used to love to say "well in industry, we do things that actually matter" (a weird premise) and boast about how efficient they are. Yet IME I just see an incredibly suboptimal setting. They routinely waste tons of money to save pennies and the attitude of "I just care that it works" really just ends up with "it looks like it worked but it's actually broken". But that's the obvious result if you surround yourself with yes men and don't let people do their jobs
I picked two examples to show the disparity. I do like where this is going, but as it frequently happens, it feels like a weapon than can be wielded selectively.
This is base salary not total compensation, which for a company like Microsoft matters quite a bit. I’ve never made less than 2-4x in a year what was on my perm application 10 years ago, that data is garbage
I see a lot of people who could probably work at any of these companies on LinkedIn unable to find work.
It seems to me the newspaper requirement needs to be nerfed and moving forward companies should require jobs be listed at the top most popular job advertising platforms (whether it be a website or what have you) as fully remote, US citizen only. Every application and interview needs to be submitted before applying for a VISA for a clear paper trail.
Theres no shortage of talent in the US, companies just need to hire remote more. Not everyone wants to live in one state for tech jobs.
I don't disagree. All regulatory issues. But, "not everyone wants to live in one state for tech jobs" - the trend is going the other way where hybrid/office is becoming the norm again. In any case, not too long ago, we were all working from office, which was the norm.
I’ve not worked at Microsoft so I can’t speak for them, but I’ve been in tech for the last 15 years with the last 5 being in manager/director roles at at least 1 company that is a household name.
What you’re saying gets repeated a lot, but I’ve never seen it to be true. Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level. I just don’t believe that it’s happening on the scale that people make it out to be.
Also, I don’t want to get too into it unless people are interested, but at least at the companies I’ve been at, the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty wrong with these programs and I’m glad to see reform, but I don’t believe the underpaying thing is happening nearly as much as people claim it does.
I've been a tech manager for 21 years, much of that at a large Fortune 100 that had tens of thousands of employees from Infosys and TCS. The hourly rates we were charged for local workers on H1-B visas were $15-$30 less than we'd pay American contractors from body shops like Teksystems, and that is just what we were paying Infosys. The employee didn't see anywhere near that.
Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.
The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.
Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.
Presumably Infosys also pays citizen workers shitty too. The issue here is Infosys, not h1b.
I will also add a data point for big tech. I have managed people on h1b, on o1, with green cards, and citizens. I have never even sniffed any sort of disparate treatment across these groups once hired. During hiring the bias was against h1b since it was a huge pain in the ass to arrange everything and their start date could be delayed.
Infosys has virtually no citizen workers, and the ones they have are managing entire programs - they aren't doing client work. The only reason they have any workers at all is they can't realistically change H1-B sponsors.
HR wasn't involved in sourcing strategy. Either I contacted HR to open a req for a full-time employee, or I contacted Infosys. For body shops there was a specific system that sent it to multiple firms, but I was usually already talking to my account managers. When doing budgets we'd submit headcount asks by type and there were some soft ratios we were expected to stay within but this was mostly the division exec and their finance partner related to keeping our ratios aligned with our charge-back rates. I never saw a number that had anything to do with diversity across contractors.
The problem isn't just whether they're hiring below market. It's that market rates themselves are impacted by there being a whole underclass of workers who can't just freely move between jobs, and has to speedrun getting a new one if they ever lose their existing ones. The precarious nature of it makes an H1-B worker less likely to speak up about most things related to working conditions due to the precarious nature of the job. And that impacts everyone else -- because the fastest way to get a big raise is by getting a new job, so there's less incentive to pay people better if fewer workers can actually move around and you can threaten the ones that can purely through the existence of ones that can't.
I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.
Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.
> Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level.
This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.
Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.
Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.
Working at other places. There used to be a thing called competition - where you'd pay more to attract people to leave elsewhere. Now companies stifle this and collaborate to artificially to keep wages down.
Instead they just throw their hands up and call it quits, hiring elsewhere instead.
> You’ll take these low wages and be happy about it or I’ll import a foreign worker who will be happy about it. And if they complain, I’ll have them deported.
I think the H1B process gets abused by body shops. Salaries are pretty demonstrably lower there than at many other tech companies.
At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).
If your "household name" company is more susceptible to scrutiny, they may not have as much of a pay gap and strictly rely on a the possibility of getting the employee sent back home if they don't contribute enough being the motivating factor. But odds are there are many sub-contractors that are through agencies that are significantly underpaying and you may have not been privy to the contracts through these parasite vendors.
this is just not true. the market for new grads is extremely bad. Microsoft could easily invest in more early career people, instead they're hiring more senior H1-Bs.
Bad market for new grads is overdetermined. AI, interest rates, etc.
But a contributing fact is flooding the tech market with H-1B visas spikes labor supply, kills workers' leverage and lets companies cheap out on salaries instead of bidding them up.
Yeah but those new grads are too uppity. We tried throwing money at them, but they're more interested in productivity destroying quality of life improvements.
The imported worker, on the other hand, is a more efficient and compliant machine. Maybe if we make those youths as poor as the workers we import, they'll eventually learn some gratitude.
> sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more
There's another option: without a sufficient workforce, the projects just happen somewhere else. Then the local market stagnates, and you end up with very little competition between employers. And the salaries go down to match.
This is not a conjecture. The European tech sector is experiencing exactly this phenomenon. Even in large tech companies, the salaries for the same positions are about 50-100% higher in the US.
Employers benefit from regulations that exist to benefit employers. We should have completely open borders or actually do what's best for citizen workers.
Employers would have to pay more competitive wages if the candidate pool was smaller. Then there is the free legal services given to some workers and not others, that leaves less budget overall for compensation.
They would be employed by another company, and contracted to Microsoft. This is the arrangement for the majority of H1-B employees in general, but I do not know if Microsoft does this.
Tech companies do not generally do this for their product teams, but may do it for their internal IT and reporting systems.
and how much pressure do they feel to raise the band over time when theres a constant stream of people coming in form another country who accept anything presented because its still higher than back home
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? It is not true. Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Meta etc. do not do this and they have no need to. They just need the top employees, and lots of them.
You want to know who does this? Companies like Disney and other IT type jobs who hire H-1B workers then lay off citizens and have those citizens train the immigrant workers. There is no reason for H-1B workers in IT departments. But there absolutely is a need for immigrant workers in high tech companies. How else do you ensure your employees are the best in the world?
The problem with H1B and some of the other employment visas is its really difficult or impossible for the worker to change jobs. JD Vance calls them indentured servants. I suspect the situation for actual indentured servants is a bit worse but in any case the workers dont have a lot of options at their disposal. They cant just leave without losing their visa. So their “choice” to work for less money isn’t really a choice at all.
Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?
If it were me, I would make companies "bid" on the visas, where their bid is the salary (including all benefits, minus ALL expenses) they will pay the employee.
Employers who really need employees for high-skilled work would thus get visas. Employers who want to underpay their foreign labor will not.
Auctions are great because it's harder to game than a lottery. If a company truly believes there is a shortage of rocket surgeons and they need to access to the global market of these specialists, they can bid high. No hand wringing about not being able to find American rocket surgeons (willing to work for low income country pay scales). No stuffing a lottery with tons of entries - bids incentivize applicants to not waste slots. No worrying that a Federal department made the wrong decision on total supply, price, or who the recipients are - auctions self-adjust and update.
Auctions are bad because need is not entirely measured in money. Highest bidders win is not egalitarian. Sometimes we do want to subsidize rocket surgeons visas for disadvantaged parts of the country.
My concern with such approaches is around the "all skilled labor is lumped into the H-1B visa", be it needing fluency in French and a teaching certificate or a PhD in data science with a focus on economics - its the same pool of visas.
Within the H-1D which is for tech jobs (just like H-1A and H-1C were for healthcare while they were active), it can have a different pool size and requirements and for that one could require a certain base pay and have an auction on top of that.
This could allow for regulating tech job immigration differently while minimizing the impact to French teachers or medical professionals in rural America that have no way to compete with Big Tech salaries.
The reason I think this is more likely doable is that it works the same way that the H-1A and H-1C visas did before to address one section of the skilled labor visa applications.
Well it does impact h1b because h1b has a maximum time of 6 years unless the visaholder has an approved green card application. So, by blocking new green card applications (at least the most common path) this effectively puts a ceiling on the number of H1B visaholders.
H1B visa's are a modern form of indentured servitude. The employer knows you can't quit, and if they fire you, you have 6 weeks to somehow find a new job (which is already hard if you are a US citizen or green card holder) or you have to leave the country.
Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.
Paying people less because they came from somewhere else and can get away with it, sounds a bit exploitative to me.
The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).
I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.
One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.
Unrelated to immigration but not for stupid managers. Friend of mine was promised a raise which was basically an adjustment of compensation.
He was fed up and he went to a meeting and he had to hear "what are you going to do about it?"
Manager knew his wife was pregnant and wanted to use it, or I suppose it was it.
He told he would pack his stuff and leave.
So he did. He packed his stuff, shared the news and another senior manager rushed after him to bring him back to his team with the raise.
I left the company few years ago but now and then I think about it. How someone can be so opportunistic with to the point of trying to abuse someone about to be a father for few thousands of dollars that do not even belong to him. And EVEN if he got a bonus or something it would have been much much less than that to the point that, if it was me, I would be so ashamed to admit that.
Possibly he would have done that with anyone in a special situation.
And I am sure this is more common than not, but how f'up it is to hide behind "it is just business" cover to act like this.
The most racist part of the program is the per country quotas. Right now they are granting EB3 for Indians who applied in 2014 while EB3 visa for the French from 2024. So that's an extra 10 years Indians are stuck in limbo. And, no, this is not just because there's more Indian's immigrating.
It is not based on race, but nationality. If you are an Indian but are a citizen of Singapore your quota will be based on Singapore quotas, not based on you being ethnically an Indian.
It's actually based on country of birth. If your parents were French but were living in India when you where born, you will be in the India quota, even if your nationality is French.
I fail to understand how it is racism to support offshore hiring. Does that not help the local economies of remote workers? I am not sure what the admin is thinking and why they are making such decisions but for people who want to stay where they are it is king great.
Also why are you singling out Indians? Are you racist against other nations?
> it just sounds like the goal is to keep Indians out
Bingo.
This is a pre-midterm messaging move aimed at shoring up support with young men who voted for Trump in ‘24. The chances that the policy even lasts more than a few months is slim.
Oh please, US citizens have been getting a raw deal for decades, I lived and worked in the Bay for years and years, my Indian colleagues were no more talented than the US citizens coming out of US schools. You clearly weren't part of that world if you can make claim to the contrary.
When I was working at a large tech company, most of our teams were foreign-born. And we were specifically scouting for the US citizens for ITAR projects.
And this only got _worse_ as more and more advanced STEM degrees in the US go to foreigners.
I hate the Trump administration and I don't know that I agree with this latest thing, but at least if they're outsourced to India then at least the company has a bit less leverage over you. I think in the current system employers can hold your H1B visa over you like a Sword of Damocles.
I've never had to worry about visas, so this is just stuff I'm getting from visa-holding friends, but that always seemed a bit scary.
Huh, there are other Indian IT vendors in list like Tata, Wipro, Cognizant and Infosys. MS is not alone in this. It'd be payback if it was about Microsoft's business/contracting with government.
There's not a single reason to assume this administration is acting in good faith in any scenario. The correct way to look at all actions by this administration is to ask yourself, "how does this help trump?" Most of the time it is money (or staying in power => more money), as it almost certainly is here. He's looking for a payout for selectively targeting microsoft. That's it.
And when trump does something which clearly hurts himself, you have to remember that he is fantastically stupid, undisciplined, and insane.
Picking your least favorite companies and applying it to them only is not the right thing to do. Laws and regulations, when not applied equally, are weapons.
It's definitely not the correct thing to do. I don't see why you would start by making an example of a company like Microsoft where starting salary is six figures than a company like Infosys which employs a similar number (median salary at Microsoft for H1B workers is $177k vs. $93k for Infosys)
There's some real ways in which it's unfair. As a software engineer in Seattle I've quite possibly lost $100-300K to the H1B program over the past 10 years. It's not a problem though, I don't need anyone's protection from Microsoft.
I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
> I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
There are so many senior leaders that rose through the ranks at MS from India and the rest of Asia that the claim is simply laughable. They wouldn't tolerate being paid any less than American natives themselves nor would they tolerate their immigrant subordinates being paid less than natives.
I sponsored an employee and that's not how pay works, in fact you have to tell them how much they are making and you have to pay them your average. The example given by the US government is a level one software developer makes on average 110k but your company pays on average 115k then you have to pay 115K and it has to be submitted to the government. So the answer to whether H-1B workers are paid less is: they are legally required not to be, but the system relies on employer attestation first and enforcement second. Companies get caught abusing this when the get audited but H-1B laws require they be paid the same.
It's always seemed odd to me that your employer somehow sponsors your Green Card. It always felt like it should simply be a measure of
A) How long you have been working as an H1B in the united states (say 10 years).
B) How much you have paid in taxes (say 1 million).
Whenever either of the above has occured, you take some citizenship test, and then you have a green card. Nothing to do with your employer dangling something for you, literally a measure of your employment history and/or taxable income.
The reason why is the drafters of immigration law care a lot about US employers (as they are voters, donors and have a big lobby). US employers want to control the green card process so that they have leverage over their employees. If employees can get green cards without the company, they can leave or threaten to leave. If employees need their employer, they can't start the processes until the company assents, and can't leave while its in process. Depending on exact details that can give employers 5 or so more years where the employee is at their mercy.
This is also why I as a US citizen strongly support green cards for everybody in the industry who's fractionally eligible for them - my working conditions are shaped by what they can get the labor force as a whole to put up with, and that's shaped by visa indenture.
Right, even if one starts from an aggrieved position of "They took our jerbs!" after it's happened you do not want to let those workers be underpaid or abused, because it will (A) only increase the incentives of employers to import pliant immigrant labor and (B) it'll ripple out to harm the bargaining position of all "locals" still in the same line of work.
P.S.: Conversely (inversely?) there's often a vague idea of "if we somehow make the positions suck ass, then immigrants will stop coming, and somehow locals will be hired to a no-longer-sucky position", which is, er.... Wishful thinking. It'll get one a sense of vengeance, but it wont help pay the bills.
To my knowledge economists do not believe this one is black-and-white, but that's much more of a question about the issuance of H1B visas they begin with anyway.
As if your (very American) bosses wouldn't find another to put you down and wrong everything they could from you. Today ICE is going after immigrants, tomorrow Pinkerton is going after you.
Well, from the Gov's POV, they don't want to import wards of the state. If you arrive in a country, someone has to fund you. Tying it to an employeer guarentees that you're funded. Without that you're just filling up ERs and hostels, etc.
The system we have is one that was politically feasible to implement. On paper, we have a system for “non-immigrant” temporary workers. Employers sponsor green cards for skilled workers because the theoretically temporary job is the only avenue for most of these workers to get to the U.S. in the first place.
I know you post this canon of "but acktually, Congress didn't want skilled immigration" in all threads, so it's useful to point to the actual legislative record, AC21 (American Competitiveness in the 21st Century), which is the most recent passed legislation that covers a lot this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Competitiveness_in_th...).
> summary, the provisions of AC21 did the following:
> They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers")
All of this is done under the pretense that these are temporary workers who will eventually go home. That’s the only way Congress could get away with it, and it seems like people are now wising up to it.
There is no pretense. You can read past the line that confirms your world view. "They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers") acquired by filing Form I-129, as well as the employment-based immigrant categories for immigration (EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3, acquired through Form I-140), thereby increasing the number of people who at a given time could be in that status." The bill acknowledges that there is a massive backlog in the H-1B->GC pipeline and while it's hard to get bipartisan consensus on supply side reform, it makes incremental progress in making lives of people in the backlog a little better.
I was talking about your claim that there is pretense or there is some ruse and that people are wising up now. If you read the entire bill, it covers all sorts of classes of non-immigrants and immigrants and the path from one to the other. If you think Congress was duped, I don't know what to tell you.
That’s just a weird modern view tainted by recent nativist and populist sentiments. If you go back 20 years, in 2006, it would be utterly not controversial for a republican politician to support issuing green cards to anyone who completed a PhD in America.
You should listen to the NYT podcast I linked! It describes decades of exactly what I’m talking about, and the NYT is neither nativist nor populist. Yes, the Bush-era GOP was shilling for cheap labor for big business. There is a reason a Bush can’t even get elected dog catcher in Texas anymore.
The US likes to tie everything to employment - see also healthcare and retirement plans. Coming from Canada, anyone can open up an RRSP account (equivalent of 401k) and your employer isn't involved at all. You control the account. In the US you're stuck with the 401k account your employer signs up for. If they decide not to offer a 401k then you lose that benefit.
From the internet: In 2026, you can contribute up to $24,500 pre-tax or Roth to your 401(k). Some plans may allow after-tax contributions up to the combined employee and employer limit of $72,000. The annual contribution limit for IRAs, including Roth and traditional IRAs, is $7,500 for 2026.
During World War II the US Government controlled prices and pressured unions not to strike. The war ended and price controls were still in effect for a few years. Since employers could not increase wages, they offered increased non-wage compensation such as health insurance. The IRS agreed that employer sponsored health insurance is not taxable income. Thus tying affordable health benefits to your job. (And giving employer health plans a big tax advantage over buying it yourself).
The idea that international socialists have that domestic labor conditions are made worse by a lack of protections for foreign workers (rather than the presence of the workers themselves) doesn’t pan out if you look at Canada; it’s quite rare for status in the country to be tied to a particular employment agreement, so immigrants are free to leave undesirable employers, but wages are substantially lower there due to the country having accepted about 3 million immigrants and temporary workers in the span of the last ten years.
> wages are substantially lower there due to the country having accepted about 3 million immigrants and temporary workers in the span of the last ten years.
Do you have any evidence of that causal connection, or is that just an assumption? The US also accepts large numbers of immigrants and temporary workers.
The vast majority of immigration to the US is based on luck (family, diversity etc.) or misery (asylum, refugee, etc.). That's about 90% immigration. The remaining 10% is employment. Where did you pull the $1M figure out of? Is the Mexican sibling paying $1M in taxes to immigrate here? Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
I did go in details in another comment so I won't repeat myself because that comment is LONG.
But a nation couldn't ask more than a working age adult where you invested zero in education and health for 20 years and suddenly pay taxes with none of almost no benefits.
In the UK, which I raised numbers due to the discussion going on in there, visa workers generated yearly 12 to 20 Billions in direct taxes and fees and they use 4B in health (which technically they paid in fees a combined value of 6B upfront If my numbers are right)
But the real numbers lies on what other revenue they generate. It is estimated in my calculations that +50B-70B pounds are from immigrants on UK with a working visa.
That's no amount to shy considering about it is 8M people in that specific situation.
And remember that none of them had to have their education covered by the government.
Someone in the other comment said that 8M British people would generate more taxes than that, but I did not find evidence of that.
According to the public consultation documents UK gov released about immigration a couple of years ago, about 10% of the immigrants are responsible for more than 35% of the taxes collected. Hence the suggestion on curb immigration considering the salary range which might make sense or not depending on where you stand on the topic.
I have no horses on this race and my impression as an outsider who just likes analysing data is that it seems as much of a claim as saying that EU took more money from UK than what it put in which turned out to be mostly incorrect.
He's speaking specifically about the green card process, at which point you've already been in the country for a long time and paid into U.S. taxes. Not people who might want to pay money to immigrate here (although for them, the EB-5 visa program exists).
I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.
Cato did a study in 2017 that asked people if they supported immigration. Most people did. Then they asked people what they thought the level of immigration should be. The median answer was around 500,000 a year. The real level is 2-5 times higher than that. That’s why nobody will push for a real skilled immigration system. Once you open up the issue to public debate, a likely outcome will be a demand to drastically cut the level of legal immigration.
For example, right now, nobody is thinking of how many immigrants come to the U.S. through family unification for each H1B worker that eventually gets permanent residency. If you open up the issue now it’s going to become a firestorm when people realize that “65,000 skilled workers a year” actually results in millions of people every year, most of whom aren’t skilled workers.
I can't find the study in question, but I'd be interested in the polling process. The average person has zero understanding of what 500,000 immigrants per year means. For context, the average American is off by at least a factor of 2 about the population of the United States. If the questioning wasn't something along the lines of "of the people you personally know, what fraction should be immigrants" or something, I have no idea how you'd get anything resembling useful responses.
For those who aren't doing the math, there are now about 340M Americans, so 500K immigrants per year would be about 0.128% or roughly 1/780 of the population arriving as immigrants per year. If you figure the average immigrant stays for about 5 years (there's likely a long tail, where many people on temporary H1Bs go back to their home countries in 3-5 years while green card holders stay forever), you'd expect < 1% of the U.S. population to be immigrants under this system, and the average person would know maybe 1 or 2 immigrants.
FWIW, my community is 30% foreign-born and we don't really have any social cohesion problems. I think that length of time in the country actually matters more than the absolute number of immigrants; people who have been here since they were teens are very well acculturated. But if I were to put numbers on how many new people a group can absorb per year without radically changing its culture, I'd put it at about 10% (that's like having one new person on a 10 person team hired within the last year). If we extrapolated to the whole U.S. population and assumed they were all evenly distributed, this'd be 34M people/year.
Honestly, I think the bigger problem is that they're not evenly distributed. Some places in America never change, over generations, and remain very suspicious of outsiders. Other places become 80% immigrant over a span of 10-15 years, and then they never talk to anyone outside their ethnic background. In not very long, you end up with multiple different Americas that can't relate to each other. The parable of the polygons is very relevant here:
Indeed. That translates to 14 relatives brought in by every skilled worker. You really wonder about the IQ of the people who believe this propaganda.
Also case in point, both me and my wife went from F1 to green card. We never worked illegally and had fully funded gradute programs. Our parents refuse to settle in the US, they have assets and families in home countries and rather live there. We haven't tried to bring in any other relatives. 3 of our siblings have also went through the F1 route, all of them fully funded gradutes, one of them left the US after graduation, other two settled and got green card.
That's not that far out of line. Spouse, children, two sets of parents and two sets of siblings. You're right that it's probably not 14 on average but 5-10 easily
Go to Little Bangladesh in Queens and tell me how all those people came here. It’s mathematically impossible unless they’re all illegal (which I don’t think is true) or it’s family reunification.
Each legal immigrant who becomes a citizen is the root of a tree that can continue indefinitely. If you come from anywhere other than India or China, it takes about 10 years to get citizenship from when you get your H1B. It took us less than 10. After that you can sponsor family for green cards directly. That person only needs about 6 years before they can get citizenship and start sponsoring their own family members. So it’s easy to see how we went from 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S. in 1990 to 300,000+ in just 35 years.
How am I responsible for what's happening in little Bangladesh in Queens? Did you go through my history to dig up where I'm from, so that you could tailor your racist reasonse?
Okay, but in other cases it's not like that. They bring spouses, siblings, and parents who can turn bring their own spouses, siblings, and parents. That is severely curtailed these days by country restrictions so I agree that it's not 14 but it's higher than 1.
> That translates to 14 relatives brought in by every skilled worker
That’s very easy within a few decades when you consider that the people who are sponsored will get citizenship and can then sponsor their own parents, siblings, etc. My dad sponsored six people, and he just has one brother. My mom has 12 siblings, but them and their families went to Australia following my uncle.
There are 300,000-600,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S., up from under 10,000 in 1990. Based on H1B petitions and natural growth, the population should be more like 15,000. People are bringing their entire extended families over.
Any changes to immigration require the legislature. Congress hasn't changed anything in over 30 years, so all this is moot. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It's a bit silly to reason backwards about what the anti-immigrant types want. There is no grounding principle there.
This line of reasoning will shut down practically any interesting conversation that has to do with wanting to change the system. Extremely unproductive.
> Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
I think the "chud" immigration logic is rather, take whatever win you can get in the general direction of restriction, because you've been losing every single battle for 5+ decades.
If they had wage parity there is zero disadvantage to a US citizen. The problem is not H1B's as a concept, it's making foreign workers indentured servants paid a fraction of the wage, thus incentivizing their hiring over US citizens.
I don't follow? Why would a US citizen want to compete against 8B people for jobs instead of just 300M? Seems like the lower number is better for the citizens of the US.
Why not just decide that only white people or only men or only people born on Tuesdays can apply for the job you want?
The job should go to the most qualified person. That's how america works. If that most qualified person is actually a guy who was born in india, great. I have no problem with that. You don't get to bogart opportunity based one what zip code you were born in.
you can already get a greencard by paying less than $1mm in taxes. in general, your requirements are way higher than what's even required for citizenship. and green cards don't need a civics test either.
but I agree that it would be nice to have a less fraught/complicated path to permanent residency.
> you can already get a greencard by paying less than $1mm in taxes.
Not really.
Your only generic option is EB-5, with $750k in direct investments. However, right now it takes 3 _years_ to process the initial application (https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times - look at the I-526 form). And after the initial form is approved, you need to apply for the actual green card, adding another 1-3 years.
Everyone should consider separating both tourism sector, and summer youth jobs from regular employment issues.
Those are special circumstances, but utterly different than regular low wage worker issues.
European kids are not going to pick tobacco; they are doing 'lifestyle' summer jobs in America.
These jobs are meant for students/youth, and necessarily going to pay a bit less but they obviously shouldn't be under duress.
It's an aspirational trade off - the business owners generally are not making bank for the most part. The system doesn't work without a lofty goodwill all around.
My cousins all worked as 'golf cart girls' at public courses, they liked being in the sun but the pay was sketchy.
All of this is very different from H1s, regular temporary workers.
this is how it works in other countries. if you have been a legal resident for a number of years you can apply for permanent residency or even citizenship.
It was a system that was created to serve a temporary need. However like any temporary system, it becomes permanent. Then companies or employers abuse it to the max, use it keep wages arbitrarily low. They use their influence to convince people from LCOL areas to uproot their lives for promises of higher wages/better living.
There are different grounds for being granted a green card. One of those is that your employer wants to hire you permanently, and can't find an American to take the job. Getting a green card doesn't require an employer's sponsorship, that's just the most common application for green cards.
Surly the “corruption” is big corporations pushing for the H1B program in the first place, at a time (early 1990s) when decreasing immigration was overwhelmingly more popular than increasing it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx. Surely the “corruption” is the government looking the other way for years while Indian body shops imported massive numbers of foreign workers while ignoring the requirement in the law to advertise to americans?
And this is hardly new. Ross Perot was opposing H1B when he was running for President in the 1990s.
H1B's are temporary visas and they make it very clear in the application process; there shouldn't be a path to citizenship through an H1B. I like the tax idea though
When they were first created they were very explicitly temporary. It's dual-intent in the sense that in the 90's they updated it so you could pursue citizenship while on an H1B, but the visa is really designed for temporary work. When you apply for an H1B they ask questions making sure you have ties to your home country, and there are time limits to send people back if you're on one for too long.
I was thinking about this the other day in the context of the boardwalk town that I vacation in sometimes. There are a lot of college student aged workers who come from Europe for the summer and work in every service industry job imaginable in town. There are agencies that find these European workers and help them find jobs and housing.
It makes me wonder why there aren't more American young adults taking these jobs. I think it would be great fun to live at the beach for the summer. Maybe the wages are too low, or American kids are focused on internships? Or maybe the European workers are better employees? I don't know.
I live in a touristy town that does this with J1 workers. I'll tell you why: The jobs pay $7.25/hour.
The J1s are then packed like sardines into houses where they pay rent by the week. Why by the week? To remind them they're expendable and can be deported at a moment's notice by the restaurant/hotel/amusement park/etc. they work at. The worst I've heard is 16 people living in a 3-bedroom, 1 bathroom house.
The J1s themselves are typically great people. A lot of them do everything they can to stay in the area via Green Cards or whatever. Business that treat their J1s like shit are usually blacklisted by locals, too. We'll actively tell tourists not to give those businesses any business and why.
People are willing to take a discount on their wages and quality of life for the intangible benefit of ‘the experience of living and working abroad for a summer’.
For non-native English speakers it also has the advantage of providing a free total immersion language course as well. People pay for opportunities like that.
So yes, an Italian 19 year old is willing to work for less money for the chance to work in a water park for a summer, improving their English and boosting their resume, and if it gives them enough money to be able to fund a couple of weekend trips to New York or DC so much the better. It’s a life experience and a working vacation.
That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.
>That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.
Which should be pretty revolting for them if that's the case. Instead of American 19 year olds making some summer money at the waterpark to buy their first car, they get moved aside by disposable foreign workers, so then they need to stay supported by their parents for longer till they can get a "proper" job.
And I'm European not American, but I see the same issue here. Getting minimum wage jobs in the hospitality/service sector is super competitive now due to pressure from migrant workers who will accept anything. These are jobs that used to be done by teenagers in the past for summer money but not anymore.
Employers everywhere being able allowed to min/max wages against the most desperate labor on the planet should be banned.
And then governments have the audacity to complain about people not having kids anymore. Well no shit, my dad and his peers had summer jobs since he was 14 because there were no migrant workers to replace them, and after finishing high school he already had a job in the factory with housing benefits, he was already making enough money to have a family and 2 kids, not one.
The result for the local American 19 year olds is that ticket prices at their local water park are kept low enough that they can afford to go there to cool off and be handed towels by foreign teenagers.
If the government cut off the seasonal work visas, tourist destination hospitality businesses would have to increase prices, some would go out of business, and American tourists’ quality of life would be lower.
>The result for the local American 19 year olds is that ticket prices at their local water park are kept low enough that they can afford to go there to cool off and be handed towels by foreign teenagers.
And where are 19 year old Americans getting money for water parks if they don't have jobs? Still having hobbies funded by your parents at 19 isn't really a societal win.
You say 30-50 years ago they couldn't afford that because labor costs were too high? Maybe they had jobs to pay those higher costs?
By finding a ready source of people willing to staff the water park at a lower price, more ‘water park amenity’ is available at a lower price.
This frees up the labor of local teenagers who can now be employed in other roles, producing other useful things for society, like… I don’t know what teenagers do nowadays. Provide market-clearing services on Kalshi by placing bad bets? Upload short form video to TikTok to enable ad buyers to find customers?
I'm talking about the "the host offers a roof, pays next to nothing for a live-in nanny" arrangement, which locals don't do.
Interestingly the 26 refers to the USA. But a similar career would be legally possible inside the USA (not under the program) but not in EU, due to heavy labour regulations.
If this is like what I saw in Maine coastal tourist towns this summer I suspect its popular with Europeans because the $15.10/hour local wage is attractive. But more so it's because you get to spend time a few months in a beautiful location surrounded by other attractive young people. Party scene is probably great.
I suspect you're correct on that front, too. I have family in an area that has been bringing in European teens to work seasonal tourist-facing jobs for probably(?) decades now. I can't speak to how they are treated outside my view, but anecdotally, they seem to really enjoy the opportunity. They get their little euro-crew together and basically have a College experience.
Locals like them, too - they're charming, generally well-behaved, polite, and it doesn't hurt that they don't have to pay them very much. I like to think the cultural exchange between the Europeans and the otherwise isolated locals is fantastic for broadening horizons, also.
Oh, this was me 18 years ago. Worked a summer in Wyoming at a truck stop in the middle of the desert. It was kind of fun. Don't regret it a minute. My one and only trip to the US. People were warm and welcoming, if a bit wierd at times. The trip I did there with the Grayhound bus was _wild_. I think of my time there with fondness.
The right policy response would be telling the firms running these programs to get fucked if they can't successfully operate while paying staff the prevailing wage that local Americans would accept.
A nearby amusement park touted that they pay $20/hr. However it's seasonal, not year around. They raised wages because COVID-19 and current Administration policies decreased the supply of foreign college students who somehow had work authorization.
When you say “I was thinking bout this the other day”, you weren’t thinking about this, in the sense of thinking about skilled worker immigration pathways for technology companies. What you were thinking about appears to be something entirely different - seasonal nonimmigrant unskilled labor.
There’s actually virtually nothing those two things have in common, except some unarticulated sense of grievance that in some unspecified way it would be better if Americans were doing those things.
One summer in my teens I worked as a groundskeeper at a Martha's Vineyard inn, and it _was_ a fun summer. I had a free place to stay (with a friend), plenty of free time, and little adult supervision.
Virtually all the hospitality staff there were European university students. Midway through the summer, they realized that they weren't earning enough to afford their return airfare and they threatened to strike. I don't recall how they resolved the issue, but I believe that they were netting less than minimum wage. Maybe things have changed since then, and maybe not.
The staff at Harris Teeter in Corolla NC (the outer banks) has been nearly 100% young adults from eastern European countries the last few times that I was down there.
I don't know their living situation, but I did see them both walking and riding bikes to the grocery store. It's a somewhat unique situation as the grocery store probably does 90% of their yearly business between June and August each year. I couldn't tell if they all knew each other from home or just from working together.
Do you mean that you are surprised that young Americans aren't working at the boardwalk in the USA or that young Americans are not working at the beaches in Europe?
They are (quite obviously) saying that this could be changed to British people commenting on how all of the service jobs are Poles, or Canadians commenting how they are all Indian.
That American complaints of this form are not unique and therefore should be disregarded? That American complaints of this form are universal and therefore indicative of a global pattern that should be concerning?
If you're a non-US citizen, I don't believe it's easy to just switch to a different job, which makes it difficult to just exit out of the job you have. US citizens could leave at any point for another job (or no job) if they chose, putting the staffing at the service roles at risk. Just speculating.
I just went to Asbury Park, NJ about a month ago. It was all local highschool/college kids. I go to an ice cream shop in Brooklyn by a park - all highschoolers.
I think it just depends on the location? But also yes - if I'm worth my salt, why would I take these jobs over higher paying internships? At 19 I was able to land $25/h jobs in tech. Maybe we should rethink the pay scales in terms of sustainability. Unfortunately we live in the US where short term gains are the sole motivator for most companies.
In Maine there are lots of early 20s workers that mostly seem to come from Balkan countries. I think those little tourist towns just don't have large enough populations to support the demand. Tourists probably outnumber actual locals. Places like NJ and Brooklyn though have plenty of 16-22 year olds who will work beach jobs.
I think it depends on what countries the owners have connections to. Random ice cream shop I visited in Florida a few years back was staffed by young Turkish women, my wife asked they said there on J1's. Before that we were in the Florida Keys - the local mosque was full of young Uzbek men that worked in the hotels, all on J1s.
There is a program that allows university students to come to the US, work for a bit, and then stay for a month or so longer. It’s called work & travel. Many entertainment companies like six flags and casinos hire them. I have many friends who have done this years ago. The pay was low but they had a fun summer, travelled a bit, and came come with a new laptop or a good SLR camera. It wasn’t glamorous but a generally positive experience.
There is a "work and travel" program for students in Europe with valid visa and everything. I know lots of people who did that for a summer or two, it was an opportunity to see USA and also it was a great thing to list on their CV when getting a job back home.
some companies (Six Flags) have in the past abused the J-1 summer work travel program, and essentially trap young people in semi-remote dorms for the summer
companies do stuff like this because american young people won't tolerate it
Interesting framing. I thought that was part of the appeal. When I was in college I was actively looking for an opportunity to go to another country and do a temporary work thing where you stayed in a mountain resort and worked at the front desk all summer.
The problem is that you have to leave the country if you quit because you can't get someone to sponsor a different job, and you don't have your own transportation. The company charges you rent, for uniform, meals, and other costs... so you end up making very little and don't get treated well.
You don't get to experience much of the country because you're located in some dorm building that's not near much. So your summer ends up looking like 12 hour days standing around in the sun watching other people have fun.
A number of companies have been hit with slap-on-the-wrist fines for actually violating labor policies doing it.
Let these people make their choices about doing or not doing it. Don't try to defend them by taking the opportunity away.
I did this for a summer, worked my butt off, got back home, paid all my expenses with the paperwork and the plane tickets, bought a laptop and came back with about 500$. It was not much, but it was much more than I ever got the opportunity by that point to make.
The people I worked with treated me quite well. Everyone I met was welcoming and warm.
I did not manage to see a lot, but I did visit Yellowstone, had a couple of adventures, and overall was a positive experience for me.
A friend I was with did not manage too well and had a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to wash toilets.
But my point is, it can be a great experience and I don't buy for a second this feigned concern for "ooh, the poor kids are exploited". No, I think it's just job protectionism.
An additional complication is that people get stuck a month in realizing they've made a huge mistake and can't get out without penalty. Choices being limited is what makes it exploitable.
There's no feigned concern, this is actually a labor system that gets abused time and time again. Still happens today. These people have no advocates. A similar situation happens on cruise ships.
you cant build career out of seasonal job in some random resort places across the country.
the idea is that foreigners will do the temp/seasonal low value work, while Americans were supposed to educate and upskill using federal student loans and get a high value jobs.
unfortunately American education system made it impossible, ue to stupidity.
Only China is able to do that: massively educate population and upskill and go up the value chain of manufacturing and industrialization.
I think this up-skilling sentiment misses that as a worker who thought a seasonal service job on the waterfront was a good deal, up-skilling means taking on 6 figures in debt - after which they will only have a ~1/5 chance of getting a job which compensates for the opportunity cost and debt. For many, this is actually a bad deal and growing their own seasonal business would have been a stronger career path.
if you are opening your own seasonal business, then you WANT seasonal wages suppressed. You dont want wages to go up, as this will be your cost of doing business.
Any american bitchin about low wages and competition was supposed to set up own S-Corp/LLC and hire his "competitors" and take advantage of those "low wages"
You have unrestricted work authorization, you have SBA loans and everything possible to create your own American Dream(R)
I absolutely understand both sides, and the sentiment of some Americans who feel betrayed by their government when they see foreigners coming in, getting elite Ivy League degrees, and snatching six-seven figure jobs.
The resentment is absolutely understandable.
What I am trying to explain is that, if magically, all foreigners are expelled, H1B/OPT banned, all Indian visas canceled, this will NEVER result in Americans getting more jobs. Quite the opposite. Global Capability Centers already are offshoring everything possible outside the US, just because of trump rhetoric.
American capitalist is not stupid, the billionaires are not idiots. Why should they hire and overpay for unskilled Americans just because they happen to be born here, instead of hiring the most qualified person? Any anti-immigrant legislation will simply accelerate the offshoring, or even worse, will create competing tech giants outside the US.
It is this entitlement attitude is whats going to ruin the US tech sector and scare the talent away.
So hire Americans and train them. Pay them above market wages so they don't leave. Problem solved. I know at least a dozen people smart enough to write software that aren't in the tech field because the barrier to entry is high. It might not appear high to people in HCOL areas, but in the rest of the country, the barrier is quite high.
Tech people are the last ones to complain about the low pay
A lot of tech jobs are paying six to seven figures, you cant really demand employers to train and lower barriers. Why should employers lower their barrier and increase salaries even further?
Where do you get this feeling of entitelement for other people’s money ???
What else do you want at this point, maybe just plain UBI and a million to everyone just for being white american ?
What do you mean why should employers lower barriers and train people? Because they're abusing visa programs meant for 'highly skilled' labor and bring in low skill, wage suppressing labor.
Learn anything at very deep and competitive level, instead of paying some random bootcamp to sit throught the $10 Udemy course and $20 Coursera certificate on how to write hello world
It doesn't matter if someone can build a career out of seasonal jobs, which is entirely false btw. The market will dictate how much seasonal goods and services are worth, thus setting wages and property values.
Just like farm labor: without importing foreigners, legal or otherwise, wages would go up, food prices would go up, prices, wages, and property values would normalize to market rates.
your libertarian view of economy is too naiive. There is no "free market" in the US. Everything that impacts inflation/CPI is tightly controlled by the federal government with monetary tools like credit expansion, rates, federal incentives and such.
the reason why America wants to suppress low value jobs, is because they are input to the actual output of American economy: agriculture, high value industrial goods, tech services, financial services, real estate, financial asset s and services.
These are the actual components of US GDP and American government does everything possible to keep the input to these sectors stable/low, in order to protect the profits of these industries.
Do you see how wages seasonal workers are lower priority to the profits of Vail Corporation?
The person you're replying to was presumably talking about a vacation town in the US. Double taxation, by the way, is only an issue if an American makes over $100,000 per year in their foreign job.
Can you explain what data I'm supposed to be witnessing the disparity on? Everything on the page looks pretty similar to me, definitely within pattern detection threshold. Is there some specific statistic, or possibly a wider data analysis to show how these things are being politically motivated?
I believe they are implying that the filing data is similar (I haven't checked myself) but the bottom two companies are not being targeted by the admin due to their links.
The “can’t find local worker” requirement is a farce and a lottery is a stupid way to get the best people into the country.
I personally feel there should be a set number of foreign worker slots, set by labor market conditions per industry. Then, auction the slots to companies.
Having to buy the visa would force the hiring to the areas of most need, objectively, and get around the farce. Then, just let the companies bring in exactly who they want.
Auction money could go towards lowering domestic worker income tax.
A lot of the focus is the effect on pay, but some of the attention should also be spent on competence. There are individuals going through master's degree programs, which are essentially degree mills, to get hired at one of these (or similar) companies, who do not have the basic skills to do the job.
Not everyone, but a significant number, and if you've ever worked with one of these individuals, you know how demoralizing and frustrating it can be. Especially in the typical political climate in a tech company, where saying something even slightly related to immigration will get taken a certain way.
Yes, exactly. Without a hint of pettiness or subjectivity: To say that many of these individuals are bad at the job would be an understatement. They might as well be random non-English-speakers grabbed off the street and told "write a React app" or "administer this database" or "perform data analysis".
It's not their fault. But it's demeaning in the extreme to the experienced, dedicated natives who are forced to work with them.
I’ve experienced working with h1b workers that are not great, but this characterization is a bit rich. All of the massively valuable big tech companies have a ton of these workers. There’s no way they are like random people pulled off the street.
Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food. If an American isn't getting the job anyway, then why bring them here in the first place to drive prices up for everyone else?
> Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food
You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.
As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.
The government exists for the general welfare and and economic system that subsidizes idleness because the disingenuous say "look over there, its a net positive" while ignoring the externalized cost borne by the taxpayer is just theft from the taxpayer.
FWIW the "international" folks I work with hardly spend any money in the US. Most of it is saved and spent or invested during 2-month annual visits to homeland.
Your logic is incorrect, you are thinking that a "international" folk buying a TV is what they mean. But that's not correct. Paying income taxes, paying tax on cars, paying tax on gas, paying rent, these matter a lot more to the government then you buying an iphone from the apple store in the mall versus one in "international country".
That's probably just your company. In Silicon Valley, "international" folks spend a lot of money on buying houses (multiple of them sometimes), cars, home improvement, going out to restaurants, etc.
Absolutely anecdotal, but in the Silicon Valley I know, I rarely see coworkers participating in skiing/surfing/hiking/US travel. Hell, even dining out outside of free-food campus is a tough sell.
As for buying multiple houses, I'm sure the wider population is happy with foreigners buying rental properties.
Me buying food from restaurant would make the owner richer, but would also employ more people at the restaurant.
The scarcity issue is valid when the resource is limited. In case of US, I was not aware of food scarcity. Even housing is more due to policies than actual land scarcity.
Economic activity does have positive feeback. Yes, some people get unfairly rich - but the solution is not to stop the activity, instead try to get the rich pay their fair share of contribution to the country.
Why are we relegating locals to menial restaurant jobs? Why not have programs to get them trained and into higher earning jobs?
A local working a restaurant will often need to take advantage of welfare. If instead we funneled the locals to higher paying jobs, we would be better off. We're supposed to look after our own citizens, afterall --that's the whole point of electing a government.
Sorry but there is no competition for health care in US. US basically has no health care. Unless of course you buy it (i.e. pay the fraudulent companies to give you false sense of security and leave you alone in the worst moment of your life)
Yup, this is much more likely to lead to more offshoring than companies hiring more American workers. Which also means that communities in the US with a large amount of workers on visas will also suffer.
Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.
Of course it's not new. And of course it never really stopped. But there is a new incentive for execs to give it a much bigger push given all the recent remote work tooling and when they now think a programmer is just monitoring AI output. So why not pay the monitor SE Asian wages rather than US wages.
The trend is away from remote work though. So much more stuff is hybrid then it was a few years ago. SE Asian wages means a 12 hour time zone difference and that carries a real cost on efficiency (I personally experienced this at two companies). Future poorly thought offshoring attempts will go just as badly as they have in the past. If anything AI makes it worse, since each individual dev is responsible for a bigger slice of the output they need to be in the loop on business / customer needs and significant timezone differences make that harder.
If managed correctly though it means you can have effectively a 24 hour work day. US workers/management goes to sleep as the Asian workers are starting up
Plenty of offshoring to both Central America and South America has occurred in recent years. It was a somewhat untapped offshoring location, but that no longer seems to be the case.
Real example: my company is US based, top and middle management is in US, some middle management and lower in Europe, managing workers in India and Manila. Same scheme with Costa Rica, but managed directly from US.
A key difference is that at least one isn’t competing for limited housing with offshoring. That is the number 1 driver of the affordability crisis atm.
I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!
For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common.
I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.
Offshoring (form the US) to Europe, especially eastern Europe is not new either. The newish offshoring location was Central America and South America, but those have been tapped as well.
I'm old enough to remember when people gnashed their teeth about the U.S. taking talent from abroad being 'brain drain' that hurt those countries. Which is it? We want to take the rest of the world's best and brightest and screw those other countries in the process, or we feel bad about that and don't want to do that? EDIT: Cynically, it could be both!
Well it depends if you live in the US or you live in a country that is hemorrhaging your best workers to the US. No idea why you are trying to lump both groups together as if they should both have a single opinion.
People in the U.S. used to complain that we drain the rest of the world's brains. That has stopped. I was referring to that.
If you put yourself in the shoes of people in other nations, then... a) individuals might really like the option of emigrating to the U.S., but b) their nation might be better off with them staying at home. Interests conflict. The question is whether we should have selfish policies (such as putting a company's bottom-line ahead of a nation's, or one nation's development ahead of another) or not, and, of course, which is is which because one could argue that the only ones being selfish are the Americans who object to all these visas (I don't think they would be the _only_ ones being selfish, and arguably the 'nation' exists in part to protect its citizens, but yes, this is a case of selfishness).
I want to know: does the HN commentariat think that brain drain is a problem or not. Elsewhere in this thread we have people urging that we do drain the rest of the world's brains to "win the talent war" [0].
Now, I can totally see that maybe draining our adversaries' brains can be a good thing, unless it's a way of bringing in a fifth column, in which case... no. And it's definitely not good for countries we're on good terms with -- there that "win the talent war" comment shocks the conscience as a thoughtless, unnuanced, jingoist-but-dumb, and immoral/destructive as to our allies comment.
Consistency was not the issue. The question was: what has changed that so few seem to care about brain drain as a negative externality?
Ok, let’s say it leads to 60% offshoring and 40% hiring more Americans.
That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.
The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.
No, that is the incorrect take. Offshoring isn't easy or cheap. Especially when Trump is basically trying to get companies to hire American workers by any means.
It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.
Is it meant as a rhetorical reply to the officials as in "aha, but Microsoft will prevail and make it even worse for you, American workers" or as a reply to the workers: "don't fret, move back to your country and work the same job anyway". Or was it meant as a hint for the officials "don't forget to close that loophole as well"?
Like you I suspect the former. But if we really believe that economics is not a zero sum game then offshoring is better for everyone because it keeps talent in the countries they can help improve, and it is a rising tide that lifts all boats, serving to equalize wealth. Yes, for a while it should have the effect of reducing incomes in the U.S., but so does importing the rest of the world's talent into the U.S., so arguably offshoring is much better. But if [regardless of whether we believe economics is/is not zero sum] we want to keep the rest of the world down then we should absolutely take their talent.
Hiring remote workers also doesn’t require filling out H1B applications and dealing with USCIS. If using remote workers was just as good, companies would already do that.
Sure, who doesn't want unlimited money? That's decidedly different from "needing" it (I could in no way manage to live on the West Coast on a Spanish salary, for example)
Sky-high cost of living (property prices, mostly). Shitty apartment with a commute in the bay costs $3,000/month. Starter home in Seattle costs a million plus.
It's also a vicious cycle: high tech salaries in those areas have driven up the cost of living.
One might argue that it should, but as a remote worker in a low cost area I don't mind making 20% less than my NYC/Bay colleagues as I can still live like a king in my midwest city on regionally adjusted swe comp.
Shouldn't the company still advertise the role for locals before offering remote? Also, for some roles it's mandatory to have on-site or at least hire within US due to compliance.
Regulated industries often have business language mandating onshore, citizens-only employment. If it isn't required by immigration, the businesses buying the product are requiring assurances (likely due to their own compliance).
As for non-protected roles, global market participation has ups and downs.
People need to stop asking what's better for the "economy" and start asking what's better for themselves. If the two don't align, it should be tough luck for the "economy", not the people.
"The economy" is often just another way of saying "everyone in aggregate."
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
This is an incredibly blinkered view. The economy is important, but there are many other factors as to whether a given policy is overall good for the citizenry or not.
Sure, but I don't think I claimed that economic factors are the only thing that can be considered when evaluating policy. Maybe it came off that way because my comment was focused on the jobs issue being discussed.
I guess I did not express it well, but I wanted to highlight that "the economy" and "the people" are not in opposition. "The economy" is a vague term that usually approximates something like "the material well being of everyone in aggregate." There are lots of other things one might value besides material well being, but "the people" and the "the economy" and not opposed forces.
Hasn’t it been known for a while now that wages are decoupled from the Economic gains that have been happening since the 80s? That gap is just going to the billionaire class now. Source:
This is why it's not productive to discuss issues using vague, undefined terms like "the economy."
Wealth inequality is a well defined economic measure and I see no reason why one couldn't use it as a yardstick when evaluating an economy, same as we use the unemployment, inflation, GDP, median household income, and so on. And indeed many economists do use it, and there are many well regarded books and papers that examine wealth distribution.
It leads to the intuition that an economy where 100 people consume 10000 (let's say of energy because it should be inflation-independent) per week and 1 person consumes 100000 is worse than an economy where 100 people consume 9000 per week and 1 person consumes 10000. That is, you can strongly reject or disapprove of changes that strictly increase everyone's wealth or consumption.
I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.
The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.
I think wealth distribution should be allowed to freely float within a large range, but at extremes it may have bad effects. You don't want a communist regime that tries to enforce complete equality, nor do you want a Russian style oligarchy where a few control almost all the wealth. US is heading towards the latter.
Probably not a simple question or answer on the face of it, but it's really not worth looking at this action in such a narrow lens, because this is not happening in a vacuum. Instead, we should look at it through the overall context of all of this admin's immigration policies, which have been bad for the US economy.
Can you explain more? This statement is already true before this policy change, so I don't understand why this is not a non sequitur. But I know this is a common rhetoric so I am trying to understand what the logic is.
They should clamp down on that next. Looking at the past 50 years, offshoring has only caused trouble for the citizens of the country and led things like the rust belt happening.
The rust belt was not caused by call centers in Pakistan, that was the Petrodollar and China deals. But it would be great to have both back (call centers and manufacturing).
I'd love to understand how people think the H1B program is going to survive the LLM era. Why in the world would I import a foreign worker to do something I can just as easily tell a clanker to do? The clanker is better at this stuff than I am!
Is it really just a matter of empire-building, at the end of the day? That can't last. Management realizes that, right?
This is an inane comment. Here are the two types of "remote" work:
1. Remote within the US. You still need valid work authorization;
2. Remote outside the US. This is just offshoring and if it really worked, every tech jobs would be offshored. Companies have been trying to do this for decades. Companies would love nothing more than to offshore every white collar job. They would if they could.
So the exact same person working within the US, even better if sitting in an office, is a good employee but if they're working from abroad all of a sudden they're not that good?
I know this is a much popular opinion now. But I can't help and ask this again:
If a company hires an engineer in India, instead of Seattle, how does America (and workers) benefit? Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains, its just a hiring decision.
The question is whether these restrictions increase American employment or just accelerate the exodus of jobs while making the US a less attractive place for talented people.
> For one, the engineer in India doesn't drive the demand for housing in Seattle thus keeping it more reasonably (less insanely) priced.
I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.
If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).
Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.
I think it’s pretty clear that Immigration has a direct strain on housing. It’s been a big problem in Canada too. Of course if you just keep building to increase the supply, that would be desirable.
Supply is rising from builders and also from lack of buying, iiuc the flattening and recent drops does line up with immigration and layoff changes, and its often quoted by the multiple local real estate agents weve talked to.
Obviously supply matters most but that doesnt mean demand isnt still a significant factor.
The engineer does marginally increase housing demand. They also increase local and federal tax revenue to support education, healthcare and other services. And the engineer will spend a large portion of their salary in the local economy, helping to support all the other business in Seattle. So there are also positive externalities.
What are some of the other "many negative externalities" you mention?
I feel like we could have the best of everything if you we just built more housing to keep up with demand.
It's just a never ending balance problem. Also the "just build more housing" is such a numbers only view. Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to hate budget cookie cutter apartment complexes; they're ugly, neighbor problems, noise, pets, etc. What people really mean is they want a single family house sitting on land, but you just can't have both.
I don't know what a "numbers only view" means. But I lived in Tokyo for a long time and I basically think it is an ideal city, and obviously there are lots of factors, but I think the single biggest factor is the abundance of housing. They have way more of it and it leads to so many wonderful things, like mass transit or an endless supply of little hole-in-the-wall restaurants, bars, and cafes in walking distance.
Look at how people vote with their wallets: there is an enormous demand for housing in places like Brooklyn. That doesn't mean we need to turn the whole nation into Brooklyn, but I think (given the massive demand) why shouldn't we have a few more places like Brooklyn, i.e. dense urban areas?
Most places in the US have a remarkably low population density; we can definitely greatly expand the housing supply with a little infill and still have lots of suburbs.
The engineer in India also doesn’t drive demand for managers and product teams and ops people and HR and payroll staff and canteen workers and office space construction and highways and education spending in the US. All that happens in Chennai instead.
people don't buy "housing." They buy views, they buy location, they buy neighborhood character. There are perfectly good houses in Nebraska---yet people aren't swarming to Nebraska. It's not because there's anything wrong with the housing.
This is the point the "just build more supply" folks never mention. Close to markets, water, aesthetically pleading single family houses on land. Like there's a reason housing crisis only happens in popular cities, because well, they're popular for a reason. Also people shit on zoning laws (yes they could be better), but I'm sure they dont want to live in hong kong style back to back concrete mega apartments with no parks
It's mostly due to absurdly difficult to get permits.
A benefactor decided to solve the housing crisis, created a development company. Gave up 2 years later. Stating the legal burden to get permits was the biggest financial obstacle. We are ready to build from the start, 2 years later we still couldn't build and spend most of our capital in lawyers in hope to get any approval.
But look at the other side. An engineer living in Seattle pays taxes and contributes to the economy. Seattle loses that benefits if that same job moves to India.
So, I am not sure if that housing argument alone makes that a better outcome for America (and workers).
Its Azure Hardware division that manages its first party silicon and its deployment has a huge hardware and electrical engineering presence. These fields don't have as many people in America in them, because Software has paid so much more for the last two decades, why would anyone go EE when they could go CS and make 2-3x more. In other countries, these degrees were paid similar so there is a larger pool to pull from then in America.
You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer
That's true. Problem is a lot of the time Middle America is comfortable and doesn't want to move out to the valley or Seattle.
Remote work makes that easier now, but with silicon / EE its not always the most optimal way to work.
Middle America EE is also not building data center class chips or infrastructure most of the time, would it be easier to get one of them up to speed, yes. But it's the equivalent of throwing a front-end engineer into C or embedded programming or vice versa.
At that salary, you're just proving the "why go EE when you can go CS and make 2X more" argument, at least if we're talking about a 20+ year senior dev/architect type.
I agree. Specialized engineering is very different from software, you can't easily replace that expertise.
My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.
They may. I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases. The problem is, that is probably incredibly hard to define and pass as legislation or whatever has to be done.
H1B and offshore jobs can be beneficial to America though, and that was why the program started. Sufficient guardrails just never went up and now there is opportunity for some abuse. But that abuse isn't across the board, there is still beneficial H1B and offshoring going on mixed in with abuse.
"I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases"
How would that work if the remote people were employed by a different company that was given a contract by the home company to provide certain pieces of software or specific computing services?
Hey man I'm just a software engineer now, I can't speak on public policy.
My best effort, the contract is a red herring, we only care about the company that employs the abroad remote employees which is the contractual company in this case. If that contractual company is also abroad, we tax (tariff?) the contract.
If they're physically here on US soil on a visa, they're paying the same taxes as any other US citizen. Sales tax, property tax, Social Security, Medicaid, etc..
Well, you can only offshore jobs complex up to a certain degree, not frontier talent or higher management. The O1 visa will likely still be in effect for them; what's getting rejected are worker-level visas.
Legal Immigration is a net positive to America. These folks follow our rules, work hard, move the needle and sometimes create entire companies and industries. The vast majority of educated legal immigrants who add value come here to study first, work, and then get their GC (except Indians who are stuck in the backlog hell).
1.4M green cards are given out each year, and of those, only 140k to legal employment immigrants. Their families get counted so it's <70k GCs most years. 95%+ of immigration happening here is family based, descendent based, or other ways.
We all need to learn about the system we criticize a bit more! The real problems are elsewhere.
You assume this is talent. Thats not at all the case. Most are mediocre workers who came in as masters students and got OPT and h1b eventually with PERM.
The talented workers can always apply for the O1 and get approved
Talent isn't enough for O-1, because the criteria are mostly about individual achievements. An established professional can fulfill them easier than a more talented junior. The criteria are about demonstrating that it has to be this specific individual, who would bring something more than the generic talent you can always get from the market by paying more than your competitors.
O-1 is also easier to get in fields like academia and entertainment, where everyone is building their individual brand. Corporate employees have a harder time qualifying, because their contributions are rarely attributed to them in public.
There's different degrees of talent. An international student who graduates from Stanford or MIT would not qualify for an O1 visa, but the US would be shooting itself in the foot to send them back.
(Ignoring the political context of this post) No. I don't want to fight a war. I want a peaceful and secure life. I have two oceans and military ten times the size it needs to be to effectively protect me. I don't need the number to go up or more plastic garbage.
> Bring smarter, qualified people to the US. If not, they’ll find a way somewhere else
More than 70% of H1B in tech is from a single country, where cheating is considered a normal aspect of life. I'm sure most people here have at least once encountered this cultural difference in their day to day work.
While I still think H1B program is needed, it has to be revamped, putting cap per country is the most obvious first step.
I see it more as a brain drain. I wonder how the world would be if those extremely talented people have stayed in their home countries and contributed to the local economies and development of the respective countries rather than contributing to the American imperialism.
Return immigrants are a non-negligible plus for the countries the people returned to because they saw other ways of working and lives and approaches and they seed their original countries. I do agree brain drain can be rough, but cross-polination of skills is super useful.
America already won here, the top tier talent outside America is already here or looking to get to America. The big name companies hiring them aren't doing it to save money. It is the outsourcing companies that are basically sweatshops that Trump is targeting.
Sounds great on paper, but in reality it is a program to bring mediocre workers that would do anything for the opportunity, including being underpaid. My company did this, on a smaller scale than Microsoft, and the result is the worst employees we have in US.
> President Donald Trump’s administration is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using H-1B visas
Everything described in the article, is about H1-B. So yes, the action is preventing greencard applications for those H1-B visas, but that is functionally the same as restricting Microsoft's access to H1-Bs since a future green card sponsorship is the reason many are there working for them on that visa.
An HR recruiter at an old job told me that they would post a job they preferred or only had budget for a h1b that they would post to obscure job boards and post the job on college campuses that they knew would not get many views. However they posted it met the legal definition to get what they wanted.
Microsoft is a global employer. This suspension means the job hires will be “in” India, or Canada, or Poland, or Japan, until the policy changes again. It’s not as significant as anyone would hope.
My understanding is that Canadian FAANG offices are staffed mostly with those who cannot (and often will never get) a US visa, plus the odd local who doesn't want to move to the US for personal or family reasons.
I’m quite shocked that this was even open to abuse to begin with. Clearly, the US has very strict immigration and green card laws. So enforcement has been lax? Or were deals made under the table with these companies and previous administrations?
Visa programs have been widely abused for decades. This just addresses the PERM portion for a few companies. The abuses of the OPT, CPT programs are insidious and have resulted in a job market that completely disincentives the hiring of new grad Americans.
It's not uncommon to find job postings that are "H1B only". Companies won't even consider citizens. H1B, H4 EAD have become a way for ethnic nepotism and kickback programs to operate without consequences and get American companies to fire Americans in favor of foreign workers.
This is just the smallest step in the right direction.
Hmm? Green card fraud is pretty easy and very common. You put out an ad for the job role. Then you sort the fake resumes to the top and fail them in the interview.
I don't think you meant to write 'green card' there? At least, what you've written makes absolutely no sense as a description of how a green card might fraudulently be obtained.
An individual immigrant violating US immigration law is dealt with very strictly.
A money-making interest violating US immigration law is a completely different matter, because capital loves nothing more than cheap labor and is willing to subject labor to the ordeal of being the individual immigrant dealing with US immigration law, so long as they don't cost as much as Americans.
It's part of the same system. The system is a largely fraudulent one throughout. Doesn't matter if you're applying for an initial H1B or a PERM.
This system is ostensibly there so that we can draw that skilled 10X engineer or brilliant researcher in India, UK, Romania, Australia, whatever, to America - to boost our companies and get his/her productivity into our GDP instead of some other country's companies and GDP. If used that way, I am all for it. Most of us have met many non-citizens who are very obviously a net benefit to our country due to their talent and ambition.
But this system is used in practice to depress all of our wages, to knock out rungs on the career ladder for new graduates, and to create a semi-indentured workforce more tolerant of low pay and poor working conditions, by bringing over completely average developers of the variety that you could just as easily get by putting up a table at your local college's career day.
I don't blame the workers who accept this offer, as being paid on the low end of our scale here is obviously an upgrade or they wouldn't take it. But it's a betrayal of our domestic workers. A financial hit for some of us, and for those earlier in their career, a major blocker to them getting jobs in the first place.
The entire program is a farce. It's the process generating the fraudulent "golly, we just can't find a US citizen for the job" claims, complete with fake ads designed to be undiscoverable.
We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations. And most of that time we’re at full employment. This policy with squander that asymmetric advantage, resulting in less innovation, lower growth, fiercer global competition as the talent starts competing from local markets, lower job growth for American workers. This will get worse over generations because the first gen immigrants in h1b have kids. We will lose out on their future talent.
Is your main source of income investment in unlisted burgeoning tech companies? If not, you're arguing against your own wealth. Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose, with no serious attempt whatsoever to try and get local talent. It doesn't have to be sinister, it's just what HR departments are used to doing again and again.
Do you know what stops Microsoft from building an office in, say, Czechia, hiring all the same people who were previously able to get a US work visa/green card/etc. but are now unable to, for the same labour, and paying Czech rates rather than US rates?
Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.
Outsourcing happens but larger firms repeatedly run into the issue that management, admin, and local talent provides diminishing returns. Most of the larger US-based firms have standards that are built on decades of developed industry practices, something that can sometimes be missing from outsourced workforces on a cultural level. Hiring in domestically at least plants folks in environments where they can learn those processes over time. I suspect this is one (amongst many) reasons why US work visas are so single-employer contingent - you don't want talent you trained from the ground up to be able to easily leave for another role somewhere.
> Outsourcing is not new, yet they haven't done it to date
I didn't say "outsourcing", outsourcing is where you have a different company do the thing (who may or may not be in the same country).
What I am describing is "offshoring" (specifically where it's the same company, though this is not strictly necessary for the word "offshoring").
> yet they haven't done it to date
As of June 30, 2026, we employed approximately 223,000 people on a full-time basis, 121,000 in the U.S. and 102,000 internationally. Of the total employees, 89,000 were in operations, including product support and consulting services, datacenter operations, and manufacturing and distribution; 77,000 were in product research and development; 43,000 were in sales and marketing; and 14,000 were in general and administration. Certain employees are subject to collective bargaining agreements.
The alternative, as we all know, is well educated people staying in their home countries and creating companies that compete globally, meaning more services will move overseas. I'm OK with that but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that in no way will reducing H1Bs (or similar) increase local wages or employment rates in the software sector.
Why "unlisted burgeoning tech companies"?? H1 Bs are going to big, publicly listed US companies. Which by the way, 60%+ of Americans own a stake in due to their 401ks, pensions, IRAs etc. So I think bringing in top talent from around the world could be really good for the average American.
I own a home health care agency in 15 states, software company, roofing company and real estate. I see the broad range of employment. My father was an immigrant. My mother is a descendant of the mayflower.
And I disagree that it has been show in har foreign labor depreciates domestic labor. In fact economic research has shown the opposite. If that were the case then we should make it illegal for people from West Virginia and Idaho to migrate to New York or SF.
Are you confident that globally uncompetitive wages are good for you long-term, though?
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
European auto sector didn't loose because they didn't flood the country with enough low wage workers (which they did anyway since 2015) to compete with China on labor costs. They lost precisely because they gave up investing in local labor that made all the pricy high-end innovations like electronic brakes, self-driving and EV-tech, and entered in the race to the bottom to boost shareholder value while cutting the expensive innovation R&D. This strategy did wonders for EU auto shareholders for about ~10 years while the badge prestige carried a lot of inertia, especially in markets like Russia, US and China, but it lost most momentum in the last couple of years, as EU cars are now seen as dated, overpriced, cheaply made, expensive to fix and underwhelming compared to the new players from US and China. Nothing to do with lack of cheap immigrant labor.
US was investing in AI powered self-driving tech, China was investing in new EV motor and battery tech with advanced manufacturing automation to cut costs, EU makers were just reselling diesel engines with fancy badges hoping the EV and self-driving fad will pass. EU car industry went from decades of being the global trend setter in terms of designs and technology, to being the follower, at least in technology.
Also, a lot of the manufacturing costs in EU not just for the auto sector, is now majority made of taxes, compliance, bureaucracy and labor's cost of housing. If you import workers they'll be under the same high compliance rules, and same expensive housing pressures, unless you bet they'll accept to live in slum-like conditions in order to undercut the locals, in which case you might as well cut the facade and just advocate for return to slavery.
That's just one perspective and I disagree with it.
European carmakers are where they are because electromobility reset their legacy advantages (a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages); now the same dollar amount gets them less R&D output than in China, because engineers are more expensive, and production itself is difficult to keep competitive for the exact same reason (also why a lot of car production has shifted east into lower wage European countries long before Chinese cars became competitive).
If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well (I'm not saying that would be desirable, just that it's a given).
>a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages
Wrong, auto-sector wages back then were much higher in regards to local purchasing power (especially on the housing front) and also unions were much stronger. Now they're already lower class jobs. A VW factory worker could buy a house and take his family on vacation with a stay at home wife. Good luck with that today when you see how much housing prices have outpaced wage growth since then.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor and less regulations. As do Japan's car makers.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
> just that it's a given
Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
The west's industry marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market. If your western cars aren't cutting edge and innovative you failed. And they aren't cutting edge and innovative because you didn't invest enough in R&D at the right time, because you valued short term shareholder returns, basically the plague of most western corporation.
> You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor. As do Japan's car makers.
Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers. Not saying this is bad, but makes it harder to compete.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would have internationally competitive cotton.
The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
> The west marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market.
This is an overgeneralization. E.g. Several of the most successful German companies are grocery retailers (as boring and low-tech as it gets).
> Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
I'm not saying you can't pay out globally uncompetitive wages as long as you're sitting on an R&D advantage, but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them (just consider the Japanese electronics industry in the 80s/90s for example; people said the exact same shit back then until they no longer could).
>Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers.
Not true anymore. They spend more on bean counters, marketers, managers, consultants, lawyers, etc than on engineers.
>The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
Because of imported cheap labor or because of automation at scale no country can match?
>but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them
Only if you make poor deals where you voluntarily give them all your hard earned technology in exchange for access to their market. Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers catching up to EU and the US, if all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
America is the #3 exporter of cotton in the world, and the world leader in manufacturing and exporting the harvesters (John Deere, Case International) which have replaced those slaves as pickers of cotton.
The facts of the matter support your point much better than your counterfactual did (I do realize you probably did not intend to be taken literally here).
> Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose
That's a (citation needed) right there.
The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:
Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."
What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.
The general idea of academia is (massive) amounts of international exchange to help ideas get spread around and, hopefully, improved upon. That is why most universities participate in student exchanges or why many academic degrees include at least one semester in a different country.
I would argue this is not accurate. The Elite Overproduction theory suggests you can have too many highly educated people and H-1B requires a bachelor's at least but incentivizes higher education. However, as it stands we already have an oversupply of highly educated people. The theory predicts that having an oversupply of highly educated people destabilizes society.
I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.
No one really cared when we were at full employment, the problem is that CS is the new liberal arts degree and it looks like it might only be getting worse.
Thats pretty insulting to the amount of effort required to obtain a CS degree.
Yes I know every po dunk college up and down the country added CS to their collection (because all you need is a computer lab so it goes in with degrees like Math, Physics etc).
CS even at lesser colleges requires sustained discipline in the maths, sciences, logic theory, and much more depending on the university.
Liberal Arts is a very different animal and while it can also be a very rigorous program for committed students, it has a greater opportunity for students to slack off and still graduate. It is much harder to hide and get through a CS program with this mentality and so it deserves more respect than you are giving it.
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?
I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.
>We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.
Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".
Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.
In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional. At big tech most employees are pretty good so it doesn’t stand out, but at random fortune 500s tech teams are often led by h1bs who are clearly the most competent employees on the department even though they usually aren’t involved in management. My experience from around 5 Fortune 500 non tech companies. These companies would have big problems if they couldn’t recruit exceptional foreign workers
And I disagree. There are not enough locals who are able and willing to fill these roles at non prestigious non tech companies in omaha. If the H1Bs leave these companies I dont think they would be able to realistically replace them. Obviously they could find someone to take the job, I just think theyd be worse at it. Worse enough to materially change outcomes.
> There are not enough locals who are able and willing to fill these roles at non prestigious non tech companies in omaha.
Maybe those companies pay shit or offer shit work conditions?
> If the H1Bs leave these companies I dont think they would be able to realistically replace them.
What about "muh free market supply/demand capitalism"?
Because when a company can't find a worker to accept their jobs, then the government gives them a foreign worker visa to fill it, but when I can't find a job, the government doesn't give me a job or deport a foreign worker to free up a place for me, it's considered my fault or skill issue. So where's the free market capitalism there?
Well, the market rejected your skills, so that's how free market capitalism works. Get good, then get employed.
But no, people only take the parts of insert preferred political flavor here that they seem beneficial to them and they discard the parts that are not.
Yea maybe it possible for these firms to poach top talent from tech companies, but I doubt it. Even if they pay the same prestige is worse. And employees at this level are often making a mil at tech companies, non tech just cant afford that. Much more likely that they just move all tech ops overseas.
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.
Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed. Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
There's also a plethora of people with CS degrees who can't even write FizzBuzz on their own, even given a warmed-up IDE and a partially filled out skeleton of the program. And no, this is not idle speculation, I've interviewed quite a few of these people. So I wouldn't personally put much stock in "has a CS degree" as a marker of qualification for any particular job. That applies, of course, regardless of nationality.
Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
Having worked with many Americans and many non-Americans over the last 35+ years, I'd say there's no general difference in ability that correlates to nationality. I've worked with dumb Americans and dumb non-Americans, and vice-versa.
Then let Americans create unions. If this is abuse of asymmetric power then balance it. It’s not about that though it’s about nativism, racism, and punishment of liberal elites.
I'm sorry but even as an immigrant in the USA this is bs. The h1b program brought a lot of great talent but also depressed employment rates for american graduates in computer science that's just a fact (please don't bother asking for a link google works as well for you as it does for me).
the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.
That's not supported by economic data or wage trends. Blocking unionization is a far bigger driver than immigration. That's why Steve jobs was trying to form a nonhiring cartel before he died.
If there's any truth to what you say, then each of these immigrant workers receive a salary which is significantly higher than their US born colleagues. They are as you say "top talent from around the world". A person who is among the world's best certainly has at least double the salary, right?
Many do. Look at the ranks of founders, context level execs, all made up of a disproportionate share of immigrants. That's also not necessary to justify the proposition that immigration doesn't reduce market wages if it increases demand. It is possible that the demand for software far exceeds software developers and we could 10x or 100x employment and demand would still keep wages the same. You need to show why the fact of salary levels and directional trends are causally linked.
Every one of them should have at least double the salary if there's any truth in claims of their superiority to domestic workers and any truth to the claims of a shortage of talent.
The world's top athletes and artists all have salaries in 10x - 100x of the average worker in their field. And what more: Their own countries are usually world leading in those fields also. But when it comes to migrant workers, somehow they are exceptionally talented beyond what any domestic worker could even compare to, yet their own countries aren't leading in their field. Hmmmmm....
Well, the program may be poorly executed, but don't ignore the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures. It does have that aspect to it.
But that raises the debate ... does the US really need to export MORE of its culture at taxpayer/citizens expect ? :|
As to the pause, repeal, destruction of this program, etc., however its characterized eventually, it seems to be inline with the idea of moving much of the manufacturing that left back home as well.
The psychology experts on youtube are all lamenting the disconnection of people and communities due to internet usage and less face time.
Framing that in terms of markets, the internet has empowered people to do more themselves, and rely on direct interaction with others less.
Economic shifts are behavioral shifts at the core, and in 2026 every programmer has a staff of 1,000+ unpaid AI agents at their disposal.
> the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures
That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.
Anyone looking at the salaries in big tech will laugh you out of the room. You think the six figure salaries for writing shitty ass Go services is _wage suppression_ ?
When they're paying $125k instead of the market rate of $200k + equity, absolutely.
Six figures isn't what it used to be. I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Golly gee if only that was a sign that the market is being highly distorted by the high six figure salaries, therefore demonstrating that there's no wage suppression...
> I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Let's be very honest here: the only two in there that have massively increased are housing (due to the aforementioned non existent wage suppression) and healthcare (because america can't into healthcare). Families making 50k do more than fine when it comes to food and gasoline, merely because they don't have 4k of rent to pay.
You must be living under a rock if you think the price of gas or food hasn't changed recently, or that $50k is easy for a family to live on in the US. Or that the price of gas is currently caused by high wages.
And no, I don't live in a major city where rent is $4k.
If the "shitty ass Go service" is delivering the value that software typically does then yes. The whole reason the wages were so high to begin with compared to something like a gas station clerk is that the clerk is delivering value for at most one customer at one time.
Software allows a task that could only be done manually once at a time by one person to be infinitely replicated and scalable at speeds that no single human could do, and that value only requires one person to invest resources to develop it once. Afterwards you got that multiplier of value generated.
This should be obvious but im merely describing the miracle of computing.
So if that software is generating the multiplier of value it is entirely plausible that the company is not providing appropriate compensation to the person tasked with developing that multiplier.
Just because they are high doesn't mean they are high as they should be. Big tech companies were pulled into lawsuits several times over wage suppression tactics and ended up settling.
As someone who interviews 10+ candidates per week for high-paying software engineering jobs, the US pool is not big enough to find qualified people. It feels like H1B shouldn't be needed. But empirically, we do need to invite talented people from other countries.
Saying the pool is too small or calling something a labor shortage is trimming away a bunch of relevant detail. There cannot be a shortage, only a shortage of people 1) qualified to do the work for 2) the compensation and 3) conditions you are offering. That's 3 levers to pull: Train more, pay more, offer better conditions (remote work). Particularly compensation, I have been told that's how supply and demand work.
The current crop of AI startups offer exceptionally high salaries, to the point that San Francisco rents have almost doubled over the past 2 years. Note that the most prominent AI researchers are of Chinese national origin. We can't only pay and train our way into getting talented people. We have to expand the pool internationally.
You can’t just train people and have them be good software engineers… It takes years of training to be a good software engineer (with plenty of people flunking out during the training).
Are you selecting based on a holistic view of merit (projects, personality, capacity to grow in a role) or are you gating based on the same-old LeetCode brain teaser exams? In the latter case there is no shortage of H1B grinders who’ve spent every day for the past 6 months memorizing the puzzles to pass your screens, even if they say nothing about raw ability.
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
You're making a few (reasonable) assumptions based on the base rate of engineering interviewing practices in the industry. I'm not using Leetcode though a coding problem is part of our onsite process. My first screen is mostly a series of knowledge questions and asking candidates to explain projects they built on their resumes. Most candidates cannot do this. They fail to explain their own projects and fail to explain foundational concepts of distributed systems.
As an interviewer I need to be able to challenge candidates to get adequate signal to make an informed selection. My pool is computer science graduates and experienced software engineers. Most candidates fail. I haven't analyzed the distribution but my best guess is that over half of the successful candidates are on work visas.
As someone who was out of work for a large portion of 2025 and attended many interviews, I found interviewing frustrating and failed many. Only after taking a couple of months sitting down and studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode, reading the latest distributed systems literature, and practicing interviewing, I discovered that I genuinely had knowledge and skill gaps. The studying actually helped me become a better engineer. I received several offers after this intensive study period.
I wanted to make a separate comment to respond to the sampling bias question. From discussions with colleagues and analysis of companies, there is a large overhang of credentialed yet low-capability engineers in many high-population countries. For example, the top Indian and Chinese companies offer comparable salaries to the US-owned multinationals resident in their countries. These are outliers.
The vast majority of candidates for Flipcart and Bytedance simply would never be able to perform adequately. These top companies pay extraordinarily highly compared to most software engineering firms in their countries, far beyond the delta between OpenAI and a typical software engineer in the United States. The quality gradient is still there. Flipcart and Bytedance need to compete internationally, so their salaries are pulled upwards substantially.
I see a lot of Polish names in those coding websites leaderboards. It seems to be working, Polish tech industry is growing, as is India's and China's. Idk, grinding seems to work if that's your issue.
So? At least they're grinding, and we as a nation used to have that American grit. Now everyone just sits on their asses and cry "unfair" when someone willing to grind gets better opportunities.
I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.
On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.
Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:
1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.
2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.
I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.
The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.
Paying more guarantees getting more high quality applicants. It also means more applicants who aren’t high quality. That’s why you do interviews instead of choosing randomly. If a company’s hiring process is unable to select the best applicants, that’s a separate problem.
So many employers on this thread are basically revealing they have no idea how to interview and select candidates. It has never been easier to find skilled engineers, and yet they're struggling to hire.
> That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.
I happen to agree with you that individual companies hoarding high-performers and keeping them useless is a dumb strategy and that it should have been targeted by anti-trust.
I was more pointing out that hoarding high-performers as a country is desirable since geopolitics prioritizes different outcomes than pure capitalism.
Optimally, the US would attract the cream of the crop, the top 5% of the world and let them roam freely inside of the American system with plenty of capital (both money and labor). I'd venture and point out that many of America's greatest technological leaps were a direct result of this kind of strategy (think WWII, the space program, computing, etc, etc).
The reason why increasing wages for low-level jobs is so important is that it puts upwards pressure on all wages above them as well.
If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.
In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.
Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.
Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.
Pay is comparable to top companies in San Francisco. This would probably be comparable to the distribution at the company I'm at now: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic
If you need evidence, look at https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic . Anthropic seems to need to sponsor visas for their workforce as well. Just like every other large US company.
This is a load of shit. There are millions of people out of work in the US and it's likely that tens of thousands of those are perfectly qualified developers. Assuming your expectations haven't been completely warped, your real problem is that modern hiring as a process is completely broken as a result of multiple factors.
Both could be true. Just because millions are out of work doesn’t mean every specialty has sufficient domestic talent pool. No one says we should recruit only domestic talent in sports.
H1B does not cover high talents - these are available to anyone who have barely any college education and only 40-60% of H1B visas are used in IT - rest are used elsewhere. Pretty much the claim about talents here is missing the point entirely, unless it is used in combination of "young talents", which is applicable to almost anyone studying, but 90% of them are nowhere near genius level talents, that like I mentioned before H1B simply does not cover, unless someone is lucky and employing geniuses by paying them peanuts in salary because of H1B.
Also all Fortuna 500 companies have offices abroad, where they use local talents already. Just like everywhere in USA there has been increase for roles that require higher security - those are for USA nationals and naturally they exclude any H1B visa holders.
Given that USA tech companies are laying off steadily thousands of software developers over last three years because of optimization efforts that they started around covid times as a push back against demands to raise salaries and freezing those salaries, the only use for H1B would be to put larger pressure on IT job pool in USA to clamp these salaries down.
Clearly this is something that USA administration has caught on as mass recruitment where a lot of those talents are not used is a security issue as it is unregulated. So, despite what other commenters are mentioning, stricter H1B is better for USA software developers, as slaves from H1B are driving salaries down.
You’re under including categories that while not identical are reasonably included in the argument that the domestic employment pool isn’t large enough for the talent. Dismissing “low level Java devs” ignores the fact that such skills are actually a small percentage of the available workforce.
I used to be optimistic that we could train displaced coal miners to code. This was tried in the 2010s and did not work. There is a distribution of aptitude in different subjects.
Imagine how much effort it would take to train a league of Google engineers to be NFL players. It's far better to use a recruiting pipeline of people who self-select for the role and have achieved rounds of selection for their talent.
> the US pool is not big enough to find qualified people
This is absurd. It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them. You and every other employer. You are shooting yourself and your peers in the foot through this stinginess.
> It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them.
I'm all for companies doing this, but the pipeline needs to be improved as whole, meaning we need to have candidates that already have enough prior education so that there's more of them that can be trained more quickly. And one way to address that is to make the entire public schooling system better through better funding, starting all the way from kindergarten through to the university system.
Just to understand your recommendation, I should create a software engineering training for candidates who do not require work visa sponsorship, but who couldn't pass the original interview, for my small software team?
And do this to avoid hiring a Chinese or Indian candidate with a master's degree from an American public university?
We pay on par with the most in-demand employers in the San Francisco Bay Area, all who also hire people who require visa sponsorship. Anthropic hires many H1Bs and O-1s.
It's demonstrably not. NVidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Jane Street, the National Basketball League, Bridgewater, Apple, etc, all sponsor visas so they can recruit the best. Raising pay for basketball players doesn't reward exclusion of global talent.
What demonstrates that the market for programmers is not subject to the basic laws of supply and demand?
I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals. I can absolutely believe that your company can't afford to pay what it would take to meet your goals with only US persons. But "we want more than we can afford" is very different from "there aren't enough."
I don't understand why you keep mentioning other companies. What does the fact that a bunch of big companies all sponsor visas have to do with the fact that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, just companies wishing they could pay less and hire more, and acting on that wish in various ways?
> I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals.
You can't make that guarantee. These companies spend lots of money to hire immigration lawyers to sponsor visas and process H1B -> Perm processes. The market would absolutely reward a participant who could bypass this headache and hire only people who do not require visa sponsorship. But the counterfactual has been tried. Many startups do not sponsor visas and they get outcompeted frequently.
I can make that guarantee. You're telling me you wouldn't have enough people if you hired away every single employee of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft? Because that is something you could do with enough money.
Labor isn't some magic thing exempt from supply and demand. Pay more, get more. It works.
If you can't afford to pay more to get more, well, that happens. We don't always have enough money to buy everything we want. The fact that I can't afford a Cirrus Vision jet is unfortunate, but it doesn't mean there's a shortage of jets.
Except this doesn’t make sense if the argument is that there are a ton of unemployed CS people sitting around. The labor market is like any other market.
It makes perfect sense. I interview unemployed CS people all the time. Some excel at interviews and some don't. I was unemployed for many months myself. As an interviewer I don't see a strong correlation with unemployed status and ability to pass a rigorous software engineering interview.
The solution is staring you right in the face: Move your business to a country where these "qualified people" live, hire there and serve that market instead.
I should tell my leadership team to move a company whose business relationships are in San Francisco, to other countries? All to avoid sponsoring people on work visas? And offshoring a business is superior to hiring people from other countries?
They made a mistake to make their company in San Fransisco, since it obviously is a pitiful backwater compared to the superior technology hubs of the world where all the greatest and leading talent comes from. You'd want to have your business there if you want to stand any chance of being in the forefront.
Besides, moving a business is a whole lot easier than uprooting people and their families and putting pressure on the local population.
I don't buy your claim of "high-paying". If you don't pay as per US resident and urban standards, good domestic candidates obviously won't bother applying.
There's never a labor shortage, only a compensation shortage.
If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.
Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.
And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.
I dunno, I don't work in Big Tech and I feel the commenter you're-replying-to's concerns. There is some sort of mismatch if my pipeline is this empty and this many qualified applicants are jobless and unhappy about it. Comp is fine and people can live wherever they want, but there is no way my team is going to meet its goal of doubling in size by the end of the year.
I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.
I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.
Your empty pipeline is telling you that your comp is not, in fact, fine.
It’s really that simple. If you’re not getting enough qualified applicants then you need to make your offer more attractive. That could involve culture, work environment, or perks, but the biggest thing is pay.
Of course a company’s ability (or willingness) to pay is not unlimited so that may not be a possibility. But then you have to accept that you’re not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet your hiring desires. That’s ok. I am not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet my luxury-sports-car desires either.
There is an apparent contradiction: you’re offering good pay and not getting many applicants, but there are a ton of jobless programmers. How to square that? The former is something you’re directly experiencing, the latter is something you’re hearing through the grapevine, maybe getting some broad numbers for. The obvious conclusion would be that the jobless programmer situation is not nearly as bad as people say.
This is said all the time, and don't get me wrong, I like "compensation" as much as the other guy, but to me this just sounds like a race to the bottom (or sky) for companies.
It's great for those compensated for sure. But what happens once the companies with deepest pockets, FAANG and such, pay the most and drain the job market, what happens to all the other companies then? It raises the bar significantly for any new startup, makes it ever more impossible for any boring, middle-of-the-road company to find anyone remotely capable. Ultimately growth of the tech sector is limited by the number of people you have available, regardless of how much you pay for them. If anything, another country with more potential talent could even surpass the one playing alone in its own sandbox.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and maybe in an economic downturn it's even a good thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't come with no tradeoffs.
If your business (including your startup) relies on paying sub-market wages, that's a "you" problem. You're not entitled to underpay employees because your business can't survive if you don't.
I see this with startups all the time. Cofounders get 30-50% equity with preferences and then want to hire a lead engineer as a first hire... with 0.5% equity and a $100,000 salary.
Big companies already do a lot to pay as little as they possibly can. AI is just the latest foil to suppress wages.
Which has an easy solution: you want to be part of the program, the state announces your opening nationally and internationally. That way the state knows exactly how many are applying and why
I prefer state over corporate all day of the week. I have legal pathways to force the state to do things... I do not have for corporate for the same thing.
In the UK, we simply removed that requirement, so company doesn't have to give evidence of shortage and also we set the wage limit to a quarter of median earning for given profession (Labour government increased it to just half now). This means corporations have no incentive to hire local workers as it is vastly cheaper to hire (and exploit) immigrants, as they don't have means to pick and choose once they are in the country. Meanwhile local people can't find work and have to battle increased rents and pressure for access to public services. All by corporations who are very shy when it comes to paying taxes.
oh and that entry level web developer on lowest band is actually a senior systems engineer? Worry not, Home Office don't check that.
There are valid criticisms to be made of the current immigration system but saying "this sucks" adds nothing and is of zero value. Here, let me help:
1. Doing layoffs at the same time as hiring temporary workers is antithetical. Which is it: you can't find someone to do a job or you have too many workers? Yes, jobs aren't completely interchangeable but large companies like Microsoft hire generic software engineers. Retrain;
2. the H1B->GC funnel where H1Bs have no pre-country quota but GCs do creates a massive backlog for India, in particular, and allows companies like Infosys and Tata to keep "temporary" workers in indentured servitude for decades;
3. Despite safeguards, it's clear that temporary workers get underpaid, particularly at the outsourcing companies, so visas are used to suppress labor costs for both citizens/residents and temporary workers.
They were also often doing basic stuff, like database programming. Even in AI, most of what they produce didn't have marketable value. So, I don't buy that they couldn't find or train anyone here to do the job.
In my experience finding good people is hard when the entire world is on the table. Limiting the pool based on stupid concepts like "nationality" is just a jobs program for the low quality people.
I live near Mt. Rushmore. When my mom was a kid, working there during tourist season was a very common summer job for high school kids. Now it's not, because now temporary foreign labor by means of seasonal visa programs, complete with housing, fills those jobs each summer instead. Are American high schoolers physically/mentally unable to do these jobs? Of course not—yet these job opportunities have been taken from them regardless, replaced with what is essentially seasonal foreign-labor indentured servitude.
Honestly, a lot fewer American teenagers want/are allowed summer jobs these days. They are all focused on doing enrichment activities that will look good on a college application, and low-wage menial jobs don't count for that.
I work in the public school system and I can definitely assure you that nowhere near “all” high school students are doing what you suppose they are doing.
It’s not always about pay. In some special disciplines there are only a handful of people with sufficient training or talent. We don’t hire more Americans by cutting the candidate pool. We hire more by growing the economy with innovation, startup formation, academic research for basic concepts that aren’t commercially viable, government investment in core infrastructure and long horizon moon shots that aren’t commercially feasible.
There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that
To follow up on this, US PhD programs are not generally packed with US citizens, they're frequently the cream skimmed from the rest of the world. For many subspecialties, there's just not going to be enough US citizens to do all the cutting edge work that could/should be done.
We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.
I mean, we also break a lot of PhD programs because due to glut of foreign workers, the work environment is hell. I've known several citizens who dropped out because it was 996 type environment and since they didn't need to visa to remain in the US, they could just move on.
Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
What does it mean to "break a lot of PhD programs"? Research is competitive, and hard work. Yeah, there are easier options, but in the long run, the countries with the people willing to work their butts off academically are going to outperform ours if we can't get their best to come here and work their butts off here.
>Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
There is actually bipartisan support for trying to make it easier for PhDs to stay - both parties have repeatedly introduced legislation to help with that - but it seems to keep getting derailed by arguments about other aspects of immigration reform.
Ok, but those people aren't H1B's. They were on O-1 visas.
These body shop firms are not hiring world-leading geniuses, they are getting mostly-okay Java devs who will do boring scutwork for the chance at life in America.
We could also try something that has not yet been attempted: investing heavily in developing people who show signs of talent at an early age and streaming ALL children's education according to their capabilities and interests at a young age, in order to eventually bolster the available pool of highly talented people without having to rely on poaching talent from elsewhere in the world (depriving those countries of an opportunity to benefit from the highly talented people that they sweated and paid to train).
Political will and priorities. It seems like there's always money and enthusiasm for another war, but not to pay for uniformly decent schools with reasonable class sizes and happy, fairly-compensated teachers. Sounds too much like the S-word, probably.
What I'm suggesting here is going to require serious investment on top of what should IMNSHO already be made, because we're talking about creating 3 parallel class streams for different tiers of ability. 3 sets of lesson plans, 3 very different kinds of student with different goals and ways of approaching life. They can't just throw that at one teacher and expect success, but their current track record suggests they would sure and damn well try.
There are several reasons my mother burned out from the classroom, and she's one of many many many such cases: low compensation, vast amounts of unpaid work time developing lesson plans and grading when not in front of students, larger class sizes and no aides to help handle the stress and chaos of another 20 teenagers on top of the 25 you already had in the room, corporatization/enshittification/growing lists of demands placed on teachers to shoulder more classes or pericurriculars, and so on. Hell, I know one (1) current schoolteacher, and they're also presently burned out and on leave. Could just be a coincidence, I guess!
But it is always the pay. Corporations could easily hire American interns and train them, for money. There's millions of people that would love to leave their retain jobs for an internship at a tech company, but there's no economic incentive for the mega corps to train these people.
Tech megacorps already hire interns and pay them very generously. Like annualized 6-figure pay.
There's been plenty of incentive for people to learn to code or study other skills to get a job in tech. Why do they need extra handholding on top of that? If they could do it, they would.
That's not to say more can't be done to strengthen early childhood education or reduce the cost of college. But it's unrelated to whether big tech companies hire foreigners or not.
They train a fraction of the actual labor force. Why should the social cost of job training be put onto taxpayers and individuals, and why should employers be allowed to import labor? Employers should foot the bill for any and all education and work training expenses, and should be allowed to import 0 labor for any reason. Employers would have to compete for the best employees, driving wages up. It's not rocket science.
> Employers should foot the bill for any and all education
Why? That means any education not directly useful to employers won't be funded at all. Not how you build a society. Education should be funded by taxpayers and society because it benefits society. "Taxpayers" includes companies too, not only individuals.
> and work training expenses
They already do. Every company trains employees on their own processes and systems. New employees aren't productive for several months.
> should be allowed to import 0 labor for any reason
Then the work goes abroad. Or these companies don't grow. (Referring solely to tech companies, not outsourcing body shops).
> Employers would have to compete for the best employees, driving wages up.
I understand if you say outsourcing body shops are a problem here. Tech megacorps pay a king's ransom in wages. They've already driven wages up. Any citizen not already working there either doesn't want to for any amount of money or is not good enough.
Companies are going to spend as little money on everything as possible, labor included. If importing labor wasn't cheaper, they wouldn't do it. It's cheaper than the alternative of training Americans to do the role.
> It's cheaper than the alternative of training Americans to do the role.
These people don't exist. Not for Big Tech roles.
You already hit the nail on the head - companies don't want to spend money. You think they like paying new grads (citizens and foreigners) $300k? Why would they do it unless they had no choice?
Sorry but I’ve hired hundreds of people. Not everyone is motivated by pay. I’ve successfully recruited people that turned down hiring pay for better title, project type, flexibility for family reasons, and been unable to recruit people with higher pay.
American policy should be to increase the total number of jobs not restrict where we hire from. We can and should increase our population to 1billion people. If China can employ that many so can we.
What you mean is the pay wasn't high enough to convince people to do a particular job, not that you couldn't find qualified people. Alternatively, you could have made 1 role into multiple, so things like 'work life' balance weren't impacted. This would cost the employer more money, so obviously can't be considered.
American policy should help average Americans, not corporations. There's a larger wealth disparity now than ever. Importing millions of white collar jobs to suppress wages only exacerbates that.
Than $228k? That's what Microsoft pays an entry-level SWE right now. Where are all these qualified people for whom $228k out of college isn't enough money?
So the competitors also pay more. Existing workers, domestic and foreign, get paid more (hurray). But it doesn't mean more domestic workers get jobs.
Instead work is either not done (less revenue for the company to expand), or is sent overseas. If management gets more comfortable with work going overseas it becomes a very big problem for domestic workers.
Same words are said by hotel owners unable to find eg. cleaning ladies for hotels over here in my small country.... touristy area (=very few locals), relatively far away from larger towns with more local population, everything is expensive there (eg. lunch and parking), and they offer minimum wage and then complain.
For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.
The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.
Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.
Sure, but op wants 'good', how much are those people paid?
Also, how much does rent in a 20-minute-drive circle around microsoft cost? And proper health insurance?
I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back, because while earning less in numbers over here, they can get a normal 8 hour job (no overtime, no weekends), proper time off (25, 30 days per year, unlimited sick days of course), and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails, they'll have enough to live comfortably.
> Sure, but op wants 'good', how much are those people paid?
You're proving my point. Paying more, beyond a certain point, doesn't increase the supply of "good" people. It just moves them around. After that the work starts going to overseas offices.
> I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back
Usually with several hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Financially they're at least 10 years ahead of their peers who stayed home. And that's after paying the higher rents and health insurance in the US.
Not close to that much left over, a lot of money is spent in USA, you're in a foreign country and you spend money on tourisy stuff, plus you're usually "alone" there, and spend more in bars, restaurants, etc.... many came home with very little left over (except a nice line in their CV).
You're paid good money here for 37.5 hours per week, for ~10 months per year, sure the net number is higher in US, but calculating what's left over per hour of work is not that much in favour of US, especially considering what you can buy with that. One of the friends who worked there (google in sf) spent over 80hours per week in office, something like that is not just unheard over here, but also illegal. He was basically working two jobs there while being paid for one.
And yes, of course at some point (when you earn enough to live comfortably) your priorities become free time and other things, but again, that means that the company needs to pay more, to get another person to split the work. That's why everyone who did that says that the experience was great but that it's not worth it, neither financially nor health-wise.
Teams are international already.
Why do they bring people to the US at all?
A nice office in Bukarest or Krakow or if you really need Munich or Zürich is good enough for most Europeans. I am sure there are equally nice places in Asia.
Honest question and I'm probably going to ruffle a lot of feelings:
In the age of AI coding, what is the point of outsourcing your programming to TCS, Wipro, et al? These consultancies are not building groundbreaking innovative stuff, they're building the drudgery enterprise software to handle taxes or business intelligence tools. Things that are perfect for AI (don't get me wrong, AI is perfect for a lot of other types of coding too).
Or is it that outsourcing is cheaper than AI tokens?
The market IS very good at that, what it's not good at is handling externalities for citizens of a country that arise from taking the most efficient market path.
Cool theory. But there are confounding factors: H1B employees get exploited like a species of indentured servants. Lazy managers like that they are compliant and happy to implement stupid ideas.
Ironic phrasing, as in my experience the steelman argument in favor of these companies is "The customer is really bad at thinking through their own requirements."
I agree that we don’t need a central planning committee.
But if you’ve ever worked with the public, you know there is almost no cultural onus on nontechnical people to properly hire or contract technical people for technical tasks.
The IRS getting okay work out of a contractor is not the same as a random food manufacturing or trucking company trying to contract work out.
Consulting companies, especially the largest ones, are known to employ more hacks than competent folks - because they can. (This is the “lowest cost” you mentioned.)
Just read the stories here about the big names.
Succeeding in not being sued - most of the time - doesn’t mean you’re doing good work or good business.
1. Risk - you throw an SLA on services and can point fingers when shit hits the fan
2. Circular agreements - you get them to sell your goods/services in the region of their home country
3. These count as "Services" on the P&L and provide massive tax advantages to the company because these aren't treated as labor costs.
This may be from an old context in my brain since I worked with some of those companies, so those reasons may have changed or impact may have with various regulations, etc.
Addendum to risk: larger companies can throw bodies at escalated issues.
Good luck trying to get a 6 person shop with a full calendar of other-customer work to suddenly prioritize a show-stopping bug that's only affecting you.
Oh totally. This is a playbook for a Fortune X00 company. Layoff your staff and create a "services" SLA contract with a third party company to deliver IT services. Just the legal team to get thru all the docs alone means you need a legal and procurement/contracts department. Not for startups.
I had a chat today with a friend about this. I think my working thesis is that AI is bad news for outsourcing/offshoring.
What was it good for? Well, often it was prompting a person in a low-cost location what code to write. He would pick it up in his timezone and implement it overnight, and present findings/questions as a response.
The problem is, coding has made implementation super cheap. It is now so cheap you have to compare it to the cost of dealing with someone in another timezone, who does not have the same cultural context on the problem. They also can't ask you clarifying questions while you're asleep. AI wins against the offshore guy, on both money and context.
Who does it help? Amazingly, the experienced onshore dev who thought he was going to be unemployed past 40. This person is now able to implement several things concurrently, has experience in making technical decisions, and has local cultural context.
Based on the last 5+ years at working at FAANG adjacent companies - less than 5% of a SWEs time is dedicated to coding (Exceptions of course for crazy things like porting massive code bases to Rust...) - If anything - now that "coding has been solved" - it significantly reduces the need for body-shops, because now you require strategic product decision making - much harder skill to hire for/develop than yet another LeetCoder.
Is it possible that individuals or groups use outsourcing as a way to funnel money into their private interests? IMO we're looking at good old corruption.
No, people should honestly confront your question. The “skilled labor shortage” premise for the H1B is dead, at least in tech. Maybe we still need to bring in a handful of superstars. But at this point I think TCS, Wipro, etc., exist only due to foreign lobbying efforts.
They tend to take care of sustainment and certain tasks more cost effectively.
This is a pretty stupid thing to do, btw, as whatever isn’t AI will just be offshored, which reduces government and social security revenue and closes a pipeline to get smart immigrants, who tend to vote Republican.
Not always. Many places will avoid hiring people to do the work instead they just contract it out. Saves them money in short term. Why hire someone at 100k, pay 401k, insurance, pto when I can simply buy it for 50k.
If you build anything worth building you’ll know contractors are a net drag in the long run. It’s a mistake most rookie middle management make and learn the hard way.
"disconnected" -- aka no longer in school and gave up on finding a job -- is 16%. Added to the 9% unemployed gives 25%. Add in the underemployed who have a job, but are only given a few hours per week and that number jumps way higher.
30% sounds correct to me. None of my friend have gotten any jobs after they were laid off. Some of them are doing some part time job like uber or doordash, and those aren't counted.
Same in China, PHD people are working as delivery driver....
This is just a straight up lie and it'll take you 2 seconds to talk to the AI to figure out how the immigration system / referrals / "chain migration" work.
> and they then chain migrate other people over by putting in referrals for random people.
I have one of the worst passports in the world. It was already difficult to travel to many places, and now more and more countries are soft-banning everyone from here.
The reason being that whenever a country makes their tourism visas more accessible, people from here known as "labor exporters" or "visa brokers" apply for visas for hundreds of other people, often poor and uneducated.
When those "tourists" arrive at their destinations, they have their passports confiscated by the broker's foreign counterparts, and they start working odd jobs while on tourism visas in places like Dubai, Thailand etc.
The brokers tell them that they owe a large amount of money for the privilege, often amounting to many months of their salary, and those brokers are the only way for the workers to send money back home.
They overstay their visas and when they get caught they can't even speak in English to explain their situation, and even if they could they wouldn't expose their handlers.
All of this has made it pretty embarrassing for the rest of us from the same country who just go for actual travel and tourism, and we can't even really complain about the racism we face because we know it's our country's fault...
Take this problem : “cheap outsourcing of simple coding work”, and replace outsourcing with AI, which will be far cheaper, much faster and much more compliant than any human being, and you can just imagine the disastrous situation we’re sleepwalking into.
To all the idiots who claim AI will create new jobs, will only change the work humans do, why didn’t that apply to Indian outsourcing?
As someone who uses Opus 5.5 daily, I feel like this admin is trying to put out a small fire, while completely blind to the all encompassing forest fire just around the corner.
First time hearing LLM hype will "create" jobs. I have only heard stories of executives foaming at the mouth of getting rid of jobs/assets and replace with 24/7 available AI/LLM.
One of the few things this administration has done that I actually applaud. These huge corporations have been abusing the Greencard and H1B system for decades, and it has gotten so out of control that people are really starting to notice. This is the kind of thing that can cause serious civil unrest, and justifiably so.
The problem is, no matter how carefully the regulations are worded, dirty lawyers will figure out how to work around them. Suspending the programs is probably the only fix at this point.
> Any company that does layoffs should immediately have all their visas revoked
This is dumb, but not directionally. Any company that has done a lay-off shouldn’t be allowed to apply for visas for 2 years, with a 5-year probationary period thereafter during which if they do layoffs again the penalty jumps to 5 years.
Seems like if you learn you have too many experts in X and instead need experts in Y you should be able to have layoffs for X but still hire for and get visas for Y.
I agree. The externality of layoffs gets partially transferred to the company and they're required to provide 3 months of salary for each impacted employee. It appears to work better for American companies AND workers. Both earn far more than their European peers who don't experience comparable layoff frequency.
what makes you say they gave you severence because of warn. severance has been a thing way before warn usually to save the hassle of legal challenges, employees badmouthing on social media ect.
> Why wouldn't they just layoff their visa workers in a downturn
Which they?
Hell, if this law passed I’d bet there would be opportunity for PE to buy the assets off a company that has done a layoff, fold the original company, and reboot it. Being locked out of 95% of the world population for twenty years is a real competitive disadvantage.
Microsoft is declared fraudulent but not Tesla, one of the leading H1B visa companies? Seems they just want to label it as fraud but not actually investigate any fraudulent activity, they want that $.
It's really bizarre to hear admin officials talk about H-1(b) workers as "indentured servants" but not ever mention or touch the L-1 visa program.
It is over-the-top hysteria either way, but it is at least actually true of the L-1 program that you cannot change employers (at least without first getting a change-of-status to another visa). H-1(b) workers can and do change employers all the time.
Cynically I believe this is just blackmail for midterms.
The current administration will promise to Microsoft (and others) that they’ll reverse this decision as long as they are provided proper funding/support.
It is so dumb to think of an immigrant as someone who steals a job from a "local", American or else.
When I left Italy to work for Amazon I was 30 years old. Until then, the Italian government (but really, my parents' taxes) paid for my education and healthcare.
Briefly after I became a "productive" member of society, I moved to a few countries and eventually ended in the US at age 35, and worked there for ~10 years. The US got the equivalent of half a million dollar, perhaps more, for free, and had the luxury to use it for these years.
A skilled immigrant is a gift to the country he/she moves in.
Lots of debate going on here, I know this boils down to hire a local if they exist, versus someone who will accept a sub-maximal rate due to getting extra value from coming to the USA, or extending a visa, or the sunken cost of already being here and not wanting to leave.
IMO companies should just say "fine we'll hire off shore contractors who pay nothing in taxes then."
> Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling added that some of the largest IT firms in the world would also be suspended from that program, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini.
> "We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies," Sonderling said.
2. I'm kinda surprised those firms were even trying to get green cards for their employees. I thought their whole model was to rotate offshore people into the US for temporary assignments on H1-Bs.
> Under the PERM process, employers seek certification from the Department of Labor that there is no qualified, willing or available US worker for a specific job. It's a step required before filing petitions for most employment-based green cards.
3. That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B. Delaying it actually made me pretty sympathetic to the attempts to game the system to prevent and American from getting the job. Even if H1-Bs were technically for temporary workers, everyone saw them as a step on the way to permanent residency.
4. So have they done anything about offshoring yet? Because focusing on H1-Bs and green cards is focusing on the problems of 20+ years ago.
It's probably been 15 years since my employer sponsored any significant numbers of employees for H1-Bs, it's all offshore hiring in Asia to company offices in Asia now.
> 2. I'm kinda surprised those firms were even trying to get green cards for their employees. I thought their whole model was to rotate offshore people into the US for temporary assignments on H1-Bs.
Certainly not at Microsoft.
> 3. That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B. Delaying it actually made me pretty sympathetic to the attempts to game the system to prevent and American from getting the job.
I was specifically responding to the list I quoted, which did not list Microsoft and was mostly Indian consulting firms.
> There's a similar evaluation done for H1B.
If so, they should tighten that up then (if they haven't already) so it can't be gamed, then drop it from the PERM evaluation if it's already been done.
> you might be surprised to learn that there are people who apply for eb-2 on work (or non-work) visas other than h1b.
That's why I said "if it's already been done," to cover such cases. I understand and agree with the need to perform such an evaluation, but I disagree with doing it long after someone's already been settled and working for years. That's just crappy and unfair.
> That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B.
It actually is a required step for the H1-B. I've heard it's more relaxed than the green card check, though.
> It actually is a required step for the H1-B. I've heard it's more relaxed than the green card check, though.
If that's the case, that's ass-backwards. The H1-B check should be more stringent, and the green card check should be more relaxed (or not be done at all).
They're suspending the PERM process for H1-Bs but are they suspending microsoft from filing for new H-1Bs? It's my understanding the wait list for Indian workers to get a green card is like 100 years, so what difference would it make anyways?
I think they need to file PERM in order to be able to renew the H-1B indefinitely, otherwise they are only good for 6 years. This is true even if the PERM filing takes decades to lead to an actual green card.
So it's possible this development will lead to people getting kicked out after their 6 years of H-1B.
Given Trump's attention span and track record, it's very likely this is squarely aimed at optics before the mid terms. I'd be willing to offer good odds that this gets quietly rolled back post midterm for companies willing to bribe the administration..... er become patriots via a donation to "America First fund.
The Green card program needs to be cleaned up but this administration isn’t the one to do it, and the way things have been going in the last 60 years I don’t think anything will be done that will be clear headed and fair all round.
Special interests in the business world at the upper end likes the status quo.
Curious nobody sees this as retaliation for Bill Gates very firm stance against AI. Even though he’s not running anything at MS is not a random blogger stating bold stuff.
Why did it took decades to see this simple H1-B industry practices thriving in glory? The post-grad visa machine, core practices of consulting companies, salary differences etc?
Once you have hard-working foreign workers available for less salary, it is highly natural a huge industry would come up and work hard to make gains of the worker supply chain. Elementary, Uncle Sam.
I'm surprised at how easily some of you are convinced. It's the midterms coming up; this programme has been abused for years (to my understanding) the timing is a little odd, no?
I understand this is a politically charged topic, and every comment is going to be a flame war nonetheless, so here we go.
No matter your political inclination, overabusing green cards to import cheap labor in detriment of the American wage is not even a secret: everybody does it. So the claim is, at least, correct in its formulation.
However:
- It doesn't include Amazon, the biggest offender by far?
- Suspends green cards but not H1Bs? so what the point is exactly?
replacing cheap labor, for a potential revolving door of cheap labor?
make sure cheap labor is never guaranteed to stay, so they don't dare to think about not being cheap anymore?
- People really thought that Microsoft was different to Tata in methodology and discipline? Did you really have to interact with people in either company? I did, and let me tell you, "highly skilled" or even "skilled at all" is nothing short of an exaggeration.
Hopefully H1B is next, or at the very least capped so there can only be a certain number at a time, and if someone wants to get another h1b visa they need to ensure that someone who is here currently is gone before it's issued. Too many "temporary" workers who come into the country, work "temporarily" then end up moving here. Ask yourself how many people from Indian origin own houses in San Francisco and the surrounding area? Are we sure they aren't putting pressure on housing for Americans? How can they prove that, until they can prove they don't impact citizens in any way, they shouldn't be here.
Its easy to take a telescope to a fruit bearing tree, point at the roots and say look its sucking out all the nutrients from the soil.
I do not condone abuse of any system, including visa/gc system, it should only go to those that truly are builders and contribute to growth of the overall system and not act as parasites, but that's a trait not exclusive to just the people (some targeting is probably legit) you're targeting.
It is a fact that many immigrants have played a pivotal/transformative roles in many different industries and their booms, nothing as great as the tech boom though. It is one of the few core engines of US staying on the frontier, but not the only engine.
H1B is explicitly a dual-purpose visa (e.g. temporary and permanent immigration).
When I was in the US on one myself, my company kept pushing me to go for a green card, but I never intended to stay permanently, which made things a little awkward... I remember basically ghosting the immigration firm they assigned to me.
Tactics that were mentioned to be used by Microsoft are unheard of in Europe. I wonder how much of perceived American tech superiority is based off of plain immigration fraud. Would the people that hammer Europe about regulation be ready to only hire bonafide equally-paid people?
Is the new visa lottery suspended for these companies or just the green card permanent residence part? If the latter, what becomes of the current H1-B visa holders?
As an Indian in tech in India, I feel bad for the people affected.
From a policy perspective though, India should probably consider providing incentives for American companies that move workers and data centers to India. This is probably a great time to do it. GCC growth has been generally resilient despite the impact of AI.
If your competitor is determined to shoot themselves in the foot. Just hand them the pistol and step back!
If that starts to happen I'm pretty sure Trump administration would introduce policies to keep the jobs in US the same way they are trying it for manufacturing jobs.
americas peak mid-20th century was in an era of no immigration.
americas soul and institutions were forged more than a century earlier in an era of adventurers striking out on the frontier. these men and women were not scab labor.
and what was so inspiring about e.g. the waves of say italian or irish immigration? the import of ethnic rivalries, tribalism, factionalism, and organized crime was just as well a result of the ellis island wave, don't see much admirable about that.
As a percent of the population we have as many foreign born residents as we did in the 1800s and more than we ever did in the 1900s. In fact, some stats even show we have more foreign born residents as a percent than we’ve ever had and it could be even higher than reported given how many folks are here illegally.
People forget that we shut down immigration for a few decades in the 1900s to let people assimilate.
We’ve overdone it, we need to slow the influx again.
I referred to the colonists.
It cannot be a myth that they were by definition all foreign born.
We don't have a clear ratio of how many were born in the Americas, when Independence was proclaimed. I concede the majority was likely born on that soil. I find that irrelevant to the parent comment stating immigration was controlled in the early 1900s.
Also to note, the shut down of immigration in the 1900s wasn't a shut down.
It was quota was set at 2% of each nationality's population as recorded in the 1890 census. That date is revealing.
The mass migration of Southern and Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc happened after 1890.
The act anchored the quota to 1890, Congress deliberately set the baseline before those groups arrived in large numbers.
The result: nations with large post-1890 diasporas, and of course all of Asia and Africa, got tiny quotas, while Northern and Western European nations got huge ones.
I don't call this stopping immigration. Rather codified national selection. It may have helped with "assimilation". But no one can deny the maneuver was for national discrimination.
most of the comments are about the h1b rules, but can we also talk about this?
> The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday proposed a $70,000 fee for international students seeking to work in the United States. The proposed rule would require schools to pay the fee for every student who participates in the Optional Practical Training program, known as OPT, which allows students to work in jobs related to their major during or after their time in school.
Absolutely insane. Nothing infuriates me quite like this administration’s consistent willingness to absolutely destroy the engine of progress that has led to American greatness over the last century. I know so many people who are in this country doing fantastic work, who later got O1 visas or green cards, because they were able to do OPT.
I'm always reading about how much of a meritocracy these tech places are. And that the US is a bastion of free market enterprise compared to backwaters like the UK.
So if this was really true, how come there aren't AI recruiters who scan the supposedly obscure newspapers for job ads like these and bring them to their clients and make a fat commission when their (clearly superior US based candidate :lol:) demonstrates throughout the interview process that they are capable of doing the job.
The section H, subsection 1, subsection B visa program has standards of review from the late 1980s. They should all be updated to 2026, inflation adjusted for base salary or compensation expectations, as well as notice requirements
If the administering of it doesn't require Congress to do, then that's fine, I hope the Democrats keep this going if they wind up being in control of appointments and oversight after midterms
Aren't a lot of these companies with H1Bs not sponsoring the green card anyway for some reason? I wonder if this will be the first of many. I always found it weird that the company could choose to not sponsor the green card but could employ you via H1B. I always wondered why anyone would work for such an employer long term.
I think the path to green card part is actually good. It's the H1B aspect that I find problematic. Once a person is no longer tied to an employer (e.g. via having a green card) then they're in a better position to negotiate wages and less of an indentured servant. That should happen as quickly as possible but we shouldn't be letting almost anyone in via an H1B.
In some sense - this is "directionally correct" but it should be cutting off letting them use the H1B program itself. I don't know why they didn't do that but maybe there's some legalese reason.
I find it weird that people in this tech sphere are so pro-immigration when you can clearly see that our wages have gone down over the last 5-8 years and immigration has been relentless in this sector. Yes, if you've stuck with one company for that entire time then you've likely seen great appreciation in your ISOs or RSUs but if you're looking for a new offer... It's the same $400k/yr for a senior engineer but cost of living is up, inflation is way up, etc. You should be seeing wages at $500k/yr to keep up with inflation alone but that's not happening. It's still $400k/yr.
All sorts of good and interesting arguments ITT, but at the end of the day it's all academic; companies are going to compensate by offshoring. I doubt this nets us more citizen-jobs, pressures salaries to increase, or provides any benefit other than the messaging to the base.
OK, now do Oracle to prove you actually care about the issue and aren’t just manipulating the stock market and helping your friends in competing businesses.
It's frustrating that my first thought, with this administration, even when they do something objectively defensible, even good, is "OK, so what bribe did Microsoft refuse to pay?"
> Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, said it looks forward to “providing the Administration with additional information.” Of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications it submitted in the last fiscal year, the company said 80% were “to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees.”
> “These were not to hire new people,” Microsoft said in a statement. “The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country.”
H-1(b) critics often (ignorantly or dishonestly) compare visa petition numbers to layoff numbers (essentially a stock vs. a flow), so it is nice to see this addressed by the company and in the article.
I suspect the H-1(b) program is the subject of so much scrutiny (instead of L-1, O-1, or OPT) specifically because every employer has to report the number of H-1(b) petitions they make each year.
> H-1(b) critics often (ignorantly or dishonestly) compare visa petition numbers to layoff numbers (essentially a stock vs. a flow), so it is nice to see this addressed by the company and in the article.
Do visa petition numbers not reflect a 'flow'? Why should the petitioned number not go down as visas are granted?
The complaints I've seen are that massive layoffs happen then are followed by visa petition increases by similar numbers. Or perhaps massive layoffs happen while massive numbers of visa petitions are open. Now, perhaps the two are for very different types of jobs, but one might want that to be checked.
The language is confusing for folks who haven’t experienced or researched the US immigration scheme. A few terms first:
* H1B visas are work permits issued to foreign-born workers sponsored by a company to work in the USA. These visas are bound to a specific employer with limited ability to transfer elsewhere, and on their own have ZERO ability to convert to a Green Card
* Green Card is Legal Permanent Residency (LPR), the first real step towards Naturalization. It lets you live and work anywhere in the USA, provided you generally contribute more than you receive in benefits (though this is very fungible depending on political incentives). Obtaining a Green Card is incredibly hard to do outside of family, with employer sponsorship being one of the few other viable routes.
So what seems to be happening here is that the regime wants to block Microsoft et al for applying for Green Cards for workers currently on H1B visas - not unheard of, but a rarity among the hordes of H1Bs employed yearly by technical firms. I suspect the goal is to discourage workers abroad from applying for H1Bs since employer green card sponsorship is off the table, but it won’t necessarily stop green cards via other routes (like marriage). It also doesn’t address the real grievances around H1Bs themselves, like how it coerces labor into taking more toxic or abusive working environments and lower wages while also robbing domestic workers of opportunities.
In other words, and assuming I’m understanding this messaging correctly (a big if), this is a nothingburger. It doesn’t stop H1B abuse, it doesn’t help American workers, and it punishes the handful of folks who deserve the Green Card conversion from their employers. It’s a packet of lies and misdirection meant to look bigger than it actually is.
#1. Young, eager tech employee from India enrolls in Masters program at US mid-tier university.
#2. Completes course work with 90% other students from India in Florida, Texas, or California.
#3. Gets internship job as part of OPT. (Optional Practical Training)
#4. After 1 (or 2 years for STEM), employer puts in for H1B.
#5. After a round or two of H1B, employer starts the PERM process for a green card.(Tough journey for someone from India... I agree)
Young techie is now 32 years old. Perhaps they marry a US Citizen, and a different pathway opens up. Perhaps they transition to a "genius visa" and then have a different pathway. Perhaps the US government changes policy. It takes a long time but you are living and working in the US during the whole experience.
Stopping this path breaks the chain. If there is no path to citizenship, even a long one, then H1B will stop being so attractive.
Note the pathway for foreign students has been closed. Check on the MS program enrollments at most mid tier schools. Down 50%, 70%, 95%....
> If there is no path to citizenship, even a long one, then H1B will stop being so attractive.
Not really, the backlog for a greencard is so huge that no one seriously plans for one when they go for a H1-B. They can hope of course, but the other pathways you mentioned are more likely at this point.
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H1-B demand will remain high since people here in india that aren't able to land a target job with high salary use US employment as a resume patching tool. It just happens that the masters is the safest path to that employment. And then they return and become an engineering manager at some company here, as an "ex-MTS 3, Nutanix" demanding a salary that they never would have been able to demand with their pre-US resume.
> Down 50%, 70%, 95%....
Many other factors, one of which is that target companies across the comp band now hire much more in india. More quants/big tech, as well as more mid-comp GCCs. For example, walmart's tech team pays 35L INR to my friend in a city where this salary lands an extremely comfy life. This did not exist even 10 years ago and my friend's resume would have necessitated migrating to the US to get the same QoL. Of course, at the extreme top end people keep going e.g bay area founders/AI unicorns. But that was always a minority. So unless you are aiming for and have a good chance at a unicorn/FAANG-level payout, OR on the other of the spectrum you want resume-patching, there is no reason to migrate anymore.
For reference, at 0YE quant TCs reach 2cr in the top colleges, and stripe/databricks almost 1cr. At a tier-2 university, local unicorns like zomato pay 60L. The former is slightly lesser than a bay area salary and the latter two are europe-level salaries even without any PPP adjustment, so you can imagine why there is less migration.
> Not really, the backlog for a greencard is so huge that no one seriously plans for one when they go for a H1-B.
That's really only a problem for Indians. If you have an MS in a STEM field, and are not from India/China, the backlog is tiny. Before the pandemic, lots of people I know were getting it within 2 years of employment.
Looking it up now, the "priority date" for EB2 is Jan 1, 2025 (it was always "current" before the pandemic) - so they're now running about 2 years slower than in the past. Still not a huge backlog.
> Young techie is now 32 years old. Perhaps they marry a US Citizen, and a different pathway opens up.
I mean, one of the reason the green card line is so long for Indians is that they have one of the lowest intermarriage rates for immigrants (not just for Americans, other immigrants as well, if you look at the census data for children it’s very obvious): you can “pick” which country your green card falls under based on either person in your household. If Indians married immigrants from any other countries their own line would not be as long
> So what seems to be happening here is that the regime wants to block Microsoft et al for applying for Green Cards for workers currently on H1B visas - not unheard of, but a rarity among the hordes of H1Bs employed yearly by technical firms.
Rarity? This is the standard path to green cards via employment. At my previous company, they did not hire a foreigner with an H1B unless they intended it to sponsor them for a green card (i.e. they started the process of applying for their green card as soon as they legally could after hiring). And they hired lots of H1Bs.
> It also doesn’t address the real grievances around H1Bs themselves, like how it coerces labor into taking more toxic or abusive working environments and lower wages while also robbing domestic workers of opportunities.
For many people, the appeal of an H1B goes away if they don't have a path to permanent residency. I guess some foreigners may do it to claim "US experience", but that's about it.
Green card backlog is so big for indians that this makes no difference. Except for one thing: this program apart from putting you on the green card waiting list, extends your H1-B beyond the initial phase, and also lets you change employers without restarting the whole process. Now that you can't change employers, the effect on employer leverage and salaries just worsens the existing situation w.r.t the stated goal of the government.
Private Businesses should not be able to offer citizenship as a side payment to their employees, they should stick to offering cash. If you are the french foreign legion and you want to reward military recruits with citizenship, then at least it's a government that is receiving the benefit and selling the citizenship, but private business should not be able to sell citizenship, or an easier way to get citizenship, to anyone. It's not a resource that belongs to them.
This requires a constitutional amendment to actually make reality - as long as the Birthright Citizenship clause of the 14th amendment stands, any program that lets you physically stand on US soil is de facto offering citizenship to your children (who can then sponsor you + other family members for family immigration later in life).
But you need an employer filing petition on your behalf. That's the fucked up part. It should be like in any other country: If you have lived in the US for at least 5 years (assuming you got here legally), you should be able to file a green card petition, or even directly apply for citizenship yourself, without your employer even knowing.
what's the purpose of a nation, this question was debated at knife's edge a hundred years ago, and the answers then crystalized quite clearly (bolsjevism, fascism, anglo-liberalism/americanism).
after an 80 years detente in the west that it exists solely to safeguard cheap gas for the proles and safeguarding cheap labor for the bourgeois, it's interesting to see that question being asked again.
This is interesting because it means that the ultra-right agenda
and ideology of Trump (or rather, the whole network behind him -
see how the prepare the eyeliner-boy to seize power once Trump
loses elections), is bigger than individual bromance-corporation
connections, such as Microsoft can effect on a smaller level.
On the big level they are all still in cahoots of corruption,
but on a smaller scale the ideology is still in place and overrides
some of the corruption in place.
Note that this appears to be about green cards/permanent residency rather than h1b.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said other companies that would be suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE. He said there were multiple active federal investigations ongoing into the matter.
It is an open secret that consulting companies (Tata, Infosys, Capgemini, etc.) are abusing the employee sponsored green cards.
But I'm surprised that Microsoft is accused doing it. I was under the impression that Microsoft will sponsor your green card but is still very strict about whom they hire and retain, regardless of immigration status. But maybe that has changed?
Tata, Infosys, HCL, and similar body shops are definitely a different story.
If you’re laying off employees en masse and still processing green cards that in itself is a red flag.
Companies have usually gotten around it saying we r laying off in 1 division but hiring in another. Maybe that hand waving can’t be swept under the rug anymore.
That doesn't feel accurate to me. If you're laying off employees en masse while getting new h1b visas, maybe - but everybody I know who's gotten a green card from tech employment was employed and working for a long time before that process even started.
If one is just waiting on a status change that’s ok. The labor certification is complete. If labor certification is being applied for as layoffs happen or if large tranches of new H1B are applied for at about the same time - that’s clearly an issue.
How is it hand waving? It's literally true a large corporation can fire a customer support agent while sponsoring a software engineer, it is not interchangeable talent
I've worked with several excellent people in my career who progressed from customer support to QA to QA engineer to software engineer.
It's not common though, and I don't think it's a case of "training". Some people have the drive to figure that path out, and those people should be encouraged and supported.
Not everyone is interested in programing. Some people are amazing at customer support and super extroverted and seek out jobs where they interact with customers and would be miserable looking at code all day. The opportunity should be there, but some people are just never going to be engineers. Management quality can't fix that.
I'm sorry but this is just absurd. Not everyone has the same aptitude for every job. For a company or country to function you have to acknowledge this and put people in jobs suited to their natural talents.
I doubt that's the argument they're making. They're saying they are laying of a software engineer in one org, and hiring another software engineer in a different org. Not cross functional roles.
Talent can be trained, less across jobs (although it's often what public services ask to entrepreneurs in some European countries), much more across departments.
I mean in the LLM era you need fewer employees and you need them to be very good to not become 10x bad engineers, so you could be processing green cards for your super stars while having to do layoffs
In a lot of cases they are claiming that the layoffs are not based on performance. The government's argument is that if there are high-performing American nationals or green card holders that are being laid off, then there is no point in giving more green cards, or H1Bs.
That's the playbook Microsoft has been accused of running in various tech press for years, and is backed up by the fact that all of their products are going to shit. Azure, Exchange, XBox & first-party titles, just to name a few of the things I've seen takedown posts about how the departments are staffed exclusively with inexperienced devs overseen by burnt-out seniors, using Copilot to duct tape shit into a somewhat-working state.
I remember not to long ago we got a service impact email from Microsoft saying they expected exchange services to resume normal operation in a sodding WEEK. Completely unacceptable for a provider my company, a smaller one, pays six figures per year for services.
For one thing, if you get laid off you only have two weeks to find another job or you need to leave the country. This balance of power is lop sided so the employer can get away with abusing the employee unreported.
No, green cards actually remove that constraint. You are a permanent resident, and you’re allowed to live in the US permanently. Irrespective of employment.
not true, you can only "dangle" the PERM which gives you an I-140 petition. PERM is usually approved within 12-24 months. That's it. You cant dangle anything and cant force a bona fide employee to be a "subservient slave labor" like some people would imagine this process.
Once the I-140 petition is approved (14 days), and I-485 is pending for 180+ days, and employee can easily leave to another employer, it only takes them to file couple forms like transfer of H1B and transfer of I-140.
So the most you can keep the employee on a leash is ~2-3 years which happens to be median tenure at tech.
the immigration discourse is filled with false information, and for this reason I prefer only immigration attorneys discuss the matter as they are the most qualified of all the quirks and nuances of the US immigration law.
Employers can and do require a certain length of employment before initiating sponsorship.
Say that’s 12 months. If their I-40 is approved at 30 months, the employer can withdraw it for 180 days and the approval will be revoked.
So we’re talking 36 months until changing employers doesn’t set you back.
That is longer than the median FAANG tenure. That means you have an employee whose floor tenure is longer than the median.
And even then if at anytime the employee is fired (until they get their green card, which can take many many years), they have 60 days to find a new employer or leave the country.
silicon valley starts PERM from day1, lower tier firms require like couple years.
that's still absolutely normal regular tenure. You work for couple years, show your performance and convince your manager to initiate the perm process.
I have never ever seen anything even close to resembling the "servitude" conditions where tech workers are kept at one company against their will. Nobody is revoking your I-140, because you just transfer it when you change jobs.
re 60 days I agree, this is brutal and should be abolished. I believe H1B workers should be able to remain until the duration of their I-94 even without the job, to seek the new employment in case of job termination
OK,got this part - this is referring to abusing the employees.
I read the former comment like that they are abusing/missusing the "technical Greencard mechanics" to get their employees past some checks/approvals/permissions/whatever or acquire whatever "special benefits" by working around whatever rules
It's pretty simple: you work as much as we tell you or we fire you. And good luck finding another job super fast with another company willing to sponsor a visa. This is the abuse. Plus, I think the pay is also not that great compared to US counterparts.
not true, the tech is not a coal mine or a cotton farm. you cant whip your employees and keep them on a short leash.
please spare me stories of "abused tech workers" who have middle six figure comp, free lunches, unlimited PTO, bunch of perks, generous 401k matches and infinite matcha lattes.
The government will take action on this, but not cruise ship visas. This has nothing to do with "explotation" and everything to do with trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers.
> trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers
No, it's not.
I know plenty of of software engineers, good ones, who can't find work. Businesses which abuse the H1B and Green card programs to import cheaper workers when there is not a shortage of same here, are acting in bad faith and they know it. They are lying that the people they're bringing over are exceptionally skilled, and they are lying that they cannot find similar workers here at any price.
There's not a shortage of workers domestically anywhere in IT. Especially not now. There's a shortage of them willing to work for the shitty wages Amazon, Microsoft, etc. wants to pay those roles. So they hire companies like Infosys etc. to supply them, which they have done for decades by means of lies and fraud.
If they were bringing over truly exceptional individuals, that would be a different story.
To be clear none of this is even a knock on the skill and integrity of these workers they're bringing over. I'm just saying they are very similar to the tons of US-citizen engineers early in their careers who are out of work, and that if we were a real country, we'd prioritize citizens' need for a job above FAANG profits, by saying "Tough shit, pay more if you can't fill a position."
As discussed upthread, the PERM process is widely understood to be a farce, so it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if the government has evidence of a Microsoft executive who wrote down that they didn’t want to replace a senior developer with 6 years of tenure. Everyone including JD Vance knows that’s a dumb outcome, but under the PERM regulations, you can only get that guy a visa if you tried and failed to replace him first.
Agreed. It's a farce on all sides. Most companies abuse H1B and PERM. We could reform immigration, by A. only allowing visas for people demonstrably very talented, stealing star performers from other countries instead of just taking bulk new grads. And then B. allowing green cards just on the basis of them paying lots of taxes, advancing in their job, establishing a family, etc. Because yes! Of course it's good for the American company to keep the tenured developer who has established themselves here!
But of course Congress is inhabited by people with the maturity level of children, so one party wants us to admit anyone who doesn't like their home country, and the other party mainly just wants to impress Trump, so no one will work on or negotiate on serious policy proposals.
It's an open secret that the US administration uses regulatory system for bribes and kickbacks, and no one should take them seriously regarding any rationale.
Not surprising seeing those names, that list of companies are notorious for exploiting H1B too. The main reason it needs stronger enforcement and per country caps/ratios.
This is an open secret. My dad was an H visa (H1B didn’t exist yet) in an industry that uses a lot of H visas because the job involves recruiting public health experts for projects in foreign countries. He said that companies never advertise these jobs to Americans and will hide the posting in some obscure newspaper or whatever to bypass that requirement of the law.
As someone who had to interface with Cognizant,Infosys for many years while working for the US corporation - GOOD ! They should loose their privileges for H1B.
The green card process is not transferable. Once its started the applicant is stuck. I personally saw the company slow roll the process for one of my directs. I kept hassling them to move it along but to no avail. I saw this happen to colleagues at numerous companies.
Yup. I had a star developer on my team that we had been planning to sponsor but the company was being sold and our future was unclear. I had to advise her to go find a new job, because if she started the process with us and got laid off, even finding a new job willing to sponsor, she'd have to start over. She would run out of time on her existing visa and lose her legal status altogether.
Never heard of that. Apparently a lot of other people haven't either or consider it too risky as the government has to approve the transfer (as I found when searching for this now).
AC21 is the law that allows H1B to be renewed indefinitely with an approved I140.
It’s the reason Indians are allowed to stay in the U.S. whilst their Green Card is being processed. A bandaid on a completely broken system that caps Green Card allocation by country of birth.
No more than 7% of EB Green Cards can be awarded to a single country and where you are born (not citizenship) determines which country you are allocated to.
The backlog for Indian born persons is over 100 years as a result.
Why should other people from other countries not be able to come here because a billion Indians want to migrate?
I don't think it's a US problem, that's a India problem.
I will say, I think the whole immigration system is a mess and I think it should be much easier and faster to immigrate to a different country as long as you can find work and meet the new country's various requirements. The systems that we have now globally pretty much suck.
"Prevents a single aggressive download, peer-to-peer stream, or Denial of Service (DoS) attack from starving other users or conversations on the link. Requires very low CPU overhead compared to strict per-flow fair queueing."
Maybe a little hyperbolic, but the point is that it adds an additional significant shackle.
If I decide my company treats me like crap, I can apply to any* job in the US that I'm qualified for.
If an H1B feels the same way, they need to search within a smaller subset of jobs that are willing to do that paperwork. Last time I was hiring (2025) we were not open to sponsoring H1Bs or green cards. It's just a lot of extra work and legal expense, and frankly we found plenty of talented developers so we were right to not do it. Tons of employers don't deal with it.
* Note: Adjust this figure down somewhat to reflect the fake job postings that I never had a shot at, because the employer is just pretending to look for domestic candidates to satisfy H1B or PERM requirements.
Now, you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent as you make it clearer and clearer that you don't want them. This is the talent we want most.
Even if you're a laborer, it's quite hard to argue that the absolute pinnacle of the labor pool is dragging down your wages and not increasing total jobs.
If other countries are giving you better alternatives, why bring your talents to the US?
LOL. It's not "top talent" it's "cheap talent" or even just "more talent so the supply is larger and wages go down".
If you're EG a PhD+ and working in a frontier AI lab on cutting edge problems, then fair enough. If you're developer x of 100 writing Java CRUD apps in the finance department of some corporate, you are not.
> Now, you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent as you make it clearer and clearer that you don't want them. This is the talent we want most.
No. It’s not.
> other companies that would be suspended […] included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE.
Top talent exists domestically, this is to hold wages down. It’s fine to impair the import conveyor and see what happens. If and when there is a labor shortage or wages spike horrendously (highly unlikely), certainly, we can revisit.
Neoliberalism ignored domestic worker concerns for shareholder returns and corporatism, and an alternative was offered, here we are. It’s a natural experiment we might not otherwise had had the opportunity to run.
If the US can bully countries into releasing 100M barrels of their own petroleum reserves, what makes you think the US can’t solve for that too? Other countries!
Everyone has a leverage point, everyone has a point at which the pain is worse than the ask. Companies and executives are easy, and usually of weak constitution. They fold fast, based on the evidence so far. US Big Tech fell in line super fast, right? “Fall in line or else.” If trillions of dollars in enterprise value and the resources it commands won’t save you, I’m unsure if anything else would.
It’s not right or wrong, it just is. We are living through a “might makes right” era. It’s not the first, won’t be the last (if history is our guide). This too shall pass.
Frankly talent doesn’t matter any more with AI - the skill floor for software has dropped to zero so an average dev now competes with the best devs. Marketing and capital matter way more.
It still matters a bit for architectural direction - but those roles are so few I wouldn’t be concerned as an American.
In a normal world, I would praise the government for taking a action to address issues with a program that has definitely been abused by major tech companies for a long time.
However, it's really hard to separate the message from the messenger here.
Beyond the fact that this is obviously a political stunt designed to make headlines just a few weeks before the mid-term elections, there is little reason to believe that this is being done in good faith targeting the worst offenders. The people who have been chosen to run the federal government are simply corrupt sociopaths who will do anything to promote their extreme ideological agenda and are not to be trusted in any way.
Until proven otherwise, I have to assume this effort has to do with kickbacks or political retribution mixed with blatant racism, rather than for any sort of public benefit. I doubt this will result in anything besides a larger donation to the Republican party - or direct payments to Trump family members - by the affected companies.
The messengers come from the political party that freed America from the worst abuses of slavery. It still exists today, and I regret that H2A workers are not more represented in this conversation. However, this administration condoning indentured servitude is a relief.
The AP blurb[0] has different quotes and includes an accusation of fraud that's missing from the Bloomberg article.
> Vance said Thursday, “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.” Vance spoke in a White House news conference announcing the decision.
Accepting Vance's premise, is he saying that the solution to replacing American workers with indentured servants is... removing the path out of indentured servitude? It sounds like they're not touching H1-B itself, just the path from H1-B to residency.
They've been limited in what changes to H1-b they can make without legislative support, so they will take any other option to make H1-b less desirable and harder.
>The report finds that a broad path to citizenship would stabilize jobs and prices across the construction, hospitality, and care industries that families depend on while raising wages for all American workers.
The article posted is about suspending a Tech company's use of h1-b. The report makes no mention of the Tech sector and all the purported gains are in low-income high-physical labor industries like construction and hospitality. The whole wage and cost of living stabilization they're saying is due to immigrant labor is due to the fact you can exploit them for lower wages.
It further argues that Citizenship, not temp work visas, is the correct path. All while calling out that Tech companies, like Microsoft, are the primary beneficiaries of the current system.
In that light, I don't think linking this report arguing what you think it does.
Is that 2 or 10 nom's of furry friends, the numbers look the same to my binary eyes, math is hard with an ai buddy?
This admin has demonstrated many times they will misuse Ai and blindly trust whatever it spits out. Would not be surprised in the slightest if that was the case here.
It's "funny" that organizations like the AP, NYT, etc, still quote Vance after that. He never really had credibility beforehand but any he may have had was lost, surely.
Thanks! Unfortunately archive.ph requires passing an impassible computational paywall for some browsers/ips/etc. Since the article is so short it seem fine to just quote it in full here,
"The Trump administration said Thursday that it would suspend an immigration program for multiple tech firms, including Microsoft Corp., alleging widespread abuse of a worker visa system. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vice President JD Vance said, during a briefing in Washington. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said other companies that would be suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE. He said there were multiple active federal investigations ongoing into the matter. The move is the latest by the Trump administration to crack down on legal and illegal pathways to migration. The program at issue allows US employers to help sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. “Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them, they do a lot of important things,” Vance said Thursday. “Our message to Microsoft is not that we want to harm your company. It’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans.” Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
This is about these companies having the ability to sponsor employees for green cards. They can still employ people on visas. It's more accurate to say the government wants to prevent these workers from eventually becoming American.
Some proof of work type thing to prevent bots by changing the economics, presumably. It's that "checking you are a human" thing without forcing you to click images
What do ya'll think about the conjecture that the elites in the USA want to destroy the actual economy while keeping their world of financial bullshit going?
The current K shaped economy being just the beginning. The elites realised that making more money wont change much for them, but they can make everyone else poor and then live as feudal lords.
Varoufakis is a member of the World Economic Forum, comes from a wealthy family and his wife is the daughter of the biggest clothing manufacturer in Greece. He's part of what he complains about.
In feudalism, there is some mutual dependence despite hostility. The peasants need the nobles to defend them from other depredation, and the lords need the peasants to feed them and fight their wars. The only problem is that during the future, if automation continues, the proletariat/peasantry will be surplus to requirements, i.e. not needed by the ruling class, so it won't really be feudal.
Yeah they don't want to destroy everything, they want to own everything, and shrink the costs of ownership by any means necessary. Labor costs are one of the more untolerable aspects of ownership of entire industries.
This only works if they are able to detach wealth from the cost of labor (ie. AI for service jobs robots for physical jobs). At that point the populace will have no way to generate value so the elites dont need them anymore. It remains to be seen if this comes to pass. My daily AI screwups need to be fixed if we are to even consider this.
I haven't seem much evidence of them wanting to destroy the economy. Trump may do some damage with his trade war everyone and run up the debt policy but I think he wants America to do well even if the policies are kind of dumb? (Brit here - I may be quite wrong).
I think the problem is the opposite. “MAGA”, both the ideology and the workings of the administration, are largely internally self-contradictory and incoherent.
You might say “okay there’s still some corporate-cons who’ll take my money and do what I ask” but then there’s guys like Miller pulling the strings whose entire purpose is opposed to yours.
This might sound crazy, but maybe getting behind a stable and predictable gov't that has ensured corporate dominance for over a century would have been a smarter strategy? But hey what do I know…
Citizens United means unlimited money in politics is free speech, they can always give more. Often, non-monetary tributes to king midus, praise or peace prizes, go much further.
The corporate-government corruption is out of hand and I am glad more people are making it a top political issue. I have my doubts this latest from the admin will make a positive difference. It's primarily performative politics for the base with zero consideration for secondary effects or real causes.
But also maybe they got there by paying and lobbying previous admins to the detriment of the local workforce (though likely good fiscally for the orgs taking advantage of the program).
It is completely possible this is a legitimate issue, but the current administration has been so corrupt about everything else it is impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Even if the claim is valid I’m sure the enforcement is targeted.
You think they’d go after palintir or spacex for the same issues?
There is a likelihood of some targeting though this isn’t the only admin to do that. Remember when the IRS was directed to audit conservative organizations (you know maybe they had a higher likely hood of fraud, maybe, but that was not proven)
That said, it seems this is targeting body farms. Firms that specialize in corrupting the process. Yes some people they bring over have unique talents, but a lot of them are run of the mill folks looking to become “manager” so they can attract a mate back home.
> Remember when the IRS was directed to audit conservative organizations
It was directed to audit them less, because they were complaining about being audited as much as other organizations. Yet another case where conservatives make themselves victims out of nowhere, to get preferential treatment and then continue pretend they were victims after proven wrong.
He admitted that the majority of the targeted auditing was against conservative orgs while also targeting a minority of liberal orgs. He admitted to the targeting and also that it greatly focused on conservative orgs.
I'm not against going after fraud, but you have to be even handed about it.
You can read NPR's take. They admit they targeted conservative groups but also had progressive bycatch.
I can't see any quotes there except claims of keyword searches. I haven't yet read the pdf.
If its true that it was based on keyword searches, then I would hope a future government gets the balls to do the same for the current Trump admin's keyword based banning/removal shenanigans.
The issue is they might run out of normal countries. In developing countries they would quickly become target of local corrupt officials. They would basically suck out whatever they can from companies that would attempt to do billion dollar business there. You can think of them as some mob from mafia movies. There is no way Microsoft would prefer to deal with that kind of folk instead of just hiring American people
Microsoft is located in Bangalore and Hyderabad. Both of those cities are not exactly known for their corruption.
If you want corruption, then Delhi is your best bet.
In only a few countries in LATAM and Europe, in LATAM they are only present largely for sales but no development. I would guess the same is the case in Europe
I entirely agree. They are looking at many countries like those in Latin America, to hire cheaper labor there either vis local subsidiaries or local outsourcing/consulting firms
I worked at MS Vancouver office in 2019, majority was people with visa issues to US. Even I was Canadian from Ontario who ended up there because I couldn't get visa to move to SF
Generally I would rather them offshore talent than bring in foreign workers to our soil. I would make an exception for the actual exceptional people we need for jobs but not for the run of the mill developers or whatever we seem to be bringing in by the truckload.
> “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”
> ... Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.
I'm glad someone is finally taking this more seriously. There are a lot of big tech teams where you can't even get a job there unless you're Indian. H1B's should be for unique, foreign talent, not senior software engineers.
In the best case we could hope this will lead to increased wages to American citizens, but realistically I think the most likely impact is it pisses a lot of people off, causes a lot of headaches for a lot of people, and has no real impact for most.
Edit: Would love to hear a coherent argument as to why my comment is off topic and deserving of downvotes but I'm sure that won't happen.
I hope it causes some people to return to Europe and do some good work over here.
I'm never sure how to feel about this kind of thing. On one hand, it's kind of interesting to see the self-destruction, and having qualified people return to Europe can only be a good thing for Europe. OTOH, it's scary to see, and I'm unsure whether I prefer a world where China gains much more power.
This ruling is not targeted towards Europeans. I doubt this will significantly affect European workers in the US. The reality is there aren't that many European immigrants in the US and not many at all on H1-Bs. The vast majority of immigrants are from the Americas (with over 22% from Mexico), India and China. European migrants as of ~2023 total around 10% and have been slowly decreasing over the past few years. Bear in mind a lot of people are still here from the post-WW2 period when immigration was much more liberal.
Anecdotally from the people I've met, the majority of Europeans are here for academia on F/J/O, entertainment, are spouses of US citizens or get temporary transfer visas like the L1. Those who go to the US because of high salaries can afford to figure out employment based green cards and they don't have multiple year waiting periods. Otherwise it's a huge pain to get permanent residency or even a normal work visa compared to the EU, but qualified Europeans generally don't have much trouble.
I think there are plenty of qualified and hard-working people in China, I'm not sure this change would increase the number of people there the same way it might in places like Europe or India.
For about 5-6 decades all the qualified and hard-working people in China came to the U.S, because they could enjoy more freedom, fewer arbitrary government dictates, and better economic opportunities. This brain drain was a huge factor in U.S. global dominance.
That conveyor has now reversed, because all of the drivers have reversed as well. China will be fine; it's the U.S. I'm concerned about.
So the US underinvested in the native workforce and now the chinese have gone back there's a big gap that a native workforce would have filled if they hadn't been temporarily replaced by chinese? Seems terrible short sighted.
Yes. The mechanism is that American kids stopped learning useful things like STEM skills. I remember when I went to college in the early 00s, every single person in my physics class was either an immigrant, child of an immigrant, or Jewish. Now we have a shortage in engineering skills that has to be filled by H1Bs, and a population that all gets service jobs and consumes disproportionately because of an overvalued reserve currency. If that currency ever stops being overvalued, we're fucked.
Stopped learning. Physics classes at my college were about 12 students. CS and math would be about 20-30ish, History and English and Psychology classes were about 40-60, PoliSci could be upwards of 100. I don't think any science or math course there ever filled up. There was zero barrier to anyone wanting to take a physics course or be a physics major, other than the work being really hard.
The U.S. will always dominate because they consume everything and make really nothing. The second people in U.S. stop consuming everyone else pays the price.
The U.S. is 4% of the world population. Back when the world population was 2B people and the developed world population was about 400M and the U.S. was 130M of that and the only market whose capital stock hadn't been totally destroyed by WW2, we were crucial to the world economy. But now the world population is 8B, the developed world population is 6B, and the U.S. is 330M of that. In terms of raw size of consumer markets, the world can ignore the U.S. The tricky part is the dependence on U.S. software and financial companies for significant parts of the global information infrastructure, but there's already a strong movement to that.
While true, the question should be: is each European nation/the EU collectively doing those restrictions sensibly, or poorly?
If done in a similar fashion as the US has chosen, i.e. due to incoherent populism, it would limit the number of competent e.g. Americas, Canadians, South Africans etc. from joining the European workforce.
If done in a sensible fashion, it would only exclude the would-be migrants from those (or other) countries who have shown a wanton disregard for democracy and other constitutionally required values.
A nitpick here, but "visa" gets tossed around a lot. A visa is a document which allows you to request permission to enter a country for some purpose. To work in a country you need a work and/or residency permit. Even in the US, there are situations where you can work with a an expired visa, provided your other immigration documents are current. But if you leave, you need a new one. Similarly UK citizens can still work in some European countries without a visa, because there is no requirement for them to enter with one (but the officer at the border might still refuse entry).
Fewer people means less qualified applicants for the same jobs, which means wages go up. Maybe companies like Microsoft have enough dead weight that they will just absorb the losses in growth but most companies don't have that luxury and this is hitting staff aug body shops so it will hit mid market and small employers as well unless it gets overturned.
Many comments here claiming immigrant tech workers undercut native workers, yet somehow in the software industry, where H1B has been the most widely used, unemployment rate has historically consistently been much lower than the overall unemployment rate, and the wages have been higher (and growing faster) than average wages.
Like 25% - 40% lower unemployment and 60% - 100% higher wages. Even during the dot-com bust software was much better off! It's right there in the BLS data (though a bit hairy to slice and dice due to how they categorize jobs.)
The "immigrants displace native worker" narrative is too simplistic. Consider maybe that without those workers the work simply does not get done.
I mean, we've all lived through this. How many people here, for most of their careers, did NOT have mountains of backlog they would like to clear out if only they had more headcount? How many have NOT spent days on quarterly planning because of the need to be extremely judicious about what you put on your roadmap? And how many have not bemoaned, oftern right here on HN, how hard it is to find people who can actually code?
It's not just you, this dynamic plays out all over the place, and puts real constraints on the expansion potential of companies, which reduces future hiring all around. There are studies on this. Yes, there is naturally some downward wage pressure on local employees due to a larger pool, but on the whole the expansion and faster growth of companies, and hence the overall economy, more than compensates for this.
Feel free to ask your favorite AI for more... You know, the thing actually taking our jerbs! ;-)
Even before this current AI wave and awful economy/hiring environment, corporations have been turning their noses up at workers. When there were "jobs a plenty", you only need to speak to anyone in the industry to see how much talent is overlooked because they can. Corporations and the economy at large should work for the people, we should not be burning down the lives of citizens to grow the economy at all costs.
Here is the evidence that even 10 years ago there was way more talent ready-to-go and easily cultivated talent that could be honed with a few weeks or months of training: ATS keyword gaming (make sure you have the right SQL/Java version mentioned), need to lie about your exact stack to get an interview, hiring gauntlets where it's "a numbers game" and you go around and around till you get just the right leet-code questions that you happened to already know, age-ism where anyone over the age of 40 is worried about a lay-off and never getting back into the industry because corps/hiring managers only want younger for technical work. All of those anecdotes, which anyone whose been in this industry is deeply familiar with, points to an absolute glut of talent even in employee-friendly times.
I'm all for H1B's and bringing in foreign talent, I'm also all for holding corporations accountable and ensuring they don't get a pass to treat humans and labor as disposable. If a large corporation can bin resumes because they don't match a plethora of exact keywords and if they don't want to train for even a few weeks and need someone to "hit the ground running", they are drowning in too much talent.
so these are just indian companies and microsoft which is lead by an indian guy? is the government signaling something here? i know amazon, meta, google are all doing the same thing- but amazon and meta are licking the ass.
giving the same excuse of "oh these companies post jobs where they are not seen" is the lamest excuse you can give. are you saying this government is so poor and incompetent that it cannot verify where the job was posted? how many people saw the jobs, how many clicked and applied?? are you really saying that the most power country, with SI is not able to do this basic check??
Vance said “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants”
My understanding is that this is pretty much how everyone does it, no? Not to say that I'm surprised that they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes, of course, nor to say that I necessarily agree / disagree with this tactic.
Here are the rough requirements for said newspaper ad according to DOL:
• The job must be advertised in the print edition of two different Sunday newspapers.
• The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.
• Both ads must run between 30 and 180 days before you file the PERM application.
• The advertisement must clearly state the name of the employer.
• The ad must outline the job duties, requirements, and the work location.
• Listing the wage is optional, but if included, it cannot be below the official prevailing wage.
• Employers must keep the full-page newspaper tearsheets for 5 years in case of an audit.
It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.
>It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.
It does say in the law [1]: "there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the United States and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor".
The rules of DOL are just guidelines how they are going to determine this but they are not the law. I will argue that if you are planning to publish your job ads in a small town newspaper you do not believe yourself that there are no "able, willing, qualified and available" Americans for your job.
1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182
>I will argue
You, or the government in this case, should argue that in a court of law. So far, the government has not won any of these cases in a court of law. And I mean over the last 2-3 decades. The number of successful prosecutions will be in single digits. It's a bit like voter fraud when it comes to actual numbers.
Which cases? What prosecutions? Are you seriously saying that there are no qualified, willing and available workers for random PM or front end jobs and only this particular Indian person, who just graduated from an American college a few years ago is the only one who is able to do the job? I'd love to see a single case like this, got any links?
The cases where the government has proved in a court of law that a company is in violation of the statute or regulation. I am not aware of any successful prosecutions here other than maybe Cognizant which was in the news some time ago.
What prosecutions of the 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(5)(A)(i) do you mean? It's a clause that says that aliens looking for a job are inadmissible unless there are no qualified, willing and available workers as certified by DOL. It is not prosecuted, aliens are just not admitted. But if you have seen it being prosecuted somehow I am still waiting for a link.
PERM is approved at a rate in high 90s. The government - this government - has approved PERM for all these corporations that it is slandering now. Here's a deposition from a DOL employee [1]:
"Q Are any PERMs denied for fraud? A Not to my knowledge."
There is a PERM process, the government overwhelmingly approves it, it does not take anything to court or win. I am not sure what you are trying to argue.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.266...
You are not giving the links to the prosecutions you claimed the government lost.
I am claiming the government does not prosecute them or deny their PERM. What are you arguing? Can you state it clearly?
You claimed that government does not successfully prosecute this, implying it prosecutes and fails. If you wanted to say it does not prosecute then you should just said so when I asked what prosecution did you mean. Also what are you arguing here? We both agree that inadmissibility does not require prosecution, so what's your point again?
No, I never implied that they fail. They do not prosecute or deny any PERM certifications. PERM is anyway not tied to inadmissibility of an alien as PERM is an employer driven certification process. Recall that PERM is administered by the Dept. of Labor. Specifically for PERM, they need to prove in a court of law that the company is violating civil rights, labor laws, discriminating against a protected class, doing fraud, etc. They do not do that at the administrative level (by denying PERM) or at the judicial level (by winning a court case). All they do is make speeches on the campaign trail, and occasionally settle out of court as some other sibling comments' examples in Apple, META, etc. show.
Okay, then I read you reply wrong and have no idea what are you trying to say. The law I quoted is about inadmissibility, PERM is a process to create an exception for an inadmissible alien as described in the law. Recall that the exception is created via DOL certifying that there are no sufficient able, qualified, willing and available workers. PERM is a way to conduct this certification. Read my first message you have responded, it has the link to the law. I am also not sure what you mean by this "They do not do that at the administrative level (by denying PERM) " because the news item you are commenting under is exactly about the blanket PERM denial.
Yes, the present blanket ban is unlawful which will be overturned by the courts as arbitrary and capricious (similar to tariffs, 100k fee, and countless other things that this admin has done). I mean that historically PERM approval rates have been above 90%.
That's, like, your opinion, dude. For what it's worth, these bans are routine and had been issued many times before, none was declared "unlawful" by an actual court, nor it had been overturned. Usually what takes for the ban to be lifted is the company getting into compliance with the law and stopping the cute "nobody told us we should not ad in the Podunk Monthly Herald, we honestly thought this is the best place to source PMs!".
> "Q Are any PERMs denied for fraud? A Not to my knowledge."
This is misleading. "Fraud" is a legal term, and it's difficult to prove. However, DoL can and will do an audit to verify that the PERM application is correct. If the audit fails (and they fail them often) they just deny the petition.
But they don't deny them. PERM is approved > 90%. Google for PERM stats.
They have settled at least one case: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
> Specifically, the department’s investigation found that Apple did not advertise positions Apple sought to fill through the PERM program on its external job website, even though its standard practice was to post other job positions on this website. It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions.
Of course court itself could have arrived in different result.
Yes, they all settle out of court. Everybody makes money and headlines. Companies write it off as the cost of doing business, politician uses it on the campaign trail. Biden sued SpaceX because they weren't hiring asylees. Same shtick.
Some of these requirements are so ridiculous that they create the need for everyone to do what Vance is accusing Microsoft of.
Many companies fulfill the intent of the law. They run a real hiring process — where they advertise online and interview people with work authorization/citizens and people who would require sponsorship.
But if someone requiring sponsorship was the best candidate for the job, then they have to run an additional “fake” process that fulfills these requirements, since no one actually hires tech workers from the newspaper.
Considering how many of these adds have more than a hundred of local applicants, and still end up hiring people that are not from North America it is quite clear they do not intend to follow the intent of the law.
Let's be honest they want a captive workforce that depends upon them to stay in the USA and build a life.
There has to be a better way to does not make them captive, and allows Americans to be the first ones, and even after that the priority should be people in North America, even International students.
But the fact they keep hiring mostly and overwhelmingly people from the same five countries that are desperate to come to the USA is an indication these companies are profiting formt he desperation of people.
> Considering how many of these adds have more than a hundred of local applicants, and still end up hiring people that are not from North America it is quite clear they do not intend to follow the intent of the law.
You’re assuming without evidence that for any given job, that there will be qualified Americans willing to perform that job who aren’t already happily employed. You haven’t established that.
Hell, ask restaurateurs. They frequently have difficult hiring qualified local labor, too, even though the bar isn’t nearly as high as for a technologist, in major cities.
> requirements are so ridiculous that they create the need
It's the other way around. The "need" creates the ridiculous requirements. Companies get the laws they want and the laws they want are those that give them an excuse to do what they want to do.
Is that really the intent of the law? From here it looks like the intent is to favor citizens to people who would require sponsorship, but a hiring process that selects the best candidate from a single set of citizen and foreign candidates doesn't do that.
It also doesn't say that the paper needs to be widely read, just circulated, right? I mean, why pay for a job ad in the SF Chronicle when you can put a cheap ad in the (now defunct?) SF Weekly free paper? When it was still around, SF Weekly would have met the threshold for being widely distributed...
Why pay to reach many thousands of people with a widely read paper when you can pay pennies to reach dozens of people that you don't want to apply to the job anyway?
This is an entire business model.
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
> This is an entire business model.
was this how those 'free newspapers' back around 2005~2010 worked?
Yeah. The trade rags from companies like Ziff Davis had a section of plain classified ads that were like 2-4 pages of 6 point black and white text.
> The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.
Based on that I would expect that if you advertise in small town newspaper, the job needs to be located in that small town. Want them to work in your big office next to big city, then it must be a newspaper widely distributed in that city not a small town on the opposite side of continent.
I wonder if wfh creates any loopholes here, and they just select areas where there are no real candidate pools.
I've seen these ads. Not the latest, some things might have changed, but circa 2015-2018, this is how they rolled:
1. You choose newspapers that are least likely to actually reach people looking for tech jobs.
2. You post an small ad specifying the role in the most vague and unappealing terms.
3. There is some weird and inconvenient way to apply (e.g., fax- or snail-mail-only) that goes to /dev/null.
You can argue that it follows the letter of the law, but as a practical matter, the outcome is always that there are no US-based applicants for any H-1B SWE role, so something is wonky, right?
Didn’t people start publishing lists of these and people started applying and these HR departments lost their minds?
Yup someone started to aggregate those. Corp lawyers probably laughed at their cuteness and then proceeded to obscure the process even more. Say, only publish in newspapers without an online presence, so someone has to physically scan it. Or find a small town where few people in tech live. Also notify the HR department to ensure to flag out all US applications for some other "unrelated reason" that look plausible on paper.
Yes, jobs.now
Anyone know the list ? Curious to check it out
https://www.jobs.now/jobs/746649922-android-developer
Here's one for Android Developer.
Must apply by snail mail.
If only they made a device (with an OS perhaps) where one could apply to such things electronically.
Just...wow.
I'm not American and I don't live in the US, and I pretty hate Trump and his allies but this ad is just...wow. I think this is a loophole that should be closed.
Do note there are similar practices in many (all?) countries. Recently there was one case in Finland where job posting was extremely specific saying "We require, and by that we mean require, not recommend, experience in Leader and EU funding as well at least 14 years and 5 months of relevant experience". Their CEO admitted publicly that it was just done due to them being to public funding and that requires job postings to published. One of the articles (in Finnish): https://www.hs.fi/alueet/art-2000012282918.html
I recently saw the job posting in Finland (Suunto, I believe) that had diving experience as an imperative requirement for an embedded software engineer role. I've applied and never heard back. HR contact that they posted also never replied. The job was closed a couple weeks after. I never even got a rejection email.
So yeah, everyone do that, that's kind of the de facto way of hiring specific people when there is a requirement to post jobs. That doesn't make it ok though.
That’s a frustration. People project their hopes and dreams onto Donald Trump, but the president isn’t t a king. The same neoliberal order remains, another war crushing global trade, but still no action taken. Donald Trump did make a lot of crypto money though.
I'm not sure there is any advantage in publishing this in a remote town rather than NYC and SF.
Any tech savvy person in NYC or SF would not be scouring newspapers for tech jobs and even if they are, they are most likely to be H1B or Greencard themselves.
A small town newspaper may actually make people apply to those roles.
But either way, people who likely to come through these ads can be easily disqualified just by adding a few technology stacks
What's the point of bringing in workers into US just to have them work remotely from home? At that point why not have them work remotely from other side of ocean.
It takes a lot of trust (on both sides) and complexity to establish a working relationship across two jurisdictions, if at all possible.
For instance, what labor laws apply? And who enforces them? And how, given parties in two different countries?
Does the company want to subject itself to some arbitrary country’s tax man or labor law enforcer prosecutions? Does the employee want to work under effectively zero labor protection? Possibly, but rarely.
It’s not even always possible, it’s very complicated to work remotely in France, for instance. The state cracks down on one person one client companies, and EoRs beyond being impractical (as they must adhere to drastic labor laws compared to the US) are in a legal gray zone.
>For instance, what labor laws apply?
The laws of the worker's locality is generally how it works. In the film industry, a production company based in LA might do a shoot in NYC- they have to follow NYC's labor laws since that's where the workers are and the work is being done.
The workers at the home base in LA have the LA laws applied to them.
>And who enforces them?
The local government.
Exactly, and those answers are why it’s a hurdle and a leap of faith.
The company has to adhere to labor laws in foreign countries (most likely plural if this is a general policy). That’s quite the overhead and opens you up to legal trouble.
The employee has to trust their government can prosecute or otherwise coerce a foreign company with no entity on their territory (otherwise they’d just get hired normally through the subsidiary).
LA and NJ remain two states of a common country and I'm sure that simplifies a lot of things.
Although none of this applies if the company is a multinational with offices in the employee’s country. But then that is offshoring rather than remote work.
Cultural and timezone alignment. We’ve been here before with the outsourcing wave 20 years ago. The answers are still the same, remote is just a job perk.
Before Covid-19, when you asked tech folks about outsourcing to central American countries (or even within the US to places with lower wages than the bay area), the answer would always be "nothing can replace in-person meetings around a real whiteboard"
Taxes probably. And you can bring them in if necessary occasionally.
It's a lot less accounting work to have most of your workers in the same state. Imagine single workers or small groups in many different countries.
Saving half in salaries might make up for some additional payroll complexity.
If they work remotely from the other side of the ocean then they are free to leave and find another job easily without risking their green card
If you bring them to America you've basically created a worker who is dependent on staying employed with you in order to keep their place
Are you trying to justify the exploitation of this loophole?
Nearly all these ads say "Send CVs to immigration_department@tech.corp" they aren't even trying to conceal what they're doing.
Those are some seriously out of touch requirements that could easily be fixed if anyone in power actually wanted to.
Yeah, I believe these are the requirements for PERM: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-20/chapter-V/part-656/sub...
They are wildly out of date compared to how jobs are actually filled. Regardless of any other enforcement actions, this needs to be fixed.
I don't think it even needs congressional approval to change these. The DoL could do it.
Just copying the actual newspaper part here:
(B) Advertisements in newspaper or professional journals.
(1) Placing an advertisement on two different Sundays in the newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment most appropriate to the occupation and the workers likely to apply for the job opportunity and most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers.
(2) If the job opportunity is located in a rural area of intended employment that does not have a newspaper with a Sunday edition, the employer may use the edition with the widest circulation in the area of intended employment.
(3) The advertisements must satisfy the requirements of paragraph (f) of this section. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by furnishing copies of the newspaper pages in which the advertisements appeared or proof of publication furnished by the newspaper.
(4) If the job involved in the application requires experience and an advanced degree, and a professional journal normally would be used to advertise the job opportunity, the employer may, in lieu of one of the Sunday advertisements, place an advertisement in the professional journal most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by providing a copy of the page in which the advertisement appeared.
I'm more speaking to the point that the options are "newspaper or professional journals" in the-year-of-our-lord 2026. Job sites are under a section that gives a pool of other options of which the employer must pick three. Those requirements should be flipped (job sites are the requirement, newspaper and journals are one of the extra options) if the DoL wasn't asleep at the wheel.
Edit: And thats not a R vs D thing. The requirements have been this way under multiple administrations, and newspapers have not been a primary way of sourcing candidates for two decades.
They are not "Out of date".
Like many things in US law, they have been deliberately ignored as time moves past them to ensure the laws no longer constrain them.
Most governments actually have no difficulty doing "Keeping the lights on" work like updating laws to reflect the times changing. Even here in the US, Republican state governments will have no difficulty keeping the lights on and running day to day tasks, and it usually moves at a reasonable clip.
Another good example of this is any time something comes up that a government body is very very for, it takes almost no time to actually get done. In principle, the turnaround time for a government to react to something can be a single day if necessary. Or less.
But the US Federal congress, explicitly Republicans, has purposely and explicitly and publicly made it a part of their platform to prevent the government from doing anything, including day to day tasks. The modern federal congress does so much less than it used to. On purpose.
Somehow the things that were trivial to do back with ink and quill are suddenly impossible to do in a timely manner. Because it's entirely by choice. Democrats aren't innocent, and are perfectly willing to not do their job when they can get away with it.
How to "fix" it depends a lot on exactly what your goals are.
Waa! Is that why I'm still unemployed, because I haven't been buying (or reading) newspapers...
I’m sure they’d find a reason to pass on anyone that does apply through those ads.
That's a systems question. We've had comments on HN before from people who post those ads because they're legally required to do so. The comment that I recall said (in my paraphrase):
- If you apply, you will not be hired, because we're only looking to hire the guy we already have in mind, who we're already working with under some other relationship.
- But, if you apply, that guy also won't be hired, because we proved to be able to fill the role locally.
- This annoys us and him and you.
From a systems perspective (and taking this description as accurate), if people make it their business to apply to those ads, it really will stop companies from using this method to get green cards for foreigners they'd like to employ. The downstream effects are open to question; maybe a given company will employ more domestic employees and maybe it will just keep using the same foreign contractors it's already using.
But then it is legally hazardous for them to hire the foreigner
That assumes anyone is actually checking up on this. Enforcement is virtually nonexistent.
Except the point of the original post is that has changed.
I heard that this rule is genuinely keeping the lights on for some local print media publications.
Socialism with extra steps.
Not that socialism is inherently bad, but why not just be honest about it and implement it more directly?
Who am I kidding, socialism is the bogeyman doing hero's duty sustaining unrestricted ultracapitalism.
Do people still look for jobs in newspapers? I don't think my city (non-American) even has a local newspaper anyore.
I would hazard a guess that Microsoft follows this process exactly, and this probably won't hold up in court. But it looks like good midterm fodder!
> • The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.
> It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.
What does 'widely distributed' mean if not "not just in a small town"?
It could be the Redmond paper in this case. That maybe has a few hundred readers.
The rule is pretty dumb in a country where people regularly move far for a job.
And where sites like LinkedIn exist.
> The job must be advertised in the print edition of two different Sunday newspapers.
Advertising in the Sunday newspaper seems a bit antiquated. I don't think I've looked in a newspaper for a job since the 90s.
That's how I have been getting my last 6 jobs.
I never get a reply via indeed and the rest online.
Please use more than one brain cell in order to consider the intent behind those guidelines, and whether what Microsoft (and similar companies) is doing is actually within the bounds of what voters and the representatives who wrote the relevant laws wanted. Do you really think the purpose of making companies advertise the job opening in a newspaper was just to give companies a bunch of busywork? or might there have actually been an intent behind it? Are you capable of ascertaining what that intent is? (note: this question has a right answer that all people arguing in good faith are capable of stating)
> It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.
I think it is implies in: "The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located."
When the job is wfh, the entire globe is where the job is located. Are there any physical rags that are widely distributed globally?
Maybe it's time to rewrite the aged and archaic laws, instead of selectively applying them to a handful of companies...
Are all the position in Microsoft WFH?
I have several friends who works in Microsoft and would disagree
If the job is WFH, is green card applicable?
Why wouldn't it be?
Because you could... Work from home? In Canada or India?
Is that supposed to be a downside? I honestly don't see why that would matter. If someone is working for a US company, then they're working for a US company. The flag sticking out of the ground where they sit shouldn't be relevant.
Why would they need a greencard?
Yes it is, because America has a vested interest in writing laws to benefit, I don't know, AMERICANS.
American companies are for Americans.
But if the job is located in Redmond, does that mean widely distributed in Redmond itself, or the Eastside, or all King County, or the whole Puget Sound area?
The point of a green card is "Nobody in the US was able to do this job"
In that context, "Widely distributed" really shouldn't be such a complicated concept. What does the NYT charge to run a classified ad?
"Nobody in redmond could do this job!". Cool, did you try any of the other 49 states at all? No? Then go away.
That's usually what a judge decides.
Anyway, I went checking and I wasn't able to find any opening in Microsoft in the Seattle times online version. Which is definitely not a nice optics and would play unfortunately well with the current allegations
> The job must be advertised in the print edition of two different Sunday newspapers
Ah yes, the newspaper, the bastion of where all millennial and Gen Z software engineers deign to get their news from in 2026…
> Both ads must run between 30 and 180 days
what can be a reason for an upper limit?
But why must it be on print? I mean ... does that make objectively sense? I don't even read paper news anymore.
Sounds like a good time to start responding to newspaper job ads
Yeah, the rules are designed to facilitate fraud. They let you put job ads for web developers in a newspaper instead of, you know, on the Internet.
If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud, they would have required the company to advertise the position in the same places they advertise their other jobs.
> If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud
I wouldn't default to assuming malice. These laws were written by extremely old people who are still living in the 1950s, where they think the paper boy still rides up on his bicycle on Sunday to deliver the news paper to them, and that's the only way to read about jobs.
These are Department of Labor regulations that are updated with some frequency.
Imagine if they changed the law to reflect what they wanted instead of randomly punishing companies that most likely are doing the same thing everyone else is, but they angered the admin by telling them "no" on some topic.
Newspaper!?
Yes, these are literally the guidelines provided by the DOL. And the government seems to want to punish companies for following the exact published guidelines.
Oh come on, if a company is placing job ads to comply with the letter of this law in 2026 they're 100% exploiting the process Vance outlines and would undoubtedly try to exploit whatever the replacement process was as well.
Nothing prevents the administration from changing the law then, last time I checked their party holds all three branches of government + SCOTUS.
Are we referring to the same administration that is met with immediate resistance from an activist judiciary whenever it tries to do literally anything?
Passing a constitutionally valid law through congress and then having the executive branch enforce it would not meet any judicial resistance.
I suspect the courts would welcome it.
Maybe they should stop trying to do illegal things.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article317504545.html
Is this thing they're doing illegal?
Why would you give this administration the benefit of doubt?
No, just selective enforcement and maybe sending a message that if you don't behave, the administration may look a bit harder into you than it normally would.
What is the evidence of selective enforcement?
Following the published guidelines is not exploiting them. If the government doesn’t like their own guidelines, they should change them.
Agreed, if a company wants to fill roles it advertises on linked in. Maybe the rules need updating.
Where "100% exploiting the process" means complying 100% with the standards.
Ethereum has “code is law”, but we can still have a notion of the code being exploited, because it is the intent that’s been exploited
Not really. Meta had to change advertising to allow online applications.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-labor-depart...
Just vote bank politics. Microsoft is not a cheap sweatshop. If it is a sweatshop and still producing what it produces then that defies logic. We can only expect more of these as mid terms approaches.
If anyone needs an example of this happening, here is one from yesterday. Netflix is advertising a fully remote $750K software engineering job in the Seattle Times classifieds but the same job isn't listed on their career website: https://x.com/JobsNowPR/status/2107816460634784094
Is there no better source (perhaps a link to the Seattle Times Classified) than an image on Twitter from a political account?
Exposing the corporate fraud is political? Or is it just political because it uses US symbolism to expose US jobs at US companies being kept from US citizens?
Quick search:
The same ad appears here: https://www.jobs.now/jobs/746612360-software-engineer-ref-10... and here: https://jobs.ieee.org/job/software-engineers/86091567/
Applicants are asked to send their resume to usresumes@netflix.com
FWIW, there are multiple job offerings for software engineers both in Seattle and remote on the Netflix page. Just not this one.
https://explore.jobs.netflix.net/careers?location=Seattle%2C...
The ads on Netflix' own website look quite different. No salary range but much more information about the job. And there is an application form to be filled out. The job ID has a different format.
(There is also another short ad for a Broadcast Operations Engineer: https://www.jobs.now/jobs/518941865-broadcast-operations-eng... )
AFAICT, the email address usresumes@netflix.com only appears online in conjunction with these very brief job ads on small job sites. It seems quite obvious that these ads are not really meant for serious candidates.
If one sends an email to usresumes@netflix.com, one receives the following automated reply. That does not necessarily mean that Netflix posted the above ads.
----------------------------------------
Thank you for your interest in Netflix!
So what happens now? Our hiring team is currently reviewing your application and should we find your background to be a fit for this role, we will be in touch.
We are always looking for stunning colleagues to join our team and do amazing work. So remember to check out our job site regularly as we are growing and adding openings often!
Thanks, Netflix Talent Acquisition
https://jobs.netflix.com/candidateprivacy
----------------------------------------
Not sure what to make of this. Either Netflix is very brazen here - posting minimalistic job adverts where they don't want anyone to apply - or someone else is posting these to further their own agenda.
Classified ads change.
Does that change anything in the message being conveyed?
Yes, it's the difference between a partisan claim and a fact.
Yeah but links to their job site and the ads arent evidence because the underlying data changes over time.
"Aliens are eating our pets"
"Is there a credible source for that"
"Does that change the message I'm conveying?"
If these jobs are fully remote, why are tech companies going through the process of getting visas to import workers? Am I missing something?
Because Indians want to escape India and live in a Western country. They're not interested in remote work.
Let’s put our pitchforks down and think for a moment.
Do you really think that Netflix has a preference for non-Americans?
On one hand we say they chose Americans to pay less money on the other hand we see this absurd amount of money for a remote job
Why? Because this is not them looking to fill a position but rather trying to get a PERM for an employee that they are already happy with. We don’t even know if it’s H1B or L1
Not saying that the H1B program doesn’t have its problems, but this is not the case of let’s fill this job with non-Americans for less pay
Cognizant was found liable for engaging in ethnic nepotism and benching non-Indian labor disproportionately, so a preference for non-Americans is indeed plausible and dependent on the hiring team.
>Not saying that the H1B program doesn’t have its problems, but this is not the case of let’s fill this job with non-Americans for less pay
What do you think happens to wages when the supply of labor decreases?
Why can't it just be Netflix wanting to choose from a larger pool?
The US market isn't a pool large enough? Why don't they publish the ad on their website then?
netflix advertising for a $3000+ dollars a DAY is like advertising for an Olympic athlete.. this is a distorted example in several dimensions.
"Oh sorry...That's a typo the newspaper made. The position is actually 75K/year" </sarc>
>Do you really think that Netflix has a preference for non-Americans?
Netflix as a whole, no.
Ethnic Indian Netflix people whose departments suddenly become 100% ethnic Indian, yes.
Wow… Racist much?
Facts don't care about your slurs
Cheap labor
how is a job with a salary of $750k "cheap labor" anywhere on earth?
only place in earth that pays labor to these prices btw. Any other random western country pays max %25 of that maybe if they are really expensive city like Zurich.
Should be 1 mill minimum
on blind
lol, because smart people only born in US
I've seen it done in not even a small-town newspaper. A company I worked for put it into a print newspaper I cannot even find anywhere and I suspect the lawyers who we used to help in the process owned it themselves (but I can't prove this). I am not sure if there is a set definition of what a small-town newspaper is or "widely distributed". Like what if lawyers print it once a month/year and just distribute it around public parks or something? Is that widely distributed?
This isn't even a good basis. The question is what the purpose of visa to residence work programs achieves. No one ever questions the underlying assumptions. Like for example, could filling skilled roles actually cause a self fulfilling prophecy? If Americans assume immigrants will fill a role, they don't acquire the skill which actually creates a dependence on immigration to fill it.
> The question is what the purpose of visa to residence work programs achieves
It achieved wage suppression and control over workers livelihood.
And it should be illegal, perhaps even criminal the way some companies go about it.
That reminds me of the Richards Tip episode from Nathan for You, in which, in order to fulfill a legal requirement for a name change, they started printing a newspaper called The Diarrhea Times.
I'm not a Republican, but if this is accurate, it's something that these companies (or individuals in these companies) should be prosecuted for.
It’s because the companies are following a flawed process, not that they’re committing fraud.
The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.
In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.
I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.
This model assumes that the number of positions is fixed at any given time, but that is not true. Instead, it will fluctuate based on what must be paid. So, to extend your example, without H1B or a similiar program or de-facto state that does the same thing, then we'd get roughly the 900 jobs that are willing to pay the most to be filled, while the rest are not worth the cost of employing someone in this hypothetical market. The result, then, is a higher wage for those 900 citizens.
This is not to say that such programs are bad. To consider that, we must ask questions like:
- Is citizens being able to make much more than non-citizens a desirable outcome? (it's electorally incentivized, since citizens can vote in the relevant elections but non-citizens can not but that is not the same as being desirable in a more broad sense) - How big is this effect? - How badly do we (meaning society at large) want these final 100 jobs done? - How will this affect competition with other countries? - What about outsourcing?
A labor shortage has a temporary effect of creating an upward pressure on the 900 jobs, but there’s a ceiling and the long term effects are complex. I may have to pay 900 jobs 1.5x to attract and retain the talent as a business, but that cost will be eaten by other functions where there’s a surplus. Or long term, the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away.
Additionally there will be a loss in productivity for business and the 900 jobs will have more work on their plates, so in a way they could be underpaid for the job they do. This is just scratching the surface, but I assume there’d be a lot of second order effects.
> the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away
Both are acceptable terms for me compared to importing cheap labor. If they automate, then at least it creates new high end jobs, and if they ship jobs away then they now have to deal with foreign cultures, foreign courts and legal system, etc that will hamper their business.
That’s because you’re automatically assigning “cheap labor” tag to all workers on visa. Which in itself is not accurate. But these same workers after following the above process become permanent residents and citizens. (Which implies these are the people companies want to retain and move them off a visa by sinking 10s of thousands of dollars) The reality is much more nuanced.
Nope. Companies are just taking advantage of the system. Just look at who the biggest importers are. Tata Consulting? I mean that's clearly just cheap tech labor. I once was contracting and had to train my replacement from Infosys who was there on an H1b visa.
This about the PERM process and Microsoft. Consultancies abusing H1B visas is problematic, there’s no denying that. But this is a separate matter.
> I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process.
This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
So anyone following the immigration process laid out by the government is cheating?
They elected a president twice that says he was being “smart” by avoiding taxes. Americans are fine with this logic.
> This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
Especially because when such processes are broken they usually got that way not on accident, but because of sustained lobbying by the same forces that then take advantage of the broken system they helped to shape.
(I'm speaking generally, not necessarily claiming it applies to the particular policy being discussed here, which I'm not super familiar with the history of one way or the other).
The companies lobbied for this process. It's flawed by design. If ti worked as you suggest, then companies couldn't exploit their workers.
TLDR;
They were committing fraud fraud fraud
We need clawbacks from the C-suite and disgorgement of illicit profits
100% happens. Microsoft is for sure an offender, but the biggest offenders are companies like Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, and IBM (among others).
There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.
IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.
If you are ever at a tech company and oddly see a piece of paper taped to the wall near the ceiling with microscopic font, that is a job posting. Its representing the tech company making their 'best effort' to hire an american. You can't make this stuff up.
It really sounds like you just did.
Paypal in the 2010s. San Jose Campus. On a bulletin board with some other mandated employee notifications. Never saw this at any other company.
Yes, exactly. I don't think Microsoft's hiring 6K foreign workers is really the problem. It's companies like Accenture and their shady practices. I've seen entire departments of American workers laid off only to be replaced by Accenture through H1Bs. This is just a publicity stunt from the administration. If they really cared about this issue, they would work with congress and update their antiquated immigration laws regarding foreign workers.
Yea, the technical details of visa policy do not exactly seem like the focus here - though they should be.
> They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks.
I really wish this was quantifiable in some way -- I have no way to tell if this statement is accurate.
I've worked with some very skilled H1B that definitely deserved to be here. If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem. Companies like these are not doing "highly skilled" work.
Edit: I kinda wonder if the "highly skilled" value judgement is a holdover from the era where people thought you were a genius if you touched a computer.
> "If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem."
It's hard to get data, but this is precisely what appears to me to be happening.
There's a limited number of slots by country. These companies specifically target those slots. I've worked with these folks (who are wonderful people, to be clear), and also had multiple friends with very niche, in-demand skills need to leave the country.
I don't have the data, but at a micro level, the system does appear to simply be set up backwards.
Remember that H1B is a lottery. If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery. But most of the jobs aren’t going to those people. The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
> If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery.
But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?
Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.
Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.
If H1b were about getting the most talented, it wouldn't be 75-80% from just one country and another 10% from a second country. I'd expect it to be very evenly distributed.
I would expect tons of H1Bs from former soviet bloc countries that have incredible math and science education. The fact that the H1B program isn’t clogged with Russians and Ukrainians is evidence something is amiss.
You'll notice it follows a population distribution of the world, with higher weighting from less developed countries. Soviet bloc people are not a high %age of world population and also tend to be captured more by europe since it's closer. People from developed countries tend to have less incentive to move on top of that. Indians have a further advantage of already knowing english on top of that and you get our current distribution of mostly people from india, china, canada (proximity, easy TN visa and english), europe with significant slavic representation and then everywhere else in the tech industry.
The relevant metric isn’t population, but educated population. India has 70% of H1bs while most other countries have under 1%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-h-1b-visa-approv.... India doesn’t have 70% of the world’s college graduates in developing countries.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
It’s a scam.
I mean that each employer petition on behalf of a worker is selected randomly. But, prior to the petition, the workers are hired by the companies in a non-random fashion. That’s important to keep in mind because I think a lot of people are like “oh the H1Bs I met working on AI at Google are super smart, so the program must bring over the best of the best.” But the system treats an H1B petition from WiPro the same as one from Google. Because the system is a lottery, it can be true that there are super smart H1bs working at Google and also that most of them are doing jobs many Americans could be doing. The lottery system makes the bar quite low and the spread very wide.
> The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
This actually changed this year. Applicant gets 1-4 tickets depending on their pay relative to job/area. So $500k Google engineer has quite a bit higher chance than $100k WiPro one.
Of course it still has issues (Google probably has 1-2 possible applicants for that position and would prefer all of them, Wipro has 100 and cares more about what % of them pass).
Fair. I think there's a discussion to be had on whether it should be a lottery, but I don't think that discussion is feasible in the current political zeitgeist.
The people that deserve the jobs are Americans. It doesnt matter if a foreigner is more skilled--the American people don't want to complete for jobs in a global labor market.
What is an American if not a temporarily foreign worker ;)
Read the report, these WITCH companies are also included ;)
It's fairly accurate.
It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.
I used to work for corp Walmart and they’d do H1B postings on a wall which would list salary and stuff. I don’t think they’d post it anywhere else
This is for the PERM. The labor certification that you cannot find an American to do the job and thus your employee should be granted a green card.
This happens. It’s the SOP, but it’s because they already have someone doing the job on a work visa and they don’t want to have to fire them and hire/train someone else.
It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.
It's rather insane that you have to state that first - don't you think?
I get it. Like 90% of the Republicans platform is the dumbest policies imaginable. It’s like saying you agree with a bunch of drunk, belligerent, clowns. You’d want people to know that you don’t paint your face and piss your pants too.
You really think that the democrats are much better? It seems like they are more concerned with their image than actually doing anything. Or if they do, it seems like they are more interested in the symbolic aspect of it and to perpetually keep the problem, such as how they deal with homelessness.
One should not have to disclose one's politics to make such a comment. IMO. That means that we should not think "smells like a Republican, so ignore them!".
One shouldn't pay heed to any comments one way or another that are prefaced with "I am X". They are thinly veiled attempts at appealing to people's base emotions.
Or -more likely- they reflect fear of being judged for their political views as inferred by others. But yeah, it could be manipulation! "I'm not an X but <opinion voiced by people who are X>" could be a purposeful way to push views held by people who are <X>.
These companies are going to bribe the govt for h1b. They thrive on cheap labor provided by h1b and the whole masters to h1b pipeline via opt.
That's not really how corruption in the US works.
It's literally required by the government's PERM process
Trump gave the Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, the National Medal of Science today
From the New York Times:
"Hours after the [Microsoft H-1B] announcement, President Trump awarded Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a summit in Washington where Mr. Musk and other tech executives also were honored.
Mr. Nadella came to the United States for graduate school and joined Microsoft in 1992. Two years later, he wrote in his memoir, he turned in his permanent residency for an H-1B visa so that his wife could immediately join him in the United States."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/us/politics/microsoft-vis...
You can't prosecute someone for following the law verbatim.
If Republicans started prosecuting crimes there'd be no republican politicians left.
Wait, you're saying the party of law and order... isn't?
You did not respond to the point.
> they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes
If a law is on the books, but it's only applied to a specific set of people in a retaliatory fashion, then it's worse than not being applied at all.
The "replacement of an American" is where the narrative breaks down. Traditionally we haven't had large numbers of unemployed developers. One of the consequences of the the Dot Com bubble bursting is we lost an entire generation of native-born engineers. People weren't going in to CS. At the same time there was an explosion of software positions. This is part of what fed the increasing use of H1B talent. This was also one of the sources of the bootcamp phenomenon. Things are bit more dynamic these days. This is just a nativist, anti-immigrant move.
>This is just a nativist, anti-immigrant move
Yes, but what is the implication of the word "just"?
It's only kind of accurate. It has to be 2 newspapers in the area the person is employed in. Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.
> Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
Well if that's how one want to proceed. Fine. In that case these companies are not really prosecuted. Government is just doing fraud prevention out of abundance of caution.
DOL requires the ad in the newspaper. Vance also said Haitians were eating cats and dogs. Let's not get carried away by things Vance says.
Vance actually admitted the "eating cats and dogs" thing was BS, but said it was okay because it helped "advance the narrative".
A place I used to work advertised a job by posting the listing in the break room, where only people with badges could get in to see the advert. Maybe there were ads elsewhere, but if that was the only posting, it felt against the spirit of the law.
That is actually not complying with the law. The law says it has to be in at least two newspapers.
Internal job postings are not unusual.
> but if that was the only posting
"I saw a thing once, and I'm going to wildly guess some incriminating details, and then claim it's proof of some sort."
Even Vance does a better job of manufacturing outrage than that.
The entire H1B visa system should be scrapped until every American engineer has a well-paying appointment.
And companies need to advertise outstanding positions on their own website to prove they can't find any candidates. Seems to me that would be impossible and you could scrap the entire H1B Circus right away.
And employees with an H1B visa should leave the country after 4 years for at least 3 months to prevent them from applying for citizenship.
But to be real, does this really matter? Do any software engineers or other positions Microsoft is looking for in these examples look for jobs in the paper these days? Would they get more responses if they advertised in a larger paper?
Microsoft is banking on the fact that nobody looks for jobs in the paper. The point is to use the lack of response be able to write on paperwork that they've proven that no qualified jobseekers exist in the US. They are aware that advertising in the newspaper is not an effective way to fill a position; the goal is to lie about how much they tried.
It's compliance theater. They can claim they technically complied with the requirement to search locally for applicants first.
Is Microsoft in particular a "foe" or have they done something particularly against the administration?
Is Microsoft in particular a "foe" or have they done something particularly against the administration?
It's not an administration thing. Vance is positioning himself for a presidential run in 2028.
Literally hours later, the head of the same administration gave the head of Microsoft an award.
> they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants
Wait but PERM process is precisely for getting that foreign person outside of the temporary "effective indentured servant" phase. It's to get a green card... Once you have it you can leave the company and work anywhere.
Where it gets maybe abused is only India/China pipelines, where they're stuck in that GC backlog for years. so it makes them in this limbo of renewable H1B until the GC is granted, which might be decades out.
Another way to look at it is that they are going after particularly notable fraudsters that have very high visibility and perhaps perpetrate it at a higher rate.
Based on its track record, I don't think the administration is "going after" anyone in good faith. This is just a way to compel Microsoft to do something beneficial to the guy in charge.
Or he's trading off of it.
I remember years back, I was maybe 5 years into being a sysadmin and saw that Microsoft was hiring, at the time they said that they expected high proficiency in the following.... And listed every piece of software they produced. It was ridiculous then and probably the same thing is the case now.
That's more likely to be a terrible hiring manager. I've seen that at smaller companies, too.
If they change the ad between the local newspaper and the foreign search, they would be breaking the law. That's not what is claimed, even by Vance.
The point is that only someone already working there would have proficiency with all the software they use internally, so by listing those as requirements they can ensure no external candidate is eligible for the job the green card applicant is doing.
> My understanding is that this is pretty much how everyone does it, no?
This is not alarming to you?!
Really a bizarre workaround. It's not even restricted to these massive entities.
I flew into a co-working space for a team onsite this summer. While walking the halls, I saw a job posting printed out and taped onto a glass door facing out from one of the single-occupant offices, surely to claim a similar approach.
https://volokh.com/2013/02/05/perils-of-prosecutorial-discre...
I was reminded of this article
Very on-topic, reminds me of some analysis of why Putin and Xi generally tolerate corruption among their subordinates: it allows them to purge anyone they want with plausible deniability, since everyone is on the take.
Is there any evidence of that claim by Vance? I am not trying to be confrontational but this claim is so outstanding that it pulled my attention. How did his people got it to a level that they prove it is systematically abused. I am not saying it is being abused or not. I am literally curious on how anyone in the face of earth could do that to a point that you can prove it is not an isolated event.
Anyone, best of luck for people.
(Imo, anti immigration is the easiest way to cut ties with other nations if you plan to send your boys in there to get a trauma)
This is a very well known tactic in H1B factory like Tata and Cognizant, people has been complaining about this for years. Not sure about Microsoft though.
I'm sorry. I am not saying you are lying. Please don't take like this. But if someone wants to audit this to prove it, how would they do? Because if they are just exploiting a hole, why not fix the hole?
Why aren’t they trying to change the laws of h1b, etc. while they have control of the all branches of the government and instead just target certain companies? Why not just close the loopholes, assuming there is systematic abuse, so no one can abuse the system anymore?
Law enforcement when a law is widely violated often involves 'making notable examples' of a few cases to scare the rest into compliance, no?
Generally they just focus on cases that are the most profitable and easy to prove.
Newspaper is ONE of the requirements. It needs to be posted across 5 sources. 2 mandatory and 3 of 10 other recruitment options.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-20/part-656/section-656.1...
This is one of those horrible moments that happen once every decade or two for me:
Somebody I believe is spiritually hideous, morally corrupt, and plain old incompetent, saying something I am in atomically perfect alignment with, using almost the exact same words I would.
Unfortunately due to the corruptness and incompetence, you're almost certainly getting nothing beyond this headline.
Even a stopped clock!
This is why i voted for him and will keep doing so. The left is too weak to push through things like this with their “morally superior” voters. So, your welcome.
What is the 22nd Amendment even?
Are you planning on voting for a third term? Because Trump isn't on the ballot in the midterms.
Lol keep the downvotes coming chronically online losers.
The right supposedly hates big gov, weaponized gov, regulating gov unless it's related to foreigners
I wonder why Microsoft is singled out. Shouldn't companies like IBM and Cisco are gross offenders?
No need to wonder, Top offenders like Tata, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant all listed.
My bad. I meant among American companies. Not those ICCs.
Presumably somebody didn't get paid.
Those are literally the rules of what you need to do. Well, except the small-town newspaper part. Pick up the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle and you'll see pages of these ads.
Once you have a green card you also are not indentured anymore :)
Indeed. I had a friend who worked in freight forwarding - Japanese company, him a Japanese citizen, but based in US.
Once he got his green card via lottery, his pay went up and his mandatory overtime went down. His Japanese coworkers without green cards still had to work late.
This has honestly been one of if not the only thing I have agreed with the Trump administration on. It also seems like something that has had bipartisan support (at least among the general public), but nobody wanted to rock the boat on these companies that provide so much funding in the form of "donations" and lobbying.
Abuse of the H1B system is pretty widespread if you look at the types of roles that these companies submit applications for. I'm convinced that if you aren't looking for someone who is literally a PhD candidate, lead of their field you can probably find someone somewhere who can write a damn REST API.
Trump was defending H-1B a year ago even as his immigration crackdown was shifting into high gear. This is simply a pre-election move that will likely be reversed by the administration or the courts.
For nearly every job title that an H1B is brought in on, they are paid more than the prevailing average wage. The idea that they are coming in as underpaid foreign scabs is mostly a myth.
Burying job listings is part of the kabuki theater, but it's being misrepresented here. Usually companies already have a candidate in mind when they do this. It makes no sense to run a complete hiring process in the US, and then turn around and run a second one for international candidates. You may as well do a complete candidate search and then post the canned jobs again if you need to get Visa sponsorship.
> For nearly every job title that an H1B is brought in on, they are paid more than the prevailing average wage. The idea that they are coming in as underpaid foreign scabs is mostly a myth.
Source? But also what difference does that make? Just pay American workers more.
It's literally baked into the H1B law was confirmed by a congressional report on the program: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/O...
> Just pay American workers more.
If we set aside software engineering - 40% of rural doctors in the US are here on H1B visas. There's not a "pay them more" button we can hit that generates more domestic doctors, especially not in under 10 years. All you'd do is compete amongst a limited supply.
> There's not a "pay them more" button we can hit that generates more domestic doctors, especially not in under 10 years.
That's literally how the button works. An undersupply in the market, increases prices.. kids and students deciding what they want to do with their life, see the wages and decide 10 years of school is worth it... and after 10 years you get more doctors.
If there's an undersupply, that's a clear indication that young people are looking at the field and deciding the wages don't justify the investment.
By short-circuiting the process of the free market, you're guaranteeing the shortage will continue.
As an American who grew up in one of these underserved markets, you couldn't pay me enough to work there. My mom works at a rural hospital and loathes every minute of it. The reality is, American workers value more than just dollars. Especially professionals with options.
Immigrant doctors may also hate working at these facilities, but the prospect of raising their family somewhere in the USA is a huge value add for them.
> As an American who grew up in one of these underserved markets, you couldn't pay me enough to work there.
Eh I think this is sort of BS. First yes literally you could be paid enough. Everyone has a price, including you, and you’re not fooling anyone. Second you can find arrangements that perhaps enable you to spend a few years doing what amounts to public service in exchange for maybe no debt or higher pay and then move on - this is a very common thing in the labor market.
Also, what does that say about you that you hate being around your fellow countrymen more than someone from outside of your country?
I really don't think this is true.
The problem is that the relationship is non-linear. The data shows that at a certain amount of comfort and income, most people really aren't willing to make drastically uncomfortable lifestyle choices for any amount of money. I'm not suddenly going to become a lineman even if it pays double what I make now.
How many kids in our culture are actually looking at earning potential as the #1 factor when they choose a career?
The pay for doctors does not matter for recruiting more doctors when the bottleneck is residencies.
There actually is a pay them more button that the federal and state government controls, but I doubt they'd hit it. Many of those rural docs are compensated heavily by Medicaid (EDIT: have a high % of Medicaid patients - compensation is a separate story), but the reimbursement structure often penalizes those rural docs vs. those that take positions in suburban and urban environments. Some states permit a flat reimbursement structure where patient volume is the only difference, but other states further penalize the rural docs by "shaping" reimbursement rates such that more funding goes to the urban and suburban areas.
This administration could address that, but if anything, they seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
Rural medical specialists are compensated very well. In my experience the bigger obstacle to getting those roles filled is more social, for example, unless you are already married the dating pool in a rural area is a consideration for new doctors, or if you are married and your spouse has a career moving to a rural area may require them to give up that career which they may not be willing to do. Cities better support dual-career households b/c they have a density of industries. Also - after 10+ years of school a lot of new doctors want to live it up a bit in a place with things to do and see.
Sure there is, we can make school affordable.
And stop degree inflation. A doctor with 4 years of med school and a year internship from 60 years ago can diagnose your sniffles or refer you to a specialist just as well as a doctor with an unrelated 4-5 year BS degree then 4 years in med school, then a year of internship followed by 3-4 more years of residency.
At the same time, the doctor with just 4-5 years of school and hundreds of thousands less debt can not only treat patients more cheaply, but will have more years of practice too.
That would be like DEI for American workers, no? Not to mention, discrimination based on nationality is illegal.
> That would be like DEI for American workers, no?
No for a couple of reasons which you’re aware of. Plus liberals say DEI is good so they can’t be against it.
> Not to mention, discrimination based on nationality is illegal.
Sort of - but you’re taking a narrow view here. We discriminate (nothing wrong with that, all countries do it) who we let in to the US for example. Many universities had or have de facto race quotas, and by being an American you can’t be discriminated against as a nationality outside of being an American. Let’s say you are Chinese American. You’re American, not Chinese. There isn’t anything to discriminate against. Welcome to team USA. All the way baby. But if you aren’t an American then we just decide what we want to do with you and whether it fits our needs or we send you back home or whatever.
The parent was asking to "just pay Americans more". That is just illegal.
I’m the parent. Society makes up laws. We can just make up a new law for whatever purposes we want.
Would be a bit difficult to change the constitution, but yeah, nothing is impossible.
It is literally a requirement for that kind of Visa.
> Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
Yes and no. Why is the prevailing wage what it is, and how does bringing more supply in affect the prevailing wage? There are secondary effects.
> There are secondary effects.
There are also tertiary effects in that bringing in young working families into the US is overwhelmingly good for the economy.
If bringing in workers shrinks an economy, then how does one go from a country of 40 million to 400 million without 360 million people being unemployed? Because wage earners actually contribute more to the economy than they crowd out.
No one in their right mind would argue that having kids is going to put downward pressure on the job market, and yet we have the idea that grown, educated adults will. (Not to mention these grown, educated adults cost us nothing in taxes in education or retirement, so overwhelmingly less of a burden on our economy)
100% as someone who sponsored someone yeah they are and the government kind of wants you too
Speaking from personal experience, this is not true. Myself and every H1B I know was paid significantly below the prevailing wage.
I have worked with a lot of H1B's in tech.
I have not met a single one who was not over qualified for the job they were doing.
I have only met a couple who were (to some extent) getting screwed because of an agency in the middle. However I would not have found the wage unreasonable and the markup was well within the industry standard.
H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here... We need to fix the portion of the process where it is onerous to go from H1B to green card and citizenship.
My experience and sincere belief is that your experience is not representative.
> H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here...
There is truth to this, certainly. In software engineering or related positions? I don’t think so, generally. If this was the case we wouldn’t also outsource positions.
> If this was the case we wouldn’t also outsource positions.
Invert your argument: If outsourcing was so great, we wouldn't have any software jobs in the US.
The reason to outsource, to offshore are far more nuanced than "cost".
That’s not the inverse though. I didn’t claim outsourcing was bad.
I've met hundreds.
Yeah this system has been very stupid for a very long time.
What's wrong with people who live in small towns?
Some of us know just as well as folks in San Francisco how to instruct claude to write code.
And this announcement changes nothing. Why only mention microsoft when they aren't even the worst of them? Tesla put out a tesla semi factory video a few days ago and most of the people in it were foreigners on visas.
This looks to be a shakedown for cash. Companies are retaining existing h1bs and not hiring new, so this "change" is coming at a meaningless time.
I think people should be asking why JD has eye shadow on as if he just came from a drag party. The guy looks like a clown and is making a meaningless announcement to fake out the maga base for the election. The h1b announcement from last year still hasn't changed anything. The lottery is still maxed out.
Are you surprised by allies vs foes in politics?
This would actually probably be acceptable to me if they multilaterally applied it across all tech companies, not just the ones who don't kiss Trump's butt.
It is. Maybe this is just executing one criminal to send a message to all the others. If they can take on MS, they can take on anyone.
Applying that standard uniformly is just good government.
Selectively applying that standard to advance a specific cause is fascist.
Yes, that is an accurate statement by him. As with many things, corruption and fraud in the visa process have grown over time and are mostly unremarked upon.
Agreed. As an ex-immigrant to US who's gone through this process, credit where credit is due: Vance exactly described how this process looks like.
US needs a modern, merit-based immigration system. No lotteries of any kind, be it the de-facto lottery for H1B or actual Diversity lottery.
Thanks for sharing. It is interesting to see the perspective of people who have personal experience with the system criticising it.
Someone else above also mentioned wages being lower, someone else mentioned working overtime.
Wages are absolutely lower and they can do that because you cannot switch employers.
For example, the high street bank in my case sponsored H1B/L1B holders for Green Card strategically. I, as a Polish national, was not sponsored, because I would receive Green Card within 6-12 months. Meanwhile Indian colleagues were all sponsored, but they wouldn't receive Green Card for years, so they had all of us pretty much "enslaved" by taking advantage of cut-off dates. My wages (~110k) were about 50% of what I could realistically earn with my skillset at the time (2015-2020).
Indian staff had it worse, thanks to how the system works, they could work on their H1B while "waiting" for GC for a decade and still not be able to move employers. In my case, at least, my H1B would run course and I'd have to leave the country. I knew I wouldn't get mine withing first couple months, after my director literally came to my desk at one point after my GC request and asked if I would indeed receive it within 6-12 months. I never heard back on the subject since, despite my repeated requests.
I am a liberal and absolutely hate what Trump admin does to the world, but they're also absolutely right on how companies exploit the system and it definitely affects actual wages and employment opportunities for US citizens.
It's not very accurate, they need to be newspapers where the person is employed. It's the government that is behind the times with respect to how people find jobs. And it's not really "fraud," it's simply companies working in their own interest within the existing outdated rules.
Besides newspapers, they have to be posted with the relevant state workforce agency and 3 other methods. It would not be hard to require that one of those needs to be the company career site or wherever the majority of recruiting comes from.
Oh, well if it's just companies being horrible I guess that's okay.
The article is lying by omission, it's not just Microsoft, which got suspended from PERM, FT has a list of few other companies (it's paywalled by searching for the article title and clicking the result link works [1]). Also, this is not something extraordinary: big companies get suspended from PERM all the time.
1. https://www.ft.com/content/5cfecbba-69ed-42d0-98fd-3ae019144...
Yes, you are of course correct, lots of large businesses do this, and hopefully they extend this scrutiny to all businesses.
I'm not sure what about this made you question your intuition. Is there something about this story that made you think it might only be Microsoft doing this?
The US will do anything but have a sane worker visa program, with clear path to citizenship. The lottery system is built to be gamed and so is the performative local "hiring" attempts.
On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers. I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it, but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots. Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back. Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
> with clear path to citizenship.
Or no path at all. Tying the citizenship carrot to the visa and letting the employers hold the stick is the worst of all possible outcomes.
The real rationale for the change isn't fraud at all. Does it make sense that the administration is specifically concerned about fraud regarding hiring in tech sector while at the same time pardoning convicted fraudsters where the victims lose out on billions of dollars?
Does it make sense to declare the "America is full" and deporting people who have been granted asylum while welcoming white South Africans with open arms?
> On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers
HN had its mask off moment some time around the 2024 election.
HN's shift from a group of plucky Wozniak-like technological enthusiasts to a group of unicorn focused wealth seekers tracked the broader change from engineers being primary staffed with hobbyists to wealth seekers across society.
That change FAR predates the most recent election.
There was never a mask. People have always cared more about their own country than their supposed political party.
If you made assumptions that turned out to be wrong, that might look like a "mask".
This is not caring about their country, this is caring about their paycheck. They want higher salaries, damned' be what it does to competitiveness. It's nearsighted protectionism, that's what it is.
> Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back
So I think what some in this thread are saying is it quite literally 'will' bring American workers the literal jobs that the H1Bs aren't doing anymore.
> but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots
So two things can definitely be true here. They can be hardworking and well-intentioned, and they can still be used as a wedge between American workers and slightly better jobs
There is no guarantee that any American will be hired to fill any job vacated by a former H-1(b) holder. The firm could contract or fail against foreign competitors.
Guarantees are rare and not a realistic bar for action.
> I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it...
The contention is pretty clear to me: the law currently says hiring companies should look for Americans who can do the jobs first (not best), and only sponsor visas if they can't find them - but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.
Sure, immigration is hard, stressful and gruelling fight against an an uncaring system. But the damaging aspects of widespread illegal corporate[1] conduct shouldn't be ignored.
I'm saying this as someone who believes American should increase its immigration and end widespread gray-area tolerance that harms the immigrants - who have the least power of all parties involved, which employers love to exploit. Sadly, partisanship makes otherwise smart voters really dumb, with one party lying to its base and the other going along with it and avoiding hard discussions about why America needs immigration.
1. Or farmer/roofer/construction
> ... but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.
The later is specifically called out for an EEOC discrimination. https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination
> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.
> ...
> National origin-related disparate treatment in hiring related to job advertisement also can include an employer making it more difficult for applicants from one national origin to apply for positions (for example, subjecting U.S. workers to more laborious application methods than H-1B visa holders during the PERM labor certification process).
Part of the challenge here is that the EEOC tends to not be funded well and is limited to acting on tips rather than being able to investigate or audit.
And they do act... https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/eeoc-sues-sibitalent-h-1b-visa... for example...
Though note:
> The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to investigate and litigate against businesses and other private sector employers for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.
And if this is important...
https://cwc.org/CWC/CWC/Updates/2026/Partial-Spending-Deal-W...
> Congressional negotiators have reached a bipartisan deal to fund the EEOC at $435.4 million for fiscal year 2026. The funding level is the same as that requested by the White House, but nearly $20 million (4.3%) less than last year’s budget.
And the funding and staffing by year: https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc-budget-and-staffing-history-1980-p...
"On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers".
They should get paid the sane as American workers is all...
But that would defeat the whole point of offering the program(s) -- they are specifically designed to depress wages of American workers.
There’s not much point in coming to these threads and expecting anything. They’re only useful as low quality commenter honeypots. My auto filters have taken out 3/4th of the comments as habitual whiner parrots. I suggest you apply similar input data hygiene.
How do you implement auto-filters?
I made this as a minimal way to share one’s blocklists https://overmod.org/
I have a Chrome extension there but I also have an iOS app that I use for myself alone (it’s really not production grade). The Chrome extension is pretty rudimentary so if you want to replicate it you can just tell your agent to do so and if it helps the source is on GitHub. The iOS app is vibe-coded entirely so perhaps you’re better off starting from scratch there.
It’s a pretty basic requirement to interact with social media these days, I think because the information feed is full of noise.
Here’s another user who implemented a different approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459985
You may like his approach as well.
I use a combination of Hacker Smacker (seems roughly the same idea), and TrustSpark for HN, which I also vibed (pre-Opus, probably could be improved at this point).
Hacker Smacker in particular would be awesome if more users picked it up (since it's a web of trust, albeit 1 hop only).
I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down. There was very definitely a shortage of qualified SWEs pre-AI, during the boom times from 2010-2022 or so. Sure some American SWEs exist but big companies were desperate for talent and there definitely weren't enough SWEs that were
(a) competent enough to pass the hiring bar (b) willing to move to places like Seattle / SF / NYC where these companies were hiring.
You only need to scroll back to a couple of years ago where people were turning their noses up at all forms of recruiter outreach and complaining about how aggressive the recruiters were. What privileged times we lived in.
Since 2022 / post COVID interest rate hikes / AI, the hiring dropped and college kids can't get jobs. The first bump in the economic road you hit, you want to scale down H1B capacity, cancel green cards, banish people. What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program? Or be resigned to getting high tax paying / high spending jobs shipped off shore? Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
IMO this is all very short term thinking / political theater to score brownie points with the republican base for the elections.
Nothing here is good policy. Sure there's fraud, fix the fraud. You don't like the ad process, make it better.
But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.
As far as I know there isn't any wage discrimination at these big companies like Adobe or Microsoft. Everyone gets paid basically in-line with what levels.fyi says as a band for their level.
> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.
I don't think this really holds up. They could offer the American engineers the opportunity to move divisions, but they don't because what they really want to do is what they did do: Fire Americans and hire foreigners.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
Then make H1B what it is supposed to be for: elite specialists, not infinite low cost non-American laborers. Then you won't even need to have this discussion.
> What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program?
Yes, why not? Or more practically: keep the program but adjust the quotas annually or even quarterly based on needs. When you see tech companies laying off workers by the thousands, as happened over the past few years, that's the sign that there is plenty of local talent to be hired.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
The solution to that is to separate visa renewals from new hires: allow companies to keep existing workers, while forcing them to hire new ones locally. This actually makes America _more_ attractive for immigrants because they know they cannot be replaced with a new generation of cheap workers from their home country when economic conditions worsen.
> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false.
In what sense is it false? Microsoft claims that of its 6,800 H1b filings 80% were “related to employees already working at Microsoft” (note no mention _which country_ those employees were working in) which translates to 20% to or 1720 new employees they hired.
And for pay, they only state that “international workers that Microsoft does hire through the H1b visa program are paid the same level of compensation that a worker from the US would receive”, but of course the point is that the average level of compensation for new hires today is significantly lower than it was 10 years ago, when there was a tech worker shortage.
So it can be simultaneously true that the current-year H1b hires are hired at the same rate Americans are, but that those rates are substantially lower than the negotiated compensation of the people Microsoft laid off. The fact that Microsoft declines to comment on this,
So the following are almost certainly all true:
Please, if you think this narrative is false, which of these facts are you specifically disputing?> I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down
Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.
[Citation needed]
I don't think any country invites and then carries out a massive purge of existing labor as it sees fit.
If it does, then it won't be appealing to the class of person you're seeking to attract.
> [Citation needed]
Perhaps you could attempt to steel-man why point-based immigration allocate and de-allocate points for certain professions over time? Or why temporary visas exist in the first place.
> If it does, then it won't be appealing to the class of person you're seeking to attract.
Such is the nature, complexity and self-contradicting character of any large-scale public policy; and it's "classes" (plural) because immigration cuts across social strata, not just your software and service industry "rockstar" geeks.
>Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back.
Source? If the job legitimately needs to be done, and the foreign option is eliminated, the domestic option is what's left.
Why would there need to be a clear path to citizenship? If I go work in Amazon UAE for 2 year contract, why would I expect citizenship? The whole reason I'm there is for money. When the job is done, I go home.
Clear path or no-path to citizenship I guess. The fact that H1B is a dual-intent visa muddies the water and allows employers to string along people for decades.
I agree that the cruelty is disgusting and unnecessary, but you're going to have a very, very hard time convincing people that removing foreigners will not free up jobs for Americans.
The average American doesn’t understand growth, you can see it in who they vote for.
> Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
How about sparing a moment for the anguish of American citizens and graduates that either lost their jobs, or cant find work, because they were replaced by foreign scab labor willing to work longer hours, for less pay, with no mobility?
Or being priced out of housing because supply became artificially depressed
Why should temporary workers have a path to citizenship? Come to the US, work in a high tech job, send your remittances back to your family, and then retire to your home country at a young age. Win-win.
A company that I worked for would hire foreign grads out of school on F-1 visas with zero experience; they’d come on board using the OPT extensions (good for up to 3 years) and then file for H1Bs immediately. If they didn’t get it they’d file again the next year and so on. If they get to year 3 of the OPT without getting an H1B they would be sent to an office in Europe where they work for a year and then get transferred back on an L1.
FWIW H1B recipients immediately get started on the PERM/GC process (if they wish), with only whatever new-grad level plus 0..2 years experience they have accumulated thus far.
Meanwhile job ads are posted in the kitchens as required by law (and I’m sure the local newspapers) with ~$80K salaries even though I that way way below what they paid even for new (US) grads [in the Boston area]. So no surprise no one ever applies for them (if they even see it).
Every H1B I know is both underpaid and unable to change jobs. The companies that use them the most are those that squeeze their employees the hardest. They work hard and are incredibly smart and capable, but they have no power to push back on the boss asks them to come in on nights and weekends.
It’s a fiction, like the idea that contractors would prefer contracts over full time employment. Its a less-privileged workforce with fewer protections to benefit the companies.
I’m pro immigration, and that means actually paying people for their expertise rather than semi-indentured workers. Too often companies get all the benefits of the workers without having to pay them. The fact of all the staffing agencies put in alongside Microsoft. Of course, the current admin couldn’t care less about any employee, citizen or migrant, they’re just using it to try to show their base they care. The dems have done absolutely nothing when they are in power either.
There are exceptions, but in 20 years in both SF and Seattle you can basically set your clock to this being what’s happening.
IDK, with a lot of things it seems like big companies are just incredibly myopic. When I got my PhD people interviewing me used to love to say "well in industry, we do things that actually matter" (a weird premise) and boast about how efficient they are. Yet IME I just see an incredibly suboptimal setting. They routinely waste tons of money to save pennies and the attitude of "I just care that it works" really just ends up with "it looks like it worked but it's actually broken". But that's the obvious result if you surround yourself with yes men and don't let people do their jobs
Sounds very complicated and onerous. Any idea why the company would go through all of that process?
Microsoft -https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/microsoft-corporation-ew2...
Wipro - https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/wipro-limited-l9k5mz3r21/...
I picked two examples to show the disparity. I do like where this is going, but as it frequently happens, it feels like a weapon than can be wielded selectively.
A law should handle fraud across all abusers.
This is base salary not total compensation, which for a company like Microsoft matters quite a bit. I’ve never made less than 2-4x in a year what was on my perm application 10 years ago, that data is garbage
Makes no difference for the current conversation - which is - is Microsoft (and others) paying way less to H1Bs than American workers.
I see a lot of people who could probably work at any of these companies on LinkedIn unable to find work.
It seems to me the newspaper requirement needs to be nerfed and moving forward companies should require jobs be listed at the top most popular job advertising platforms (whether it be a website or what have you) as fully remote, US citizen only. Every application and interview needs to be submitted before applying for a VISA for a clear paper trail.
Theres no shortage of talent in the US, companies just need to hire remote more. Not everyone wants to live in one state for tech jobs.
I don't disagree. All regulatory issues. But, "not everyone wants to live in one state for tech jobs" - the trend is going the other way where hybrid/office is becoming the norm again. In any case, not too long ago, we were all working from office, which was the norm.
Doesn't mean much without seeing location. Not everyone is in the Bay Area.
I know the administration is controversial, but this is the correct thing to do for a lot of reasons.
The biggest one is the program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job.
I’ve not worked at Microsoft so I can’t speak for them, but I’ve been in tech for the last 15 years with the last 5 being in manager/director roles at at least 1 company that is a household name.
What you’re saying gets repeated a lot, but I’ve never seen it to be true. Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level. I just don’t believe that it’s happening on the scale that people make it out to be.
Also, I don’t want to get too into it unless people are interested, but at least at the companies I’ve been at, the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty wrong with these programs and I’m glad to see reform, but I don’t believe the underpaying thing is happening nearly as much as people claim it does.
I've been a tech manager for 21 years, much of that at a large Fortune 100 that had tens of thousands of employees from Infosys and TCS. The hourly rates we were charged for local workers on H1-B visas were $15-$30 less than we'd pay American contractors from body shops like Teksystems, and that is just what we were paying Infosys. The employee didn't see anywhere near that.
Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.
The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.
Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.
Can you clarify? These workers were resident in the U.S. or abroad?
The local workers were resident in the US on H1-B visas. Those were the ones paid $15-$30 less. I edited my post to clarify, thanks!
Presumably Infosys also pays citizen workers shitty too. The issue here is Infosys, not h1b.
I will also add a data point for big tech. I have managed people on h1b, on o1, with green cards, and citizens. I have never even sniffed any sort of disparate treatment across these groups once hired. During hiring the bias was against h1b since it was a huge pain in the ass to arrange everything and their start date could be delayed.
Infosys has virtually no citizen workers, and the ones they have are managing entire programs - they aren't doing client work. The only reason they have any workers at all is they can't realistically change H1-B sponsors.
HR is not allowed to tell you to prefer an H1B. They can strongly hint that you need to hit your DEI quota though.
HR wasn't involved in sourcing strategy. Either I contacted HR to open a req for a full-time employee, or I contacted Infosys. For body shops there was a specific system that sent it to multiple firms, but I was usually already talking to my account managers. When doing budgets we'd submit headcount asks by type and there were some soft ratios we were expected to stay within but this was mostly the division exec and their finance partner related to keeping our ratios aligned with our charge-back rates. I never saw a number that had anything to do with diversity across contractors.
The problem isn't just whether they're hiring below market. It's that market rates themselves are impacted by there being a whole underclass of workers who can't just freely move between jobs, and has to speedrun getting a new one if they ever lose their existing ones. The precarious nature of it makes an H1-B worker less likely to speak up about most things related to working conditions due to the precarious nature of the job. And that impacts everyone else -- because the fastest way to get a big raise is by getting a new job, so there's less incentive to pay people better if fewer workers can actually move around and you can threaten the ones that can purely through the existence of ones that can't.
I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.
Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.
> Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level.
This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.
Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.
Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.
> doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent
Are wages too low to incentivize local talent? Tech companies already pay high six figures. What is this "local talent" doing that pays more?
Working at other places. There used to be a thing called competition - where you'd pay more to attract people to leave elsewhere. Now companies stifle this and collaborate to artificially to keep wages down.
Instead they just throw their hands up and call it quits, hiring elsewhere instead.
This doesn't mean more domestic workers get jobs though. Existing workers get paid slightly more, but also more work gets sent to overseas offices.
(This is not outsourcing. The foreign workers are still on the company's payroll, just in an office where they don't need a visa to work).
> You’ll take these low wages and be happy about it or I’ll import a foreign worker who will be happy about it. And if they complain, I’ll have them deported.
>but I’ve never seen it to be true.
it's been true 100% of the places I've worked. I can't name names on the internet.
> the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Laughs in ESG. Companies stopped reporting this in 2024, but go look at prior year results compared to US demographics.
My $0.02 here is that AAPI and African applicants have crowded out ADOS and Hispanics when you look at corporate demographics.
> comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level
You're so close to getting it... keep going...
Not GP, but also not getting it. Are you referring to how they take up a slot on the team that would otherwise go to an American?
The argument is it drives down wages across the board so obviously the wages would be the same.
Op is saying that everybody's wage is suppressed to the level of the H1B holder.
There's no conflict. They can be comparable to anyone else on their team while being better than the average American developer.
Seriously. GP is accidentally highlighting the issue.
America should want fewer highly paid tech workers so those that remain are paid marginally more?
That’d be a dumb way to run an economy.
I think the H1B process gets abused by body shops. Salaries are pretty demonstrably lower there than at many other tech companies.
At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).
Its also abused all major tech companies. The easiest way they do is by abusing Matsers->OPt->h1b pipeline
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=microsoft+corporation&job=...
Idk if people don't realize you can look this up? Pay doesn't look suppressed to me....
Moreover, this is just the regular wage that doesn't take into account RSUs or stock options.
If your "household name" company is more susceptible to scrutiny, they may not have as much of a pay gap and strictly rely on a the possibility of getting the employee sent back home if they don't contribute enough being the motivating factor. But odds are there are many sub-contractors that are through agencies that are significantly underpaying and you may have not been privy to the contracts through these parasite vendors.
>> paying them much less to do the same damn job.
where is this data coming from? Engineers frequently move between Amazon/Meta/Google/Microsoft, even on H1B.
MSFT has always been one of the higher paying tech companies out there: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/job-lists/highest-payi...
> paying them much less to do the same damn job.
That isnt true. A SWE engineer working at the same level at Redmond gets paid the same band irrespective of visa status.
sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more
But it wouldn't result in more domestic workers being hired. Those companies would just have smaller workforces in the US and larger ones abroad.
Big Tech has hired functionally every domestic worker interested in and capable of doing the job. They pay so much already.
this is just not true. the market for new grads is extremely bad. Microsoft could easily invest in more early career people, instead they're hiring more senior H1-Bs.
You said it yourself. The market for new grads is bad. AI is better for senior employees than juniors. Visas don't affect this dynamic.
Bad market for new grads is overdetermined. AI, interest rates, etc.
But a contributing fact is flooding the tech market with H-1B visas spikes labor supply, kills workers' leverage and lets companies cheap out on salaries instead of bidding them up.
Yeah but those new grads are too uppity. We tried throwing money at them, but they're more interested in productivity destroying quality of life improvements.
The imported worker, on the other hand, is a more efficient and compliant machine. Maybe if we make those youths as poor as the workers we import, they'll eventually learn some gratitude.
> sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more
There's another option: without a sufficient workforce, the projects just happen somewhere else. Then the local market stagnates, and you end up with very little competition between employers. And the salaries go down to match.
This is not a conjecture. The European tech sector is experiencing exactly this phenomenon. Even in large tech companies, the salaries for the same positions are about 50-100% higher in the US.
Correct!
Employers benefit from regulations that exist to benefit employers. We should have completely open borders or actually do what's best for citizen workers.
Employers would have to pay more competitive wages if the candidate pool was smaller. Then there is the free legal services given to some workers and not others, that leaves less budget overall for compensation.
How about the contractors working for Microsoft?
You can't work as a contractor on H1b. You need to be employed full-time.
They would be employed by another company, and contracted to Microsoft. This is the arrangement for the majority of H1-B employees in general, but I do not know if Microsoft does this.
Tech companies do not generally do this for their product teams, but may do it for their internal IT and reporting systems.
and how much pressure do they feel to raise the band over time when theres a constant stream of people coming in form another country who accept anything presented because its still higher than back home
> paying them much less to do the same damn job
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? It is not true. Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Meta etc. do not do this and they have no need to. They just need the top employees, and lots of them.
You want to know who does this? Companies like Disney and other IT type jobs who hire H-1B workers then lay off citizens and have those citizens train the immigrant workers. There is no reason for H-1B workers in IT departments. But there absolutely is a need for immigrant workers in high tech companies. How else do you ensure your employees are the best in the world?
> program itself is racist as hell
why is it racist to find workers willing to accept a lower wage to do the same quality work?
The problem with H1B and some of the other employment visas is its really difficult or impossible for the worker to change jobs. JD Vance calls them indentured servants. I suspect the situation for actual indentured servants is a bit worse but in any case the workers dont have a lot of options at their disposal. They cant just leave without losing their visa. So their “choice” to work for less money isn’t really a choice at all.
Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?
If it were me, I would make companies "bid" on the visas, where their bid is the salary (including all benefits, minus ALL expenses) they will pay the employee.
Employers who really need employees for high-skilled work would thus get visas. Employers who want to underpay their foreign labor will not.
The auction or bid for H-1B would lead to only Big Tech being able to hire them.
Other uses of the H-1B (e.g. French teacher https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+teacher&city=&... ) wouldn't be able to compete. There are also places in rural America where the only way to get doctors and nurses ( https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=nurse+practitioner&ci... ) is to hire them from abroad (the other option is to close the facility as insurance reimbursements aren't high enough to pay more).
Auctions are great because it's harder to game than a lottery. If a company truly believes there is a shortage of rocket surgeons and they need to access to the global market of these specialists, they can bid high. No hand wringing about not being able to find American rocket surgeons (willing to work for low income country pay scales). No stuffing a lottery with tons of entries - bids incentivize applicants to not waste slots. No worrying that a Federal department made the wrong decision on total supply, price, or who the recipients are - auctions self-adjust and update.
Auctions are bad because need is not entirely measured in money. Highest bidders win is not egalitarian. Sometimes we do want to subsidize rocket surgeons visas for disadvantaged parts of the country.
My concern with such approaches is around the "all skilled labor is lumped into the H-1B visa", be it needing fluency in French and a teaching certificate or a PhD in data science with a focus on economics - its the same pool of visas.
We keep saying H-1B. There used to also be a H-1A visa and an H-1C visa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1A_visa
What if, instead of trying to solve the H-1B visa problem from companies that have gone through the roof for visa applications ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Top_H-1B_employers_b... ), instead split off all the jobs that are classified by the BLS as 15-0000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes150000.htm ) and move them to a new section ... Lets call it H-1D.
Within the H-1D which is for tech jobs (just like H-1A and H-1C were for healthcare while they were active), it can have a different pool size and requirements and for that one could require a certain base pay and have an auction on top of that.
https://www.uscis.gov/archive/h-1c-registered-nurse-working-...
This could allow for regulating tech job immigration differently while minimizing the impact to French teachers or medical professionals in rural America that have no way to compete with Big Tech salaries.
The reason I think this is more likely doable is that it works the same way that the H-1A and H-1C visas did before to address one section of the skilled labor visa applications.
It sounds like these changes won't even touch H1B
Well it does impact h1b because h1b has a maximum time of 6 years unless the visaholder has an approved green card application. So, by blocking new green card applications (at least the most common path) this effectively puts a ceiling on the number of H1B visaholders.
H1B visa's are a modern form of indentured servitude. The employer knows you can't quit, and if they fire you, you have 6 weeks to somehow find a new job (which is already hard if you are a US citizen or green card holder) or you have to leave the country.
Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.
Lower wages with the same quality is an MBA fantasy. The old saying "you get what you pay for" applies to tech as well as any other topic.
Paying people less because they came from somewhere else and can get away with it, sounds a bit exploitative to me.
The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).
I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.
One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.
Unrelated to immigration but not for stupid managers. Friend of mine was promised a raise which was basically an adjustment of compensation.
He was fed up and he went to a meeting and he had to hear "what are you going to do about it?" Manager knew his wife was pregnant and wanted to use it, or I suppose it was it. He told he would pack his stuff and leave. So he did. He packed his stuff, shared the news and another senior manager rushed after him to bring him back to his team with the raise.
I left the company few years ago but now and then I think about it. How someone can be so opportunistic with to the point of trying to abuse someone about to be a father for few thousands of dollars that do not even belong to him. And EVEN if he got a bonus or something it would have been much much less than that to the point that, if it was me, I would be so ashamed to admit that.
Possibly he would have done that with anyone in a special situation. And I am sure this is more common than not, but how f'up it is to hide behind "it is just business" cover to act like this.
I decided to leave a company before my probationary period, and the HR woman was visibly angry with me; she was one of these lifers at the company.
Some people just identify with the company and/or like the power they get through the position.
Congratulations. Your trolling level is out of this world.
The most racist part of the program is the per country quotas. Right now they are granting EB3 for Indians who applied in 2014 while EB3 visa for the French from 2024. So that's an extra 10 years Indians are stuck in limbo. And, no, this is not just because there's more Indian's immigrating.
It's 100% based on country of birth. What do you mean?
It is not based on race, but nationality. If you are an Indian but are a citizen of Singapore your quota will be based on Singapore quotas, not based on you being ethnically an Indian.
It's actually based on country of birth. If your parents were French but were living in India when you where born, you will be in the India quota, even if your nationality is French.
>And, no, this is not just because there's more Indian's immigrating.
yes it is right? am i mistaken here?
They'll just hire them from abroad and have them work remotely as contractors...
Let them and it is better that way anyway.
Why? At that point it just sounds like the goal is to keep Indians out instead of creating equal footing for American citizens or whatever.
I fail to understand how it is racism to support offshore hiring. Does that not help the local economies of remote workers? I am not sure what the admin is thinking and why they are making such decisions but for people who want to stay where they are it is king great.
Also why are you singling out Indians? Are you racist against other nations?
Is this bait?
Yes, it is racism and xenophobia. That’s what the current government is pushing for
You're implying that the guy married to an Indian, who named his son Vivek, is somehow racist against Indians?
If there were a billion Englishmen trying to immigrate here and drive down wages, we'd be against that too.
> it just sounds like the goal is to keep Indians out
Bingo.
This is a pre-midterm messaging move aimed at shoring up support with young men who voted for Trump in ‘24. The chances that the policy even lasts more than a few months is slim.
Oh please, US citizens have been getting a raw deal for decades, I lived and worked in the Bay for years and years, my Indian colleagues were no more talented than the US citizens coming out of US schools. You clearly weren't part of that world if you can make claim to the contrary.
> US citizens have been getting a raw deal for decades
Agree. Isn’t it odd that the H1B and offshoring aren’t being touched? Just green cards? The kind that gives employees leverage with employers?
This is a messaging move. We need immigration reform and a pro-labor movement in America. This is crumbs to peasants.
> This is a messaging move. We need immigration reform and a pro-labor movement in America. This is crumbs to peasants.
Couldn't agree more. I can see the admin flailing in trying this, the fact they didn't go farther just means there's an opportunity for the midterms.
When I was working at a large tech company, most of our teams were foreign-born. And we were specifically scouting for the US citizens for ITAR projects.
And this only got _worse_ as more and more advanced STEM degrees in the US go to foreigners.
I hate the Trump administration and I don't know that I agree with this latest thing, but at least if they're outsourced to India then at least the company has a bit less leverage over you. I think in the current system employers can hold your H1B visa over you like a Sword of Damocles.
I've never had to worry about visas, so this is just stuff I'm getting from visa-holding friends, but that always seemed a bit scary.
> this is the correct thing to do for a lot of reasons
The chances that this lasts for even a few months beyond the midterms is zero.
It's hard to believe the administration is for this for any sane reason. It's just payback for Microsoft hiring someone the government doesn't like.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/26/trump-microsoft-lis...
Huh, there are other Indian IT vendors in list like Tata, Wipro, Cognizant and Infosys. MS is not alone in this. It'd be payback if it was about Microsoft's business/contracting with government.
There's not a single reason to assume this administration is acting in good faith in any scenario. The correct way to look at all actions by this administration is to ask yourself, "how does this help trump?" Most of the time it is money (or staying in power => more money), as it almost certainly is here. He's looking for a payout for selectively targeting microsoft. That's it.
And when trump does something which clearly hurts himself, you have to remember that he is fantastically stupid, undisciplined, and insane.
> The biggest one is the program itself is racist as hell.
Can you explain how its racist?
Picking your least favorite companies and applying it to them only is not the right thing to do. Laws and regulations, when not applied equally, are weapons.
It's definitely not the correct thing to do. I don't see why you would start by making an example of a company like Microsoft where starting salary is six figures than a company like Infosys which employs a similar number (median salary at Microsoft for H1B workers is $177k vs. $93k for Infosys)
https://h1bgrader.com/compare/infosys-limited-vs-microsoft-c...
There's some real ways in which it's unfair. As a software engineer in Seattle I've quite possibly lost $100-300K to the H1B program over the past 10 years. It's not a problem though, I don't need anyone's protection from Microsoft.
I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
> I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
Enforcing existing regulations and supplying the resources for the agency to effectively audit the already existing category of H-1B-dependent employers (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer ) could be an approach taken.
This is a lie.
I know people that work for FAANG as immigrants in the US, and I myself worked for one.
They made as much as anyone else there.
There are so many senior leaders that rose through the ranks at MS from India and the rest of Asia that the claim is simply laughable. They wouldn't tolerate being paid any less than American natives themselves nor would they tolerate their immigrant subordinates being paid less than natives.
> program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job
This is not racism, it is abuse of the visa system. It can happen to any race.
That’s liberalism not racism.
(In the economical sense, not in the political sense)
Not going to be evenly applied though, just another stick to hit with.
I sponsored an employee and that's not how pay works, in fact you have to tell them how much they are making and you have to pay them your average. The example given by the US government is a level one software developer makes on average 110k but your company pays on average 115k then you have to pay 115K and it has to be submitted to the government. So the answer to whether H-1B workers are paid less is: they are legally required not to be, but the system relies on employer attestation first and enforcement second. Companies get caught abusing this when the get audited but H-1B laws require they be paid the same.
More like MS forgot to pay into administration or family slush fund.
Every company is doing what Microsoft pioneered years ago. Yet only MS is facing the consequences.
Oracle. Apple. Any Fortune 500 company. They have the same playbook.
well you know what happens now right? they become remote contractors and get paid even less
It's always seemed odd to me that your employer somehow sponsors your Green Card. It always felt like it should simply be a measure of
A) How long you have been working as an H1B in the united states (say 10 years).
B) How much you have paid in taxes (say 1 million).
Whenever either of the above has occured, you take some citizenship test, and then you have a green card. Nothing to do with your employer dangling something for you, literally a measure of your employment history and/or taxable income.
The reason why is the drafters of immigration law care a lot about US employers (as they are voters, donors and have a big lobby). US employers want to control the green card process so that they have leverage over their employees. If employees can get green cards without the company, they can leave or threaten to leave. If employees need their employer, they can't start the processes until the company assents, and can't leave while its in process. Depending on exact details that can give employers 5 or so more years where the employee is at their mercy.
This is also why I as a US citizen strongly support green cards for everybody in the industry who's fractionally eligible for them - my working conditions are shaped by what they can get the labor force as a whole to put up with, and that's shaped by visa indenture.
Right, even if one starts from an aggrieved position of "They took our jerbs!" after it's happened you do not want to let those workers be underpaid or abused, because it will (A) only increase the incentives of employers to import pliant immigrant labor and (B) it'll ripple out to harm the bargaining position of all "locals" still in the same line of work.
P.S.: Conversely (inversely?) there's often a vague idea of "if we somehow make the positions suck ass, then immigrants will stop coming, and somehow locals will be hired to a no-longer-sucky position", which is, er.... Wishful thinking. It'll get one a sense of vengeance, but it wont help pay the bills.
Your working conditions and salary would be substantially higher if those people weren’t in the country to begin with.
To my knowledge economists do not believe this one is black-and-white, but that's much more of a question about the issuance of H1B visas they begin with anyway.
This flat claim only makes sense when you consider foreign employees to only participate in the US economy through their employment.
But they are in fact full-fledged human beings living physically in the United States. They are buying groceries, paying rent, getting their haircut.
Once you realize they are fully participating economic actors, it is much less clear whether they are a net positive or negative.
they also pay into taxes and social security without ever hoping to get that money back
Hahaha
As if your (very American) bosses wouldn't find another to put you down and wrong everything they could from you. Today ICE is going after immigrants, tomorrow Pinkerton is going after you.
For tech especially I don't think that's necessarily true.
Well, from the Gov's POV, they don't want to import wards of the state. If you arrive in a country, someone has to fund you. Tying it to an employeer guarentees that you're funded. Without that you're just filling up ERs and hostels, etc.
It’s not weird when you understand that Americans never voted to have a skilled immigration system: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... Had someone tried to get one through Congress, they would have lost elections.
The system we have is one that was politically feasible to implement. On paper, we have a system for “non-immigrant” temporary workers. Employers sponsor green cards for skilled workers because the theoretically temporary job is the only avenue for most of these workers to get to the U.S. in the first place.
I know you post this canon of "but acktually, Congress didn't want skilled immigration" in all threads, so it's useful to point to the actual legislative record, AC21 (American Competitiveness in the 21st Century), which is the most recent passed legislation that covers a lot this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Competitiveness_in_th...).
Yes, that’s useful:
> summary, the provisions of AC21 did the following:
> They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers")
All of this is done under the pretense that these are temporary workers who will eventually go home. That’s the only way Congress could get away with it, and it seems like people are now wising up to it.
There is no pretense. You can read past the line that confirms your world view. "They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers") acquired by filing Form I-129, as well as the employment-based immigrant categories for immigration (EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3, acquired through Form I-140), thereby increasing the number of people who at a given time could be in that status." The bill acknowledges that there is a massive backlog in the H-1B->GC pipeline and while it's hard to get bipartisan consensus on supply side reform, it makes incremental progress in making lives of people in the backlog a little better.
I was literally just quoting the first two sentences in the section describing the provisions of the law.
I was talking about your claim that there is pretense or there is some ruse and that people are wising up now. If you read the entire bill, it covers all sorts of classes of non-immigrants and immigrants and the path from one to the other. If you think Congress was duped, I don't know what to tell you.
> but acktually
Did you need this to get your point across?
That’s just a weird modern view tainted by recent nativist and populist sentiments. If you go back 20 years, in 2006, it would be utterly not controversial for a republican politician to support issuing green cards to anyone who completed a PhD in America.
You should listen to the NYT podcast I linked! It describes decades of exactly what I’m talking about, and the NYT is neither nativist nor populist. Yes, the Bush-era GOP was shilling for cheap labor for big business. There is a reason a Bush can’t even get elected dog catcher in Texas anymore.
The US likes to tie everything to employment - see also healthcare and retirement plans. Coming from Canada, anyone can open up an RRSP account (equivalent of 401k) and your employer isn't involved at all. You control the account. In the US you're stuck with the 401k account your employer signs up for. If they decide not to offer a 401k then you lose that benefit.
If you don't have access to a 401k at work you can contribute pre-tax to a traditional IRA instead. It is weird to have both, though.
But the contribution limit on the traditional IRA is much lower though.
From the internet: In 2026, you can contribute up to $24,500 pre-tax or Roth to your 401(k). Some plans may allow after-tax contributions up to the combined employee and employer limit of $72,000. The annual contribution limit for IRAs, including Roth and traditional IRAs, is $7,500 for 2026.
One of these things is not like the other...
But then you can't run modern slavery!
Didn't healthcare get tied to employment due to union demands in the 60s or 70s?
During World War II the US Government controlled prices and pressured unions not to strike. The war ended and price controls were still in effect for a few years. Since employers could not increase wages, they offered increased non-wage compensation such as health insurance. The IRS agreed that employer sponsored health insurance is not taxable income. Thus tying affordable health benefits to your job. (And giving employer health plans a big tax advantage over buying it yourself).
No it's because there was wage control during WWII. Employers started offering it as a benefit to get around the caps.
The idea that international socialists have that domestic labor conditions are made worse by a lack of protections for foreign workers (rather than the presence of the workers themselves) doesn’t pan out if you look at Canada; it’s quite rare for status in the country to be tied to a particular employment agreement, so immigrants are free to leave undesirable employers, but wages are substantially lower there due to the country having accepted about 3 million immigrants and temporary workers in the span of the last ten years.
I don't really see how this relates to my comment about the connection between benefits and employment.
> wages are substantially lower there due to the country having accepted about 3 million immigrants and temporary workers in the span of the last ten years.
Do you have any evidence of that causal connection, or is that just an assumption? The US also accepts large numbers of immigrants and temporary workers.
The vast majority of immigration to the US is based on luck (family, diversity etc.) or misery (asylum, refugee, etc.). That's about 90% immigration. The remaining 10% is employment. Where did you pull the $1M figure out of? Is the Mexican sibling paying $1M in taxes to immigrate here? Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
I did go in details in another comment so I won't repeat myself because that comment is LONG.
But a nation couldn't ask more than a working age adult where you invested zero in education and health for 20 years and suddenly pay taxes with none of almost no benefits.
In the UK, which I raised numbers due to the discussion going on in there, visa workers generated yearly 12 to 20 Billions in direct taxes and fees and they use 4B in health (which technically they paid in fees a combined value of 6B upfront If my numbers are right)
But the real numbers lies on what other revenue they generate. It is estimated in my calculations that +50B-70B pounds are from immigrants on UK with a working visa.
That's no amount to shy considering about it is 8M people in that specific situation. And remember that none of them had to have their education covered by the government.
Someone in the other comment said that 8M British people would generate more taxes than that, but I did not find evidence of that. According to the public consultation documents UK gov released about immigration a couple of years ago, about 10% of the immigrants are responsible for more than 35% of the taxes collected. Hence the suggestion on curb immigration considering the salary range which might make sense or not depending on where you stand on the topic. I have no horses on this race and my impression as an outsider who just likes analysing data is that it seems as much of a claim as saying that EU took more money from UK than what it put in which turned out to be mostly incorrect.
He's speaking specifically about the green card process, at which point you've already been in the country for a long time and paid into U.S. taxes. Not people who might want to pay money to immigrate here (although for them, the EB-5 visa program exists).
I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.
Cato did a study in 2017 that asked people if they supported immigration. Most people did. Then they asked people what they thought the level of immigration should be. The median answer was around 500,000 a year. The real level is 2-5 times higher than that. That’s why nobody will push for a real skilled immigration system. Once you open up the issue to public debate, a likely outcome will be a demand to drastically cut the level of legal immigration.
For example, right now, nobody is thinking of how many immigrants come to the U.S. through family unification for each H1B worker that eventually gets permanent residency. If you open up the issue now it’s going to become a firestorm when people realize that “65,000 skilled workers a year” actually results in millions of people every year, most of whom aren’t skilled workers.
I can't find the study in question, but I'd be interested in the polling process. The average person has zero understanding of what 500,000 immigrants per year means. For context, the average American is off by at least a factor of 2 about the population of the United States. If the questioning wasn't something along the lines of "of the people you personally know, what fraction should be immigrants" or something, I have no idea how you'd get anything resembling useful responses.
For those who aren't doing the math, there are now about 340M Americans, so 500K immigrants per year would be about 0.128% or roughly 1/780 of the population arriving as immigrants per year. If you figure the average immigrant stays for about 5 years (there's likely a long tail, where many people on temporary H1Bs go back to their home countries in 3-5 years while green card holders stay forever), you'd expect < 1% of the U.S. population to be immigrants under this system, and the average person would know maybe 1 or 2 immigrants.
FWIW, my community is 30% foreign-born and we don't really have any social cohesion problems. I think that length of time in the country actually matters more than the absolute number of immigrants; people who have been here since they were teens are very well acculturated. But if I were to put numbers on how many new people a group can absorb per year without radically changing its culture, I'd put it at about 10% (that's like having one new person on a 10 person team hired within the last year). If we extrapolated to the whole U.S. population and assumed they were all evenly distributed, this'd be 34M people/year.
Honestly, I think the bigger problem is that they're not evenly distributed. Some places in America never change, over generations, and remain very suspicious of outsiders. Other places become 80% immigrant over a span of 10-15 years, and then they never talk to anyone outside their ethnic background. In not very long, you end up with multiple different Americas that can't relate to each other. The parable of the polygons is very relevant here:
https://ncase.me/polygons/
How does 65000 workers translate to millions of unskilled relatives? Even green cards for relatives are a nontrivial process.
Indeed. That translates to 14 relatives brought in by every skilled worker. You really wonder about the IQ of the people who believe this propaganda.
Also case in point, both me and my wife went from F1 to green card. We never worked illegally and had fully funded gradute programs. Our parents refuse to settle in the US, they have assets and families in home countries and rather live there. We haven't tried to bring in any other relatives. 3 of our siblings have also went through the F1 route, all of them fully funded gradutes, one of them left the US after graduation, other two settled and got green card.
That's not that far out of line. Spouse, children, two sets of parents and two sets of siblings. You're right that it's probably not 14 on average but 5-10 easily
OP said 1 million unskilled relative per 65000 skilled worker.
In my case, spouses are siblings are all skilled workers, and we have not sponsored each other.
We have one kid, even he is advanced for his age in terms of reading/math.
Go to Little Bangladesh in Queens and tell me how all those people came here. It’s mathematically impossible unless they’re all illegal (which I don’t think is true) or it’s family reunification.
Each legal immigrant who becomes a citizen is the root of a tree that can continue indefinitely. If you come from anywhere other than India or China, it takes about 10 years to get citizenship from when you get your H1B. It took us less than 10. After that you can sponsor family for green cards directly. That person only needs about 6 years before they can get citizenship and start sponsoring their own family members. So it’s easy to see how we went from 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S. in 1990 to 300,000+ in just 35 years.
How am I responsible for what's happening in little Bangladesh in Queens? Did you go through my history to dig up where I'm from, so that you could tailor your racist reasonse?
Okay, but in other cases it's not like that. They bring spouses, siblings, and parents who can turn bring their own spouses, siblings, and parents. That is severely curtailed these days by country restrictions so I agree that it's not 14 but it's higher than 1.
> That translates to 14 relatives brought in by every skilled worker
That’s very easy within a few decades when you consider that the people who are sponsored will get citizenship and can then sponsor their own parents, siblings, etc. My dad sponsored six people, and he just has one brother. My mom has 12 siblings, but them and their families went to Australia following my uncle.
There are 300,000-600,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S., up from under 10,000 in 1990. Based on H1B petitions and natural growth, the population should be more like 15,000. People are bringing their entire extended families over.
Any changes to immigration require the legislature. Congress hasn't changed anything in over 30 years, so all this is moot. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It's a bit silly to reason backwards about what the anti-immigrant types want. There is no grounding principle there.
This line of reasoning will shut down practically any interesting conversation that has to do with wanting to change the system. Extremely unproductive.
> Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
I think the "chud" immigration logic is rather, take whatever win you can get in the general direction of restriction, because you've been losing every single battle for 5+ decades.
The argument at its core says wealthy immigrants are preferable, which is predictable bias on on a forum frequented by tech workers.
> Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
Yup real chud. I'd play world's smallest violin in solidarity with these most productive people.
We are talking about Microsoft employees.
Honest question, does having a temporary worker on a 10 year H1B visa seem like it's benefiting US citizens working in the same sector?
If they had wage parity there is zero disadvantage to a US citizen. The problem is not H1B's as a concept, it's making foreign workers indentured servants paid a fraction of the wage, thus incentivizing their hiring over US citizens.
I don't follow? Why would a US citizen want to compete against 8B people for jobs instead of just 300M? Seems like the lower number is better for the citizens of the US.
Would that US citizen be even better off if we got rid of all the other Americans so they had to compete against nobody?
Immigrants contribute to both supply and demand. It's not at all obvious whether this is net good or bad for natives' pay.
Why not just decide that only white people or only men or only people born on Tuesdays can apply for the job you want?
The job should go to the most qualified person. That's how america works. If that most qualified person is actually a guy who was born in india, great. I have no problem with that. You don't get to bogart opportunity based one what zip code you were born in.
What is the purpose of a nation if not to benefit its own Citizens. If it doesn't do that in good times then why would anyone fight when called upon?
you can already get a greencard by paying less than $1mm in taxes. in general, your requirements are way higher than what's even required for citizenship. and green cards don't need a civics test either.
but I agree that it would be nice to have a less fraught/complicated path to permanent residency.
> you can already get a greencard by paying less than $1mm in taxes.
Not really.
Your only generic option is EB-5, with $750k in direct investments. However, right now it takes 3 _years_ to process the initial application (https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times - look at the I-526 form). And after the initial form is approved, you need to apply for the actual green card, adding another 1-3 years.
Everyone should consider separating both tourism sector, and summer youth jobs from regular employment issues.
Those are special circumstances, but utterly different than regular low wage worker issues.
European kids are not going to pick tobacco; they are doing 'lifestyle' summer jobs in America.
These jobs are meant for students/youth, and necessarily going to pay a bit less but they obviously shouldn't be under duress.
It's an aspirational trade off - the business owners generally are not making bank for the most part. The system doesn't work without a lofty goodwill all around.
My cousins all worked as 'golf cart girls' at public courses, they liked being in the sun but the pay was sketchy.
All of this is very different from H1s, regular temporary workers.
But then employers couldn't treat H1 folks like slaves, and where would we be then?
H1B lasts 6 years and can't be extended further without an approved I140.
Approved I140 is almost standard across all companies. They abuse perm process for the MS->OPT->H1b pipeline and keep on extending
The first point can’t happen without reforming H1B to last more than six years.
Great point. H1 can be sponsored but Green Card should not.
this is how it works in other countries. if you have been a legal resident for a number of years you can apply for permanent residency or even citizenship.
The entire US economy is organized around delegating government responsibilities to corporations. This is no different.
It was a system that was created to serve a temporary need. However like any temporary system, it becomes permanent. Then companies or employers abuse it to the max, use it keep wages arbitrarily low. They use their influence to convince people from LCOL areas to uproot their lives for promises of higher wages/better living.
But how would companies exploit the workers if the system worked your way? The exploitation is the point.
> Nothing to do with your employer dangling something for you,
they will dangle visa renewal for ppl to get to that time then.
There are different grounds for being granted a green card. One of those is that your employer wants to hire you permanently, and can't find an American to take the job. Getting a green card doesn't require an employer's sponsorship, that's just the most common application for green cards.
You didn't control for corruption.
Surly the “corruption” is big corporations pushing for the H1B program in the first place, at a time (early 1990s) when decreasing immigration was overwhelmingly more popular than increasing it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx. Surely the “corruption” is the government looking the other way for years while Indian body shops imported massive numbers of foreign workers while ignoring the requirement in the law to advertise to americans?
And this is hardly new. Ross Perot was opposing H1B when he was running for President in the 1990s.
A won't work because it will incentivize more scummy H1B employers.
H1B's are temporary visas and they make it very clear in the application process; there shouldn't be a path to citizenship through an H1B. I like the tax idea though
Its considered a dual-intent visa.
When they were first created they were very explicitly temporary. It's dual-intent in the sense that in the 90's they updated it so you could pursue citizenship while on an H1B, but the visa is really designed for temporary work. When you apply for an H1B they ask questions making sure you have ties to your home country, and there are time limits to send people back if you're on one for too long.
I was thinking about this the other day in the context of the boardwalk town that I vacation in sometimes. There are a lot of college student aged workers who come from Europe for the summer and work in every service industry job imaginable in town. There are agencies that find these European workers and help them find jobs and housing.
It makes me wonder why there aren't more American young adults taking these jobs. I think it would be great fun to live at the beach for the summer. Maybe the wages are too low, or American kids are focused on internships? Or maybe the European workers are better employees? I don't know.
I live in a touristy town that does this with J1 workers. I'll tell you why: The jobs pay $7.25/hour.
The J1s are then packed like sardines into houses where they pay rent by the week. Why by the week? To remind them they're expendable and can be deported at a moment's notice by the restaurant/hotel/amusement park/etc. they work at. The worst I've heard is 16 people living in a 3-bedroom, 1 bathroom house.
The J1s themselves are typically great people. A lot of them do everything they can to stay in the area via Green Cards or whatever. Business that treat their J1s like shit are usually blacklisted by locals, too. We'll actively tell tourists not to give those businesses any business and why.
People are willing to take a discount on their wages and quality of life for the intangible benefit of ‘the experience of living and working abroad for a summer’.
For non-native English speakers it also has the advantage of providing a free total immersion language course as well. People pay for opportunities like that.
So yes, an Italian 19 year old is willing to work for less money for the chance to work in a water park for a summer, improving their English and boosting their resume, and if it gives them enough money to be able to fund a couple of weekend trips to New York or DC so much the better. It’s a life experience and a working vacation.
That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.
>That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.
Which should be pretty revolting for them if that's the case. Instead of American 19 year olds making some summer money at the waterpark to buy their first car, they get moved aside by disposable foreign workers, so then they need to stay supported by their parents for longer till they can get a "proper" job.
And I'm European not American, but I see the same issue here. Getting minimum wage jobs in the hospitality/service sector is super competitive now due to pressure from migrant workers who will accept anything. These are jobs that used to be done by teenagers in the past for summer money but not anymore.
Employers everywhere being able allowed to min/max wages against the most desperate labor on the planet should be banned.
And then governments have the audacity to complain about people not having kids anymore. Well no shit, my dad and his peers had summer jobs since he was 14 because there were no migrant workers to replace them, and after finishing high school he already had a job in the factory with housing benefits, he was already making enough money to have a family and 2 kids, not one.
The result for the local American 19 year olds is that ticket prices at their local water park are kept low enough that they can afford to go there to cool off and be handed towels by foreign teenagers.
If the government cut off the seasonal work visas, tourist destination hospitality businesses would have to increase prices, some would go out of business, and American tourists’ quality of life would be lower.
>The result for the local American 19 year olds is that ticket prices at their local water park are kept low enough that they can afford to go there to cool off and be handed towels by foreign teenagers.
And where are 19 year old Americans getting money for water parks if they don't have jobs? Still having hobbies funded by your parents at 19 isn't really a societal win.
You say 30-50 years ago they couldn't afford that because labor costs were too high? Maybe they had jobs to pay those higher costs?
This is a lump of labor fallacy.
By finding a ready source of people willing to staff the water park at a lower price, more ‘water park amenity’ is available at a lower price.
This frees up the labor of local teenagers who can now be employed in other roles, producing other useful things for society, like… I don’t know what teenagers do nowadays. Provide market-clearing services on Kalshi by placing bad bets? Upload short form video to TikTok to enable ad buyers to find customers?
>By finding a ready source of people willing to staff the water park at a lower price, more ‘water park amenity’ is available at a lower price.
Or same prices but higher margins for the owner.
Which leads to more water parks existing.
Same thing with au pairs and childcare work: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/09/683831264/au-pair-sponsor-age.... It’s basically below minimum wage.
Exactly. Au pairs are super common in Europe too, I even know of American ones.
The appeal for foreigners is living temporarily in Germany, Switzerland, etc.
It's an exchange: the host offers a roof, pays next to nothing for a live-in nanny, etc.
It's tourism + work.
I don't think anyone would do this as a career, and locals just do it in another country.
I believe there is an age-out age for being an au-pair, 26 I think, so it isn't possible to make a career out of it.
I'm talking about the "the host offers a roof, pays next to nothing for a live-in nanny" arrangement, which locals don't do.
Interestingly the 26 refers to the USA. But a similar career would be legally possible inside the USA (not under the program) but not in EU, due to heavy labour regulations.
If this is like what I saw in Maine coastal tourist towns this summer I suspect its popular with Europeans because the $15.10/hour local wage is attractive. But more so it's because you get to spend time a few months in a beautiful location surrounded by other attractive young people. Party scene is probably great.
I suspect you're correct on that front, too. I have family in an area that has been bringing in European teens to work seasonal tourist-facing jobs for probably(?) decades now. I can't speak to how they are treated outside my view, but anecdotally, they seem to really enjoy the opportunity. They get their little euro-crew together and basically have a College experience.
Locals like them, too - they're charming, generally well-behaved, polite, and it doesn't hurt that they don't have to pay them very much. I like to think the cultural exchange between the Europeans and the otherwise isolated locals is fantastic for broadening horizons, also.
Naturally, there’s an old This American Life episode about this which focuses on young international people who work summer at a highway rest stop.
Ep. 388
Oh, this was me 18 years ago. Worked a summer in Wyoming at a truck stop in the middle of the desert. It was kind of fun. Don't regret it a minute. My one and only trip to the US. People were warm and welcoming, if a bit wierd at times. The trip I did there with the Grayhound bus was _wild_. I think of my time there with fondness.
The right policy response would be telling the firms running these programs to get fucked if they can't successfully operate while paying staff the prevailing wage that local Americans would accept.
A nearby amusement park touted that they pay $20/hr. However it's seasonal, not year around. They raised wages because COVID-19 and current Administration policies decreased the supply of foreign college students who somehow had work authorization.
I learned this hiring practice in my home state of MN. The lake Superior North shore has resorts that hire these types of workers and pay them shit.
I agree. If the minimum wage is raised, there will be less incentives for businesses to hire cheap foreign workers.
When you say “I was thinking bout this the other day”, you weren’t thinking about this, in the sense of thinking about skilled worker immigration pathways for technology companies. What you were thinking about appears to be something entirely different - seasonal nonimmigrant unskilled labor.
There’s actually virtually nothing those two things have in common, except some unarticulated sense of grievance that in some unspecified way it would be better if Americans were doing those things.
I agree, my reply was tangential to the topic of the AP article being discussed here. I apologize for getting off topic.
And I didn't mean to give the impression that I have some grievance that these jobs aren't filled by Americans.
My curiosity was why aren't there more American kids having a working vacation in beach towns, not shame on these towns for importing labor.
And also the indentured servitude
One summer in my teens I worked as a groundskeeper at a Martha's Vineyard inn, and it _was_ a fun summer. I had a free place to stay (with a friend), plenty of free time, and little adult supervision.
Virtually all the hospitality staff there were European university students. Midway through the summer, they realized that they weren't earning enough to afford their return airfare and they threatened to strike. I don't recall how they resolved the issue, but I believe that they were netting less than minimum wage. Maybe things have changed since then, and maybe not.
The staff at Harris Teeter in Corolla NC (the outer banks) has been nearly 100% young adults from eastern European countries the last few times that I was down there.
I don't know their living situation, but I did see them both walking and riding bikes to the grocery store. It's a somewhat unique situation as the grocery store probably does 90% of their yearly business between June and August each year. I couldn't tell if they all knew each other from home or just from working together.
Do you mean that you are surprised that young Americans aren't working at the boardwalk in the USA or that young Americans are not working at the beaches in Europe?
What does this mean? Use more words please.
The s/something/other/ patterns are regular expression replaces.
He's saying you can replace 'something' for 'other' in each of those patterns.
They are (quite obviously) saying that this could be changed to British people commenting on how all of the service jobs are Poles, or Canadians commenting how they are all Indian.
… as a way to express what, though?
That American complaints of this form are not unique and therefore should be disregarded? That American complaints of this form are universal and therefore indicative of a global pattern that should be concerning?
Seems like a pre-Brexit example for Britain.
I feel like AI has ruined hn
I agree! People can't recognize regex-replace statements anymore! a forum commenting tradition that goes back decades.
HN and regular expressions are best friends.
\bai\b
Other countries import cheap labor too.
whats your point?
If you're a non-US citizen, I don't believe it's easy to just switch to a different job, which makes it difficult to just exit out of the job you have. US citizens could leave at any point for another job (or no job) if they chose, putting the staffing at the service roles at risk. Just speculating.
I just went to Asbury Park, NJ about a month ago. It was all local highschool/college kids. I go to an ice cream shop in Brooklyn by a park - all highschoolers.
I think it just depends on the location? But also yes - if I'm worth my salt, why would I take these jobs over higher paying internships? At 19 I was able to land $25/h jobs in tech. Maybe we should rethink the pay scales in terms of sustainability. Unfortunately we live in the US where short term gains are the sole motivator for most companies.
In Maine there are lots of early 20s workers that mostly seem to come from Balkan countries. I think those little tourist towns just don't have large enough populations to support the demand. Tourists probably outnumber actual locals. Places like NJ and Brooklyn though have plenty of 16-22 year olds who will work beach jobs.
I think it depends on what countries the owners have connections to. Random ice cream shop I visited in Florida a few years back was staffed by young Turkish women, my wife asked they said there on J1's. Before that we were in the Florida Keys - the local mosque was full of young Uzbek men that worked in the hotels, all on J1s.
Because you either continue paying rent for the room you're renting the rest of the year, or you risk not having digs in the fall.
For those European workers, a US wage more than pays for the rent for their vacant rent back home.
> who come from Europe for the summer and work in every service industry job imaginable in town
Do they have work visas for this, or are they abusing a travel visa? All the people I knew that did this were doing it illegally.
There is a program that allows university students to come to the US, work for a bit, and then stay for a month or so longer. It’s called work & travel. Many entertainment companies like six flags and casinos hire them. I have many friends who have done this years ago. The pay was low but they had a fun summer, travelled a bit, and came come with a new laptop or a good SLR camera. It wasn’t glamorous but a generally positive experience.
There is a "work and travel" program for students in Europe with valid visa and everything. I know lots of people who did that for a summer or two, it was an opportunity to see USA and also it was a great thing to list on their CV when getting a job back home.
because the american workers are off working on better opportunities afforded to them because the immigrants are working these service jobs.
And now that there's less of them, the jobs will be replaced by higher wage americans, which will increase inflation from the higher payroll costs.
I actually have taken that job as an American, any questions? I will say the Irish had an amazing work ethic despite being drunk half the time.
Only half?
Sleeping the other half?
some companies (Six Flags) have in the past abused the J-1 summer work travel program, and essentially trap young people in semi-remote dorms for the summer
companies do stuff like this because american young people won't tolerate it
Interesting framing. I thought that was part of the appeal. When I was in college I was actively looking for an opportunity to go to another country and do a temporary work thing where you stayed in a mountain resort and worked at the front desk all summer.
The problem is that you have to leave the country if you quit because you can't get someone to sponsor a different job, and you don't have your own transportation. The company charges you rent, for uniform, meals, and other costs... so you end up making very little and don't get treated well.
You don't get to experience much of the country because you're located in some dorm building that's not near much. So your summer ends up looking like 12 hour days standing around in the sun watching other people have fun.
A number of companies have been hit with slap-on-the-wrist fines for actually violating labor policies doing it.
Let these people make their choices about doing or not doing it. Don't try to defend them by taking the opportunity away.
I did this for a summer, worked my butt off, got back home, paid all my expenses with the paperwork and the plane tickets, bought a laptop and came back with about 500$. It was not much, but it was much more than I ever got the opportunity by that point to make.
The people I worked with treated me quite well. Everyone I met was welcoming and warm.
I did not manage to see a lot, but I did visit Yellowstone, had a couple of adventures, and overall was a positive experience for me.
A friend I was with did not manage too well and had a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to wash toilets.
But my point is, it can be a great experience and I don't buy for a second this feigned concern for "ooh, the poor kids are exploited". No, I think it's just job protectionism.
An additional complication is that people get stuck a month in realizing they've made a huge mistake and can't get out without penalty. Choices being limited is what makes it exploitable.
There's no feigned concern, this is actually a labor system that gets abused time and time again. Still happens today. These people have no advocates. A similar situation happens on cruise ships.
This is prevalent among the big ski consolidators (Vail Resorts, Alterra) year over year.
They were taking those jobs, but then the agencies decided they wanted a cut and found cheaper foreign workers, same as always
Wages are always too low if you replace Americans with cheaper foreigners.
you cant build career out of seasonal job in some random resort places across the country.
the idea is that foreigners will do the temp/seasonal low value work, while Americans were supposed to educate and upskill using federal student loans and get a high value jobs.
unfortunately American education system made it impossible, ue to stupidity.
Only China is able to do that: massively educate population and upskill and go up the value chain of manufacturing and industrialization.
I think this up-skilling sentiment misses that as a worker who thought a seasonal service job on the waterfront was a good deal, up-skilling means taking on 6 figures in debt - after which they will only have a ~1/5 chance of getting a job which compensates for the opportunity cost and debt. For many, this is actually a bad deal and growing their own seasonal business would have been a stronger career path.
if you are opening your own seasonal business, then you WANT seasonal wages suppressed. You dont want wages to go up, as this will be your cost of doing business.
Any american bitchin about low wages and competition was supposed to set up own S-Corp/LLC and hire his "competitors" and take advantage of those "low wages"
You have unrestricted work authorization, you have SBA loans and everything possible to create your own American Dream(R)
> impossible, ue to stupidity.
Due to the jobs not existing in the number required.
tech jobs are abundant but talent is not there, hence the need for h1b and such
same for microchip manufacturing (Micron and TSMC factories in US) and every other high value industry.
heck even Submarine production cannot find welders and machinists.
Just wanna say: thanks for going the opposite way of the other half of this website who's just constantly saying tech jobs are gone.
It's still incredibly hard to hire skilled devs.
> other half
More than half. Everyone is talking their book here, and the book that isn't blind to this problem belongs to the overwhelming majority.
I absolutely understand both sides, and the sentiment of some Americans who feel betrayed by their government when they see foreigners coming in, getting elite Ivy League degrees, and snatching six-seven figure jobs.
The resentment is absolutely understandable.
What I am trying to explain is that, if magically, all foreigners are expelled, H1B/OPT banned, all Indian visas canceled, this will NEVER result in Americans getting more jobs. Quite the opposite. Global Capability Centers already are offshoring everything possible outside the US, just because of trump rhetoric.
American capitalist is not stupid, the billionaires are not idiots. Why should they hire and overpay for unskilled Americans just because they happen to be born here, instead of hiring the most qualified person? Any anti-immigrant legislation will simply accelerate the offshoring, or even worse, will create competing tech giants outside the US.
It is this entitlement attitude is whats going to ruin the US tech sector and scare the talent away.
We can solve this problem with tariffs. Digital goods and services can be taxed like any other.
tariffs do not apply to services. You are completely delusional about the governments ability to tax offshoring
So hire Americans and train them. Pay them above market wages so they don't leave. Problem solved. I know at least a dozen people smart enough to write software that aren't in the tech field because the barrier to entry is high. It might not appear high to people in HCOL areas, but in the rest of the country, the barrier is quite high.
Tech people are the last ones to complain about the low pay
A lot of tech jobs are paying six to seven figures, you cant really demand employers to train and lower barriers. Why should employers lower their barrier and increase salaries even further?
Where do you get this feeling of entitelement for other people’s money ???
What else do you want at this point, maybe just plain UBI and a million to everyone just for being white american ?
What do you mean why should employers lower barriers and train people? Because they're abusing visa programs meant for 'highly skilled' labor and bring in low skill, wage suppressing labor.
false, why would they import low skill labor and then pay them six figures, when America is full of low skill burger flipping labor ?
I'm not in the US and was talking in general, but I share your sentiment.
So learn to code?
Learn anything at very deep and competitive level, instead of paying some random bootcamp to sit throught the $10 Udemy course and $20 Coursera certificate on how to write hello world
It doesn't matter if someone can build a career out of seasonal jobs, which is entirely false btw. The market will dictate how much seasonal goods and services are worth, thus setting wages and property values.
Just like farm labor: without importing foreigners, legal or otherwise, wages would go up, food prices would go up, prices, wages, and property values would normalize to market rates.
your libertarian view of economy is too naiive. There is no "free market" in the US. Everything that impacts inflation/CPI is tightly controlled by the federal government with monetary tools like credit expansion, rates, federal incentives and such.
the reason why America wants to suppress low value jobs, is because they are input to the actual output of American economy: agriculture, high value industrial goods, tech services, financial services, real estate, financial asset s and services.
These are the actual components of US GDP and American government does everything possible to keep the input to these sectors stable/low, in order to protect the profits of these industries.
Do you see how wages seasonal workers are lower priority to the profits of Vail Corporation?
Only like 50% US population has a valid passport, 40% are a paycheck away from homelessness, and potential double taxation?
https://rusticpathways.com/blog/how-many-americans-have-a-pa...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/40-of-americans-one-step-from-p...
The person you're replying to was presumably talking about a vacation town in the US. Double taxation, by the way, is only an issue if an American makes over $100,000 per year in their foreign job.
I'll let the data do the talking:
Cursed companies:
- https://permtrack.app/employers/microsoft-corporation
- https://permtrack.app/employers/tata-consultancy-services-li...
Blessed companies:
- https://permtrack.app/employers/oracle-america-inc
- https://permtrack.app/employers/tesla-inc
Can you explain what data I'm supposed to be witnessing the disparity on? Everything on the page looks pretty similar to me, definitely within pattern detection threshold. Is there some specific statistic, or possibly a wider data analysis to show how these things are being politically motivated?
I believe they are implying that the filing data is similar (I haven't checked myself) but the bottom two companies are not being targeted by the admin due to their links.
The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMFj8uDubsE&list=RDMMFj8uDub...).
Should add amazon
and Apple since reception of Golden iPhone was reciprocated with zero/low tariffs a.k.a. Government picks winners.
November can't come fast enough!!
Yes all they had to do was invest 600 billion in US investment
Or just say they would.
I feel the whole h1b program is ill-conceived.
The “can’t find local worker” requirement is a farce and a lottery is a stupid way to get the best people into the country.
I personally feel there should be a set number of foreign worker slots, set by labor market conditions per industry. Then, auction the slots to companies.
Having to buy the visa would force the hiring to the areas of most need, objectively, and get around the farce. Then, just let the companies bring in exactly who they want.
Auction money could go towards lowering domestic worker income tax.
A lot of the focus is the effect on pay, but some of the attention should also be spent on competence. There are individuals going through master's degree programs, which are essentially degree mills, to get hired at one of these (or similar) companies, who do not have the basic skills to do the job.
Not everyone, but a significant number, and if you've ever worked with one of these individuals, you know how demoralizing and frustrating it can be. Especially in the typical political climate in a tech company, where saying something even slightly related to immigration will get taken a certain way.
Yes, exactly. Without a hint of pettiness or subjectivity: To say that many of these individuals are bad at the job would be an understatement. They might as well be random non-English-speakers grabbed off the street and told "write a React app" or "administer this database" or "perform data analysis".
It's not their fault. But it's demeaning in the extreme to the experienced, dedicated natives who are forced to work with them.
I’ve experienced working with h1b workers that are not great, but this characterization is a bit rich. All of the massively valuable big tech companies have a ton of these workers. There’s no way they are like random people pulled off the street.
You know who doesn't need visas? Remote workers
Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food. If an American isn't getting the job anyway, then why bring them here in the first place to drive prices up for everyone else?
> Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food
You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.
As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.
If a mansion is surrounded by a slum is society better off? In India the answer is yes but in america we see slums as a failure.
In America we see homeless zombies running around the richest neighborhoods. Thats the definition of success here.
> If a mansion is surrounded by a slum is society better off?
Who is in the mansion and who is in the slum?
Irrelevant
The government exists for the general welfare and and economic system that subsidizes idleness because the disingenuous say "look over there, its a net positive" while ignoring the externalized cost borne by the taxpayer is just theft from the taxpayer.
> Irrelevant
You made an analogy!
> system that subsidizes idleness
You’ve genuinely lost me. What does this have to do with this thread?
Displacement is a taxpayer funded externality. Companies are not entitled to taxpayer dollars just because theyre too cheap to hire american.
To keep all of that money you just enumerated flowing in the local economy.
FWIW the "international" folks I work with hardly spend any money in the US. Most of it is saved and spent or invested during 2-month annual visits to homeland.
Your logic is incorrect, you are thinking that a "international" folk buying a TV is what they mean. But that's not correct. Paying income taxes, paying tax on cars, paying tax on gas, paying rent, these matter a lot more to the government then you buying an iphone from the apple store in the mall versus one in "international country".
Sure. Any other body hired in their place would still pay taxes PLUS more likely spend more money locally thus boosting local economy.
That's probably just your company. In Silicon Valley, "international" folks spend a lot of money on buying houses (multiple of them sometimes), cars, home improvement, going out to restaurants, etc.
Absolutely anecdotal, but in the Silicon Valley I know, I rarely see coworkers participating in skiing/surfing/hiking/US travel. Hell, even dining out outside of free-food campus is a tough sell.
As for buying multiple houses, I'm sure the wider population is happy with foreigners buying rental properties.
Do we need to make the rich richer or allow locals affordability?
Me buying food from restaurant would make the owner richer, but would also employ more people at the restaurant.
The scarcity issue is valid when the resource is limited. In case of US, I was not aware of food scarcity. Even housing is more due to policies than actual land scarcity.
Economic activity does have positive feeback. Yes, some people get unfairly rich - but the solution is not to stop the activity, instead try to get the rich pay their fair share of contribution to the country.
Why are we relegating locals to menial restaurant jobs? Why not have programs to get them trained and into higher earning jobs?
A local working a restaurant will often need to take advantage of welfare. If instead we funneled the locals to higher paying jobs, we would be better off. We're supposed to look after our own citizens, afterall --that's the whole point of electing a government.
> Me buying food from restaurant would make the owner richer, but would also employ more people at the restaurant
What of one of the employees at the restaurant had your job, and they bought food there? Or are you declaring only you can do your job?
Sorry but there is no competition for health care in US. US basically has no health care. Unless of course you buy it (i.e. pay the fraudulent companies to give you false sense of security and leave you alone in the worst moment of your life)
Yup, this is much more likely to lead to more offshoring than companies hiring more American workers. Which also means that communities in the US with a large amount of workers on visas will also suffer.
Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.
Of course it's not new. And of course it never really stopped. But there is a new incentive for execs to give it a much bigger push given all the recent remote work tooling and when they now think a programmer is just monitoring AI output. So why not pay the monitor SE Asian wages rather than US wages.
The trend is away from remote work though. So much more stuff is hybrid then it was a few years ago. SE Asian wages means a 12 hour time zone difference and that carries a real cost on efficiency (I personally experienced this at two companies). Future poorly thought offshoring attempts will go just as badly as they have in the past. If anything AI makes it worse, since each individual dev is responsible for a bigger slice of the output they need to be in the loop on business / customer needs and significant timezone differences make that harder.
If managed correctly though it means you can have effectively a 24 hour work day. US workers/management goes to sleep as the Asian workers are starting up
What about Central America?
Plenty of offshoring to both Central America and South America has occurred in recent years. It was a somewhat untapped offshoring location, but that no longer seems to be the case.
Real example: my company is US based, top and middle management is in US, some middle management and lower in Europe, managing workers in India and Manila. Same scheme with Costa Rica, but managed directly from US.
A key difference is that at least one isn’t competing for limited housing with offshoring. That is the number 1 driver of the affordability crisis atm.
I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!
There is a lot more to an economy than just housing prices. All the local business now have less customers to sell their good and services to.
The post-Covid offshoring is looking quite a bit different though.
How so?
For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common.
I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.
Offshoring to India is an idle threat due to radically different work cultures and expectations.
Offshoring to, say Poland or Portugal on the other hand...
Offshoring (form the US) to Europe, especially eastern Europe is not new either. The newish offshoring location was Central America and South America, but those have been tapped as well.
For example see https://theenterpriseworld.com/offshore-development-centers/ where they are listing well established locations for (US) offshoring.
Then let them already. Relocate all the work to India. I’m tired of US companies threatening everyone with job losses. Just fucking do it already.
They already are.
I'm old enough to remember when people gnashed their teeth about the U.S. taking talent from abroad being 'brain drain' that hurt those countries. Which is it? We want to take the rest of the world's best and brightest and screw those other countries in the process, or we feel bad about that and don't want to do that? EDIT: Cynically, it could be both!
Well it depends if you live in the US or you live in a country that is hemorrhaging your best workers to the US. No idea why you are trying to lump both groups together as if they should both have a single opinion.
People in the U.S. used to complain that we drain the rest of the world's brains. That has stopped. I was referring to that.
If you put yourself in the shoes of people in other nations, then... a) individuals might really like the option of emigrating to the U.S., but b) their nation might be better off with them staying at home. Interests conflict. The question is whether we should have selfish policies (such as putting a company's bottom-line ahead of a nation's, or one nation's development ahead of another) or not, and, of course, which is is which because one could argue that the only ones being selfish are the Americans who object to all these visas (I don't think they would be the _only_ ones being selfish, and arguably the 'nation' exists in part to protect its citizens, but yes, this is a case of selfishness).
> People in the U.S. used to complain that we drain the rest of the world's brains.
Ok? Are we all supposed to maintain a consistent view with this group of people? I don't understand your point.
I want to know: does the HN commentariat think that brain drain is a problem or not. Elsewhere in this thread we have people urging that we do drain the rest of the world's brains to "win the talent war" [0].
Now, I can totally see that maybe draining our adversaries' brains can be a good thing, unless it's a way of bringing in a fifth column, in which case... no. And it's definitely not good for countries we're on good terms with -- there that "win the talent war" comment shocks the conscience as a thoughtless, unnuanced, jingoist-but-dumb, and immoral/destructive as to our allies comment.
Consistency was not the issue. The question was: what has changed that so few seem to care about brain drain as a negative externality?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009507
Ok, let’s say it leads to 60% offshoring and 40% hiring more Americans.
That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.
The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.
It's not so simple because it's also a drop in demand for american goods and services. Fewer taxes paid, less consumption, etc.
No, that is the incorrect take. Offshoring isn't easy or cheap. Especially when Trump is basically trying to get companies to hire American workers by any means.
It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.
> It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.
Now apply that same line of thought to AI.
"Suffer"? It might help bring home prices back down to reality.
For the first time in my life I'm seeing high-income earners as a big drag on society.
There is a lot more to an economy than just housing prices. All the local business now have less customers to sell their good and services to.
> You know who doesn't need visas? Remote workers
Is it meant as a rhetorical reply to the officials as in "aha, but Microsoft will prevail and make it even worse for you, American workers" or as a reply to the workers: "don't fret, move back to your country and work the same job anyway". Or was it meant as a hint for the officials "don't forget to close that loophole as well"?
Like you I suspect the former. But if we really believe that economics is not a zero sum game then offshoring is better for everyone because it keeps talent in the countries they can help improve, and it is a rising tide that lifts all boats, serving to equalize wealth. Yes, for a while it should have the effect of reducing incomes in the U.S., but so does importing the rest of the world's talent into the U.S., so arguably offshoring is much better. But if [regardless of whether we believe economics is/is not zero sum] we want to keep the rest of the world down then we should absolutely take their talent.
Hiring remote workers also doesn’t require filling out H1B applications and dealing with USCIS. If using remote workers was just as good, companies would already do that.
I assume you mean offshore rather than "wfh" style remote. If so, companies already do that and they have been doing it on a much larger scale - https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/business/american-companies.... This will simply be another accelerant.
Not that salary expenses is a big problem for top tech companies, but remote workers don't warrant US west-coast comps either.
> but remote workers don't warrant US west-coast comps either
I mean, we don't really need that west coast comp either? If I was pulling my old FAANG comp here in Spain, I'd be in the top 0.1% of earners...
Why don't we need it? I wouldn't mind being in the 0.1% or 0.0001% of earners in a place.
Sure, who doesn't want unlimited money? That's decidedly different from "needing" it (I could in no way manage to live on the West Coast on a Spanish salary, for example)
Well then why do the people who do earn that much there need it?
Sky-high cost of living (property prices, mostly). Shitty apartment with a commute in the bay costs $3,000/month. Starter home in Seattle costs a million plus.
It's also a vicious cycle: high tech salaries in those areas have driven up the cost of living.
Why not? Doesn’t that depend on the worker output?
Hatred of the labor theory of value. This isn't my judgement on it. Just my guess why certain people with certain interests argue against it
One might argue that it should, but as a remote worker in a low cost area I don't mind making 20% less than my NYC/Bay colleagues as I can still live like a king in my midwest city on regionally adjusted swe comp.
Shouldn't the company still advertise the role for locals before offering remote? Also, for some roles it's mandatory to have on-site or at least hire within US due to compliance.
Regulated industries often have business language mandating onshore, citizens-only employment. If it isn't required by immigration, the businesses buying the product are requiring assurances (likely due to their own compliance).
As for non-protected roles, global market participation has ups and downs.
Which begs the question: What's better for the US economy?
Compared to having someone move to the US, does hiring a remote worker help or hinder the US economy?
People need to stop asking what's better for the "economy" and start asking what's better for themselves. If the two don't align, it should be tough luck for the "economy", not the people.
"The economy" is often just another way of saying "everyone in aggregate."
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
This is an incredibly blinkered view. The economy is important, but there are many other factors as to whether a given policy is overall good for the citizenry or not.
Sure, but I don't think I claimed that economic factors are the only thing that can be considered when evaluating policy. Maybe it came off that way because my comment was focused on the jobs issue being discussed.
I guess I did not express it well, but I wanted to highlight that "the economy" and "the people" are not in opposition. "The economy" is a vague term that usually approximates something like "the material well being of everyone in aggregate." There are lots of other things one might value besides material well being, but "the people" and the "the economy" and not opposed forces.
Hasn’t it been known for a while now that wages are decoupled from the Economic gains that have been happening since the 80s? That gap is just going to the billionaire class now. Source:
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Elon Musk and I are doing quite well financially, in aggregate.
Obviously how wealth is distributed is a hugely important factor, which a "good" economy does not necessarily take into account.
This is why it's not productive to discuss issues using vague, undefined terms like "the economy."
Wealth inequality is a well defined economic measure and I see no reason why one couldn't use it as a yardstick when evaluating an economy, same as we use the unemployment, inflation, GDP, median household income, and so on. And indeed many economists do use it, and there are many well regarded books and papers that examine wealth distribution.
It leads to the intuition that an economy where 100 people consume 10000 (let's say of energy because it should be inflation-independent) per week and 1 person consumes 100000 is worse than an economy where 100 people consume 9000 per week and 1 person consumes 10000. That is, you can strongly reject or disapprove of changes that strictly increase everyone's wealth or consumption.
I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.
The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.
Yea, I don't disagree with any of that.
I think wealth distribution should be allowed to freely float within a large range, but at extremes it may have bad effects. You don't want a communist regime that tries to enforce complete equality, nor do you want a Russian style oligarchy where a few control almost all the wealth. US is heading towards the latter.
Probably not a simple question or answer on the face of it, but it's really not worth looking at this action in such a narrow lens, because this is not happening in a vacuum. Instead, we should look at it through the overall context of all of this admin's immigration policies, which have been bad for the US economy.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/05/12/g-s1-12...
Depends a lot on how that remote worker's children vote.
Don't worry, I'm sure their leadership is thinking "AI Bots" instead of remote workers.
Can you explain more? This statement is already true before this policy change, so I don't understand why this is not a non sequitur. But I know this is a common rhetoric so I am trying to understand what the logic is.
Thats true but now they hate remote workers. They want you in that timezone.
Plenty of tech workers in Canada and LATAM in the same time zones
They want you in the US for tax purposes too.
They should clamp down on that next. Looking at the past 50 years, offshoring has only caused trouble for the citizens of the country and led things like the rust belt happening.
The rust belt was not caused by call centers in Pakistan, that was the Petrodollar and China deals. But it would be great to have both back (call centers and manufacturing).
That will come next.
And AI.
I'd love to understand how people think the H1B program is going to survive the LLM era. Why in the world would I import a foreign worker to do something I can just as easily tell a clanker to do? The clanker is better at this stuff than I am!
Is it really just a matter of empire-building, at the end of the day? That can't last. Management realizes that, right?
This is an inane comment. Here are the two types of "remote" work:
1. Remote within the US. You still need valid work authorization;
2. Remote outside the US. This is just offshoring and if it really worked, every tech jobs would be offshored. Companies have been trying to do this for decades. Companies would love nothing more than to offshore every white collar job. They would if they could.
So the exact same person working within the US, even better if sitting in an office, is a good employee but if they're working from abroad all of a sudden they're not that good?
I know this is a much popular opinion now. But I can't help and ask this again:
If a company hires an engineer in India, instead of Seattle, how does America (and workers) benefit? Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains, its just a hiring decision.
The question is whether these restrictions increase American employment or just accelerate the exodus of jobs while making the US a less attractive place for talented people.
For one, the engineer in India doesn't drive the demand for housing in Seattle thus keeping it more reasonably (less insanely) priced.
There are many negative externalities of mass migration that are borne by the locals while benefits mostly accrue to a handful of... shysters.
> For one, the engineer in India doesn't drive the demand for housing in Seattle thus keeping it more reasonably (less insanely) priced.
I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.
If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).
Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.
Someone recently pointed out to me that rent and housing are actually down in Dallas due to crackdown on H1B’s: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-dallas-h1b-housing-m...
I think it’s pretty clear that Immigration has a direct strain on housing. It’s been a big problem in Canada too. Of course if you just keep building to increase the supply, that would be desirable.
Supply is rising from builders and also from lack of buying, iiuc the flattening and recent drops does line up with immigration and layoff changes, and its often quoted by the multiple local real estate agents weve talked to.
Obviously supply matters most but that doesnt mean demand isnt still a significant factor.
> I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.
Would you say that supply and demand share some kind of economic relationship?
The engineer does marginally increase housing demand. They also increase local and federal tax revenue to support education, healthcare and other services. And the engineer will spend a large portion of their salary in the local economy, helping to support all the other business in Seattle. So there are also positive externalities.
What are some of the other "many negative externalities" you mention?
I feel like we could have the best of everything if you we just built more housing to keep up with demand.
It's just a never ending balance problem. Also the "just build more housing" is such a numbers only view. Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to hate budget cookie cutter apartment complexes; they're ugly, neighbor problems, noise, pets, etc. What people really mean is they want a single family house sitting on land, but you just can't have both.
I don't know what a "numbers only view" means. But I lived in Tokyo for a long time and I basically think it is an ideal city, and obviously there are lots of factors, but I think the single biggest factor is the abundance of housing. They have way more of it and it leads to so many wonderful things, like mass transit or an endless supply of little hole-in-the-wall restaurants, bars, and cafes in walking distance.
Look at how people vote with their wallets: there is an enormous demand for housing in places like Brooklyn. That doesn't mean we need to turn the whole nation into Brooklyn, but I think (given the massive demand) why shouldn't we have a few more places like Brooklyn, i.e. dense urban areas?
Most places in the US have a remarkably low population density; we can definitely greatly expand the housing supply with a little infill and still have lots of suburbs.
The engineer in India also doesn’t drive demand for managers and product teams and ops people and HR and payroll staff and canteen workers and office space construction and highways and education spending in the US. All that happens in Chennai instead.
Housing is not a finite resource. Not building more housing is a choice.
people don't buy "housing." They buy views, they buy location, they buy neighborhood character. There are perfectly good houses in Nebraska---yet people aren't swarming to Nebraska. It's not because there's anything wrong with the housing.
This is the point the "just build more supply" folks never mention. Close to markets, water, aesthetically pleading single family houses on land. Like there's a reason housing crisis only happens in popular cities, because well, they're popular for a reason. Also people shit on zoning laws (yes they could be better), but I'm sure they dont want to live in hong kong style back to back concrete mega apartments with no parks
Housing (in a given area) is a finite resource and not building more housing (in a given area) is a choice.
Yes but it also has a pretty long lead time so continued mass immigration always drives up the price. It's true of most hard infrastructure.
It's mostly due to absurdly difficult to get permits.
A benefactor decided to solve the housing crisis, created a development company. Gave up 2 years later. Stating the legal burden to get permits was the biggest financial obstacle. We are ready to build from the start, 2 years later we still couldn't build and spend most of our capital in lawyers in hope to get any approval.
Which makes cutting back on immigration a short term solution.
Population growth is driven largely by immigration though.
And what do you suppose drives the growth in housing?
I mean, if the goal is fewer people, then there are many many nefarious ways to achieve that.
Really with birthrates the way they are going, unless radical life extension comes soon it's going to be a problem that "solves itself".
We could also just do a good ol' fashioned culling!
But look at the other side. An engineer living in Seattle pays taxes and contributes to the economy. Seattle loses that benefits if that same job moves to India.
So, I am not sure if that housing argument alone makes that a better outcome for America (and workers).
Microsoft employs more than Software engineers.
Its Azure Hardware division that manages its first party silicon and its deployment has a huge hardware and electrical engineering presence. These fields don't have as many people in America in them, because Software has paid so much more for the last two decades, why would anyone go EE when they could go CS and make 2-3x more. In other countries, these degrees were paid similar so there is a larger pool to pull from then in America.
You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer
Middle america is full of experienced EE's making $100K a year. After 20 years at the same company.
And they are good at it.
That's true. Problem is a lot of the time Middle America is comfortable and doesn't want to move out to the valley or Seattle.
Remote work makes that easier now, but with silicon / EE its not always the most optimal way to work.
Middle America EE is also not building data center class chips or infrastructure most of the time, would it be easier to get one of them up to speed, yes. But it's the equivalent of throwing a front-end engineer into C or embedded programming or vice versa.
At that salary, you're just proving the "why go EE when you can go CS and make 2X more" argument, at least if we're talking about a 20+ year senior dev/architect type.
I agree. Specialized engineering is very different from software, you can't easily replace that expertise.
My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.
They may. I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases. The problem is, that is probably incredibly hard to define and pass as legislation or whatever has to be done.
H1B and offshore jobs can be beneficial to America though, and that was why the program started. Sufficient guardrails just never went up and now there is opportunity for some abuse. But that abuse isn't across the board, there is still beneficial H1B and offshoring going on mixed in with abuse.
"I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases"
How would that work if the remote people were employed by a different company that was given a contract by the home company to provide certain pieces of software or specific computing services?
Hey man I'm just a software engineer now, I can't speak on public policy.
My best effort, the contract is a red herring, we only care about the company that employs the abroad remote employees which is the contractual company in this case. If that contractual company is also abroad, we tax (tariff?) the contract.
> You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer
But but but I was told that unions will force employers to retrain folks instead of laying them off.
If they're physically here on US soil on a visa, they're paying the same taxes as any other US citizen. Sales tax, property tax, Social Security, Medicaid, etc..
Lower expenses for the company means the shareholders profit more.
A follow up question for you: why isn’t India lobbying heavily to end the H1B program? Wouldn’t it be a massive economic benefit to them?
> Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains
Sorry, what now?
Well, you can only offshore jobs complex up to a certain degree, not frontier talent or higher management. The O1 visa will likely still be in effect for them; what's getting rejected are worker-level visas.
Legal Immigration is a net positive to America. These folks follow our rules, work hard, move the needle and sometimes create entire companies and industries. The vast majority of educated legal immigrants who add value come here to study first, work, and then get their GC (except Indians who are stuck in the backlog hell).
1.4M green cards are given out each year, and of those, only 140k to legal employment immigrants. Their families get counted so it's <70k GCs most years. 95%+ of immigration happening here is family based, descendent based, or other ways.
We all need to learn about the system we criticize a bit more! The real problems are elsewhere.
Maybe I’m in the minority here, but do we want to win talent war or not?
We should be thrilled to be attracting talent from other countries. Most countries do not have this luxury.
Bring smarter, qualified people to the US. If not, they’ll find a way somewhere else
You assume this is talent. Thats not at all the case. Most are mediocre workers who came in as masters students and got OPT and h1b eventually with PERM.
The talented workers can always apply for the O1 and get approved
Talent isn't enough for O-1, because the criteria are mostly about individual achievements. An established professional can fulfill them easier than a more talented junior. The criteria are about demonstrating that it has to be this specific individual, who would bring something more than the generic talent you can always get from the market by paying more than your competitors.
O-1 is also easier to get in fields like academia and entertainment, where everyone is building their individual brand. Corporate employees have a harder time qualifying, because their contributions are rarely attributed to them in public.
There's different degrees of talent. An international student who graduates from Stanford or MIT would not qualify for an O1 visa, but the US would be shooting itself in the foot to send them back.
(Ignoring the political context of this post) No. I don't want to fight a war. I want a peaceful and secure life. I have two oceans and military ten times the size it needs to be to effectively protect me. I don't need the number to go up or more plastic garbage.
But if you stop growing, for how long will your peaceful secure life last?
Do you believe that economics is zero-sum?
>do we want to win talent war or not?
Talent war against whom? It's not like the best and brightest are lining up to defect to China.
> Bring smarter, qualified people to the US. If not, they’ll find a way somewhere else
More than 70% of H1B in tech is from a single country, where cheating is considered a normal aspect of life. I'm sure most people here have at least once encountered this cultural difference in their day to day work.
While I still think H1B program is needed, it has to be revamped, putting cap per country is the most obvious first step.
I would actually prefer having a job so that I can avoid starving, than to "win the talent war", whatever that means.
I see it more as a brain drain. I wonder how the world would be if those extremely talented people have stayed in their home countries and contributed to the local economies and development of the respective countries rather than contributing to the American imperialism.
Return immigrants are a non-negligible plus for the countries the people returned to because they saw other ways of working and lives and approaches and they seed their original countries. I do agree brain drain can be rough, but cross-polination of skills is super useful.
“Talent” is an subjective term.
This is a nepotism war
America already won here, the top tier talent outside America is already here or looking to get to America. The big name companies hiring them aren't doing it to save money. It is the outsourcing companies that are basically sweatshops that Trump is targeting.
Sounds great on paper, but in reality it is a program to bring mediocre workers that would do anything for the opportunity, including being underpaid. My company did this, on a smaller scale than Microsoft, and the result is the worst employees we have in US.
Microsoft isn't the biggest user of this program, Amazon is: https://miserablyunemployed.com/market/h1b
Different program, but weird that you'd need that many visas in a market where so many US developers are unemployed.
Not weird, just cheaper labor.
That's for H1B immigration visa applications. Those are not green cards.
The first sentence of TFA:
> President Donald Trump’s administration is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using H-1B visas
Everything described in the article, is about H1-B. So yes, the action is preventing greencard applications for those H1-B visas, but that is functionally the same as restricting Microsoft's access to H1-Bs since a future green card sponsorship is the reason many are there working for them on that visa.
Suprised they didnt get amazon and oracle.
oh wait...
An HR recruiter at an old job told me that they would post a job they preferred or only had budget for a h1b that they would post to obscure job boards and post the job on college campuses that they knew would not get many views. However they posted it met the legal definition to get what they wanted.
Microsoft is a global employer. This suspension means the job hires will be “in” India, or Canada, or Poland, or Japan, until the policy changes again. It’s not as significant as anyone would hope.
This seems to be the case.
I live in Vancouver Canada so just north of Seattle.
Just recently another building downtown got a big Microsoft logo slapped on it. A colleague of mine said that it’s because of “Microsoft refugees”.
My understanding is that Canadian FAANG offices are staffed mostly with those who cannot (and often will never get) a US visa, plus the odd local who doesn't want to move to the US for personal or family reasons.
I’m quite shocked that this was even open to abuse to begin with. Clearly, the US has very strict immigration and green card laws. So enforcement has been lax? Or were deals made under the table with these companies and previous administrations?
Visa programs have been widely abused for decades. This just addresses the PERM portion for a few companies. The abuses of the OPT, CPT programs are insidious and have resulted in a job market that completely disincentives the hiring of new grad Americans. It's not uncommon to find job postings that are "H1B only". Companies won't even consider citizens. H1B, H4 EAD have become a way for ethnic nepotism and kickback programs to operate without consequences and get American companies to fire Americans in favor of foreign workers. This is just the smallest step in the right direction.
Hmm? Green card fraud is pretty easy and very common. You put out an ad for the job role. Then you sort the fake resumes to the top and fail them in the interview.
Boom, perm green card. Every big company does it.
I don't think you meant to write 'green card' there? At least, what you've written makes absolutely no sense as a description of how a green card might fraudulently be obtained.
PERM is an employment based green card that requires a labor market test. In my own experience, I’ve been part of fake job postings and interviews.
Effectively you put the persons role up as a job ad, then fail a few people in the interview and that’s all it takes for PERM.
They weren’t real interviews. The job postings wasn’t real. I interviewed people so someone on the team already could get a PERM.
An individual immigrant violating US immigration law is dealt with very strictly.
A money-making interest violating US immigration law is a completely different matter, because capital loves nothing more than cheap labor and is willing to subject labor to the ordeal of being the individual immigrant dealing with US immigration law, so long as they don't cost as much as Americans.
It's been abused for decades, if you're of the mindset that hiring H1B workers for cheaper is an abuse of the system instead of the intended result.
H1B != green card
It's part of the same system. The system is a largely fraudulent one throughout. Doesn't matter if you're applying for an initial H1B or a PERM.
This system is ostensibly there so that we can draw that skilled 10X engineer or brilliant researcher in India, UK, Romania, Australia, whatever, to America - to boost our companies and get his/her productivity into our GDP instead of some other country's companies and GDP. If used that way, I am all for it. Most of us have met many non-citizens who are very obviously a net benefit to our country due to their talent and ambition.
But this system is used in practice to depress all of our wages, to knock out rungs on the career ladder for new graduates, and to create a semi-indentured workforce more tolerant of low pay and poor working conditions, by bringing over completely average developers of the variety that you could just as easily get by putting up a table at your local college's career day.
I don't blame the workers who accept this offer, as being paid on the low end of our scale here is obviously an upgrade or they wouldn't take it. But it's a betrayal of our domestic workers. A financial hit for some of us, and for those earlier in their career, a major blocker to them getting jobs in the first place.
The entire program is a farce. It's the process generating the fraudulent "golly, we just can't find a US citizen for the job" claims, complete with fake ads designed to be undiscoverable.
We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations. And most of that time we’re at full employment. This policy with squander that asymmetric advantage, resulting in less innovation, lower growth, fiercer global competition as the talent starts competing from local markets, lower job growth for American workers. This will get worse over generations because the first gen immigrants in h1b have kids. We will lose out on their future talent.
Is your main source of income investment in unlisted burgeoning tech companies? If not, you're arguing against your own wealth. Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose, with no serious attempt whatsoever to try and get local talent. It doesn't have to be sinister, it's just what HR departments are used to doing again and again.
Do you know what stops Microsoft from building an office in, say, Czechia, hiring all the same people who were previously able to get a US work visa/green card/etc. but are now unable to, for the same labour, and paying Czech rates rather than US rates?
Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.
Outsourcing happens but larger firms repeatedly run into the issue that management, admin, and local talent provides diminishing returns. Most of the larger US-based firms have standards that are built on decades of developed industry practices, something that can sometimes be missing from outsourced workforces on a cultural level. Hiring in domestically at least plants folks in environments where they can learn those processes over time. I suspect this is one (amongst many) reasons why US work visas are so single-employer contingent - you don't want talent you trained from the ground up to be able to easily leave for another role somewhere.
That’s not outsourcing. It’s off-shoring, which is (IMO) quite a bit easier and something that a lot of companies are fairly successful at.
Outsourcing is not new, yet they haven't done it to date. you cannot seriously think that visa are the only reason why they didn't to date, or do you?
> Outsourcing is not new, yet they haven't done it to date
I didn't say "outsourcing", outsourcing is where you have a different company do the thing (who may or may not be in the same country).
What I am describing is "offshoring" (specifically where it's the same company, though this is not strictly necessary for the word "offshoring").
> yet they haven't done it to date
- SEC filing, MICROSOFT CORPORATION, for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2026, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/0001193125263...i.e. 45.7% of their staff never even needed a US visa, green card, or HB-1.
The alternative, as we all know, is well educated people staying in their home countries and creating companies that compete globally, meaning more services will move overseas. I'm OK with that but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that in no way will reducing H1Bs (or similar) increase local wages or employment rates in the software sector.
Why "unlisted burgeoning tech companies"?? H1 Bs are going to big, publicly listed US companies. Which by the way, 60%+ of Americans own a stake in due to their 401ks, pensions, IRAs etc. So I think bringing in top talent from around the world could be really good for the average American.
I own a home health care agency in 15 states, software company, roofing company and real estate. I see the broad range of employment. My father was an immigrant. My mother is a descendant of the mayflower.
And I disagree that it has been show in har foreign labor depreciates domestic labor. In fact economic research has shown the opposite. If that were the case then we should make it illegal for people from West Virginia and Idaho to migrate to New York or SF.
Are you confident that globally uncompetitive wages are good for you long-term, though?
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
European auto sector didn't loose because they didn't flood the country with enough low wage workers (which they did anyway since 2015) to compete with China on labor costs. They lost precisely because they gave up investing in local labor that made all the pricy high-end innovations like electronic brakes, self-driving and EV-tech, and entered in the race to the bottom to boost shareholder value while cutting the expensive innovation R&D. This strategy did wonders for EU auto shareholders for about ~10 years while the badge prestige carried a lot of inertia, especially in markets like Russia, US and China, but it lost most momentum in the last couple of years, as EU cars are now seen as dated, overpriced, cheaply made, expensive to fix and underwhelming compared to the new players from US and China. Nothing to do with lack of cheap immigrant labor.
US was investing in AI powered self-driving tech, China was investing in new EV motor and battery tech with advanced manufacturing automation to cut costs, EU makers were just reselling diesel engines with fancy badges hoping the EV and self-driving fad will pass. EU car industry went from decades of being the global trend setter in terms of designs and technology, to being the follower, at least in technology.
Also, a lot of the manufacturing costs in EU not just for the auto sector, is now majority made of taxes, compliance, bureaucracy and labor's cost of housing. If you import workers they'll be under the same high compliance rules, and same expensive housing pressures, unless you bet they'll accept to live in slum-like conditions in order to undercut the locals, in which case you might as well cut the facade and just advocate for return to slavery.
That's just one perspective and I disagree with it.
European carmakers are where they are because electromobility reset their legacy advantages (a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages); now the same dollar amount gets them less R&D output than in China, because engineers are more expensive, and production itself is difficult to keep competitive for the exact same reason (also why a lot of car production has shifted east into lower wage European countries long before Chinese cars became competitive).
If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well (I'm not saying that would be desirable, just that it's a given).
>a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages
Wrong, auto-sector wages back then were much higher in regards to local purchasing power (especially on the housing front) and also unions were much stronger. Now they're already lower class jobs. A VW factory worker could buy a house and take his family on vacation with a stay at home wife. Good luck with that today when you see how much housing prices have outpaced wage growth since then.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor and less regulations. As do Japan's car makers.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
> just that it's a given
Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
The west's industry marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market. If your western cars aren't cutting edge and innovative you failed. And they aren't cutting edge and innovative because you didn't invest enough in R&D at the right time, because you valued short term shareholder returns, basically the plague of most western corporation.
> You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor. As do Japan's car makers.
Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers. Not saying this is bad, but makes it harder to compete.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would have internationally competitive cotton.
The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
> The west marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market.
This is an overgeneralization. E.g. Several of the most successful German companies are grocery retailers (as boring and low-tech as it gets).
> Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
I'm not saying you can't pay out globally uncompetitive wages as long as you're sitting on an R&D advantage, but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them (just consider the Japanese electronics industry in the 80s/90s for example; people said the exact same shit back then until they no longer could).
>Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers.
Not true anymore. They spend more on bean counters, marketers, managers, consultants, lawyers, etc than on engineers.
>The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
Because of imported cheap labor or because of automation at scale no country can match?
>but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them
Only if you make poor deals where you voluntarily give them all your hard earned technology in exchange for access to their market. Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers catching up to EU and the US, if all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
America is the #3 exporter of cotton in the world, and the world leader in manufacturing and exporting the harvesters (John Deere, Case International) which have replaced those slaves as pickers of cotton.
The facts of the matter support your point much better than your counterfactual did (I do realize you probably did not intend to be taken literally here).
> Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose
That's a (citation needed) right there.
The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16736/w167...
Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."
What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.
Foreign labor helped build the very successful companies that have paid me extremely well.
Immigration adds to both supply and demand. It’s not at all clear that the effect should be suppressed wages.
They can help their own country with their talent, we don't "need" it to live.
You hear that a lot in third world countries where people nonlonger wanna go work.
The general idea of academia is (massive) amounts of international exchange to help ideas get spread around and, hopefully, improved upon. That is why most universities participate in student exchanges or why many academic degrees include at least one semester in a different country.
Well if you would have read just the title, these restrictions are for corporations, not academia.
I would argue this is not accurate. The Elite Overproduction theory suggests you can have too many highly educated people and H-1B requires a bachelor's at least but incentivizes higher education. However, as it stands we already have an oversupply of highly educated people. The theory predicts that having an oversupply of highly educated people destabilizes society.
I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.
No one really cared when we were at full employment, the problem is that CS is the new liberal arts degree and it looks like it might only be getting worse.
Thats pretty insulting to the amount of effort required to obtain a CS degree.
Yes I know every po dunk college up and down the country added CS to their collection (because all you need is a computer lab so it goes in with degrees like Math, Physics etc).
CS even at lesser colleges requires sustained discipline in the maths, sciences, logic theory, and much more depending on the university.
Liberal Arts is a very different animal and while it can also be a very rigorous program for committed students, it has a greater opportunity for students to slack off and still graduate. It is much harder to hide and get through a CS program with this mentality and so it deserves more respect than you are giving it.
I assume they're comparing them in terms of employment value not effort required
Well if you have a liberal arts degree you might have learned something applicable to a world beyond computer programming
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?
I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.
>We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.
Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".
Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.
In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional. At big tech most employees are pretty good so it doesn’t stand out, but at random fortune 500s tech teams are often led by h1bs who are clearly the most competent employees on the department even though they usually aren’t involved in management. My experience from around 5 Fortune 500 non tech companies. These companies would have big problems if they couldn’t recruit exceptional foreign workers
>In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional.
I never said they're bad at their job, I said they're just doing the same jobs the locals can do, nothing exceptional.
And I disagree. There are not enough locals who are able and willing to fill these roles at non prestigious non tech companies in omaha. If the H1Bs leave these companies I dont think they would be able to realistically replace them. Obviously they could find someone to take the job, I just think theyd be worse at it. Worse enough to materially change outcomes.
> There are not enough locals who are able and willing to fill these roles at non prestigious non tech companies in omaha.
Maybe those companies pay shit or offer shit work conditions?
> If the H1Bs leave these companies I dont think they would be able to realistically replace them.
What about "muh free market supply/demand capitalism"?
Because when a company can't find a worker to accept their jobs, then the government gives them a foreign worker visa to fill it, but when I can't find a job, the government doesn't give me a job or deport a foreign worker to free up a place for me, it's considered my fault or skill issue. So where's the free market capitalism there?
Well, the market rejected your skills, so that's how free market capitalism works. Get good, then get employed.
But no, people only take the parts of insert preferred political flavor here that they seem beneficial to them and they discard the parts that are not.
Yea maybe it possible for these firms to poach top talent from tech companies, but I doubt it. Even if they pay the same prestige is worse. And employees at this level are often making a mil at tech companies, non tech just cant afford that. Much more likely that they just move all tech ops overseas.
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.
Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed. Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
There's also a plethora of people with CS degrees who can't even write FizzBuzz on their own, even given a warmed-up IDE and a partially filled out skeleton of the program. And no, this is not idle speculation, I've interviewed quite a few of these people. So I wouldn't personally put much stock in "has a CS degree" as a marker of qualification for any particular job. That applies, of course, regardless of nationality.
Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
Having worked with many Americans and many non-Americans over the last 35+ years, I'd say there's no general difference in ability that correlates to nationality. I've worked with dumb Americans and dumb non-Americans, and vice-versa.
> There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
Where are all these people? Every time I post a job, I get thousands of garbage resumes.
Then let Americans create unions. If this is abuse of asymmetric power then balance it. It’s not about that though it’s about nativism, racism, and punishment of liberal elites.
I'm sorry but even as an immigrant in the USA this is bs. The h1b program brought a lot of great talent but also depressed employment rates for american graduates in computer science that's just a fact (please don't bother asking for a link google works as well for you as it does for me).
the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.
That's not supported by economic data or wage trends. Blocking unionization is a far bigger driver than immigration. That's why Steve jobs was trying to form a nonhiring cartel before he died.
If there's any truth to what you say, then each of these immigrant workers receive a salary which is significantly higher than their US born colleagues. They are as you say "top talent from around the world". A person who is among the world's best certainly has at least double the salary, right?
Many do. Look at the ranks of founders, context level execs, all made up of a disproportionate share of immigrants. That's also not necessary to justify the proposition that immigration doesn't reduce market wages if it increases demand. It is possible that the demand for software far exceeds software developers and we could 10x or 100x employment and demand would still keep wages the same. You need to show why the fact of salary levels and directional trends are causally linked.
> Many do.
Every one of them should have at least double the salary if there's any truth in claims of their superiority to domestic workers and any truth to the claims of a shortage of talent.
The world's top athletes and artists all have salaries in 10x - 100x of the average worker in their field. And what more: Their own countries are usually world leading in those fields also. But when it comes to migrant workers, somehow they are exceptionally talented beyond what any domestic worker could even compare to, yet their own countries aren't leading in their field. Hmmmmm....
Well, the program may be poorly executed, but don't ignore the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures. It does have that aspect to it.
But that raises the debate ... does the US really need to export MORE of its culture at taxpayer/citizens expect ? :|
As to the pause, repeal, destruction of this program, etc., however its characterized eventually, it seems to be inline with the idea of moving much of the manufacturing that left back home as well.
The psychology experts on youtube are all lamenting the disconnection of people and communities due to internet usage and less face time.
Framing that in terms of markets, the internet has empowered people to do more themselves, and rely on direct interaction with others less.
Economic shifts are behavioral shifts at the core, and in 2026 every programmer has a staff of 1,000+ unpaid AI agents at their disposal.
We can all just download programmers now. :|
> the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures
That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.
I have no doubt everyone who has abused the program, has done so to the best of their abilities.
We can count how many people are truly lamenting its loss, and follow the money.
> fully abused to suppress wages
Anyone looking at the salaries in big tech will laugh you out of the room. You think the six figure salaries for writing shitty ass Go services is _wage suppression_ ?
When they're paying $125k instead of the market rate of $200k + equity, absolutely.
Six figures isn't what it used to be. I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Golly gee if only that was a sign that the market is being highly distorted by the high six figure salaries, therefore demonstrating that there's no wage suppression...
> I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Let's be very honest here: the only two in there that have massively increased are housing (due to the aforementioned non existent wage suppression) and healthcare (because america can't into healthcare). Families making 50k do more than fine when it comes to food and gasoline, merely because they don't have 4k of rent to pay.
You must be living under a rock if you think the price of gas or food hasn't changed recently, or that $50k is easy for a family to live on in the US. Or that the price of gas is currently caused by high wages.
And no, I don't live in a major city where rent is $4k.
I agree. We should kick out whichever government caused the gas and food prices to rise so high.
Sure. And regardless, companies shouldn't be allowed to pay immigrants on restrictive visas below market rate.
If the "shitty ass Go service" is delivering the value that software typically does then yes. The whole reason the wages were so high to begin with compared to something like a gas station clerk is that the clerk is delivering value for at most one customer at one time.
Software allows a task that could only be done manually once at a time by one person to be infinitely replicated and scalable at speeds that no single human could do, and that value only requires one person to invest resources to develop it once. Afterwards you got that multiplier of value generated.
This should be obvious but im merely describing the miracle of computing.
So if that software is generating the multiplier of value it is entirely plausible that the company is not providing appropriate compensation to the person tasked with developing that multiplier.
Just because they are high doesn't mean they are high as they should be. Big tech companies were pulled into lawsuits several times over wage suppression tactics and ended up settling.
> fully abused to suppress wages
We should all bear in mind, every government program is a market price distortion, and the workers are going to keep working.
Who they work for is all that has changed.
As someone who interviews 10+ candidates per week for high-paying software engineering jobs, the US pool is not big enough to find qualified people. It feels like H1B shouldn't be needed. But empirically, we do need to invite talented people from other countries.
Saying the pool is too small or calling something a labor shortage is trimming away a bunch of relevant detail. There cannot be a shortage, only a shortage of people 1) qualified to do the work for 2) the compensation and 3) conditions you are offering. That's 3 levers to pull: Train more, pay more, offer better conditions (remote work). Particularly compensation, I have been told that's how supply and demand work.
The current crop of AI startups offer exceptionally high salaries, to the point that San Francisco rents have almost doubled over the past 2 years. Note that the most prominent AI researchers are of Chinese national origin. We can't only pay and train our way into getting talented people. We have to expand the pool internationally.
You can’t just train people and have them be good software engineers… It takes years of training to be a good software engineer (with plenty of people flunking out during the training).
Are you selecting based on a holistic view of merit (projects, personality, capacity to grow in a role) or are you gating based on the same-old LeetCode brain teaser exams? In the latter case there is no shortage of H1B grinders who’ve spent every day for the past 6 months memorizing the puzzles to pass your screens, even if they say nothing about raw ability.
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
You're making a few (reasonable) assumptions based on the base rate of engineering interviewing practices in the industry. I'm not using Leetcode though a coding problem is part of our onsite process. My first screen is mostly a series of knowledge questions and asking candidates to explain projects they built on their resumes. Most candidates cannot do this. They fail to explain their own projects and fail to explain foundational concepts of distributed systems.
As an interviewer I need to be able to challenge candidates to get adequate signal to make an informed selection. My pool is computer science graduates and experienced software engineers. Most candidates fail. I haven't analyzed the distribution but my best guess is that over half of the successful candidates are on work visas.
As someone who was out of work for a large portion of 2025 and attended many interviews, I found interviewing frustrating and failed many. Only after taking a couple of months sitting down and studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode, reading the latest distributed systems literature, and practicing interviewing, I discovered that I genuinely had knowledge and skill gaps. The studying actually helped me become a better engineer. I received several offers after this intensive study period.
I wanted to make a separate comment to respond to the sampling bias question. From discussions with colleagues and analysis of companies, there is a large overhang of credentialed yet low-capability engineers in many high-population countries. For example, the top Indian and Chinese companies offer comparable salaries to the US-owned multinationals resident in their countries. These are outliers.
The vast majority of candidates for Flipcart and Bytedance simply would never be able to perform adequately. These top companies pay extraordinarily highly compared to most software engineering firms in their countries, far beyond the delta between OpenAI and a typical software engineer in the United States. The quality gradient is still there. Flipcart and Bytedance need to compete internationally, so their salaries are pulled upwards substantially.
I see a lot of Polish names in those coding websites leaderboards. It seems to be working, Polish tech industry is growing, as is India's and China's. Idk, grinding seems to work if that's your issue.
So? At least they're grinding, and we as a nation used to have that American grit. Now everyone just sits on their asses and cry "unfair" when someone willing to grind gets better opportunities.
Our discipline fundamentally seeks to remove “grind”. You’re missing the point.
Yeah, that's been my experience as well.
I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.
On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.
Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:
1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.
2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.
I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.
The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.
Paying more guarantees getting more high quality applicants. It also means more applicants who aren’t high quality. That’s why you do interviews instead of choosing randomly. If a company’s hiring process is unable to select the best applicants, that’s a separate problem.
So many employers on this thread are basically revealing they have no idea how to interview and select candidates. It has never been easier to find skilled engineers, and yet they're struggling to hire.
> That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.
And now it has predictably blown up in our faces.
I happen to agree with you that individual companies hoarding high-performers and keeping them useless is a dumb strategy and that it should have been targeted by anti-trust.
I was more pointing out that hoarding high-performers as a country is desirable since geopolitics prioritizes different outcomes than pure capitalism.
Optimally, the US would attract the cream of the crop, the top 5% of the world and let them roam freely inside of the American system with plenty of capital (both money and labor). I'd venture and point out that many of America's greatest technological leaps were a direct result of this kind of strategy (think WWII, the space program, computing, etc, etc).
The reason why increasing wages for low-level jobs is so important is that it puts upwards pressure on all wages above them as well.
If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.
In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.
Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.
Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.
Why does "qualified" always mean someone who commands an inflated salary and can do the job from day one?
Why couldn't it mean someone young, with a reasonable education, who's willing to work at half the price and be trained over the course of years?
I hire new grads and experienced engineers, roughly half of who require visa sponsorship.
What exactly are you paying, do you offer remote work, do you offer training? You can find plently of excellent devs in the USA.
Pay is comparable to top companies in San Francisco. This would probably be comparable to the distribution at the company I'm at now: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic
>But empirically
Ok you said it. Where's your empirical evidence?
me: observes something
you: where's your evidence?
If you need evidence, look at https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic . Anthropic seems to need to sponsor visas for their workforce as well. Just like every other large US company.
Are you hiring for in office or remote?
Then pay more or modify your requirements. Stop chasing unicorns.
We're paying top of market and compete with frontier labs. Your recommendation is to exclude candidates who require visa sponsorship?
This is a load of shit. There are millions of people out of work in the US and it's likely that tens of thousands of those are perfectly qualified developers. Assuming your expectations haven't been completely warped, your real problem is that modern hiring as a process is completely broken as a result of multiple factors.
Both could be true. Just because millions are out of work doesn’t mean every specialty has sufficient domestic talent pool. No one says we should recruit only domestic talent in sports.
H1B does not cover high talents - these are available to anyone who have barely any college education and only 40-60% of H1B visas are used in IT - rest are used elsewhere. Pretty much the claim about talents here is missing the point entirely, unless it is used in combination of "young talents", which is applicable to almost anyone studying, but 90% of them are nowhere near genius level talents, that like I mentioned before H1B simply does not cover, unless someone is lucky and employing geniuses by paying them peanuts in salary because of H1B.
Also all Fortuna 500 companies have offices abroad, where they use local talents already. Just like everywhere in USA there has been increase for roles that require higher security - those are for USA nationals and naturally they exclude any H1B visa holders.
Given that USA tech companies are laying off steadily thousands of software developers over last three years because of optimization efforts that they started around covid times as a push back against demands to raise salaries and freezing those salaries, the only use for H1B would be to put larger pressure on IT job pool in USA to clamp these salaries down.
Clearly this is something that USA administration has caught on as mass recruitment where a lot of those talents are not used is a security issue as it is unregulated. So, despite what other commenters are mentioning, stricter H1B is better for USA software developers, as slaves from H1B are driving salaries down.
You’re under including categories that while not identical are reasonably included in the argument that the domestic employment pool isn’t large enough for the talent. Dismissing “low level Java devs” ignores the fact that such skills are actually a small percentage of the available workforce.
I used to be optimistic that we could train displaced coal miners to code. This was tried in the 2010s and did not work. There is a distribution of aptitude in different subjects.
Imagine how much effort it would take to train a league of Google engineers to be NFL players. It's far better to use a recruiting pipeline of people who self-select for the role and have achieved rounds of selection for their talent.
> the US pool is not big enough to find qualified people
This is absurd. It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them. You and every other employer. You are shooting yourself and your peers in the foot through this stinginess.
> It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them.
I'm all for companies doing this, but the pipeline needs to be improved as whole, meaning we need to have candidates that already have enough prior education so that there's more of them that can be trained more quickly. And one way to address that is to make the entire public schooling system better through better funding, starting all the way from kindergarten through to the university system.
Just to understand your recommendation, I should create a software engineering training for candidates who do not require work visa sponsorship, but who couldn't pass the original interview, for my small software team?
And do this to avoid hiring a Chinese or Indian candidate with a master's degree from an American public university?
It's always somebody else's responsibility, isn't it? Not yours.
You haven't shared your recommendation. What is it?
You’re simply outcompeted by other employers. Get good.
NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Microsoft are outcompeted because they hire from H1B visa pools? This is your assertion?
You’d get more qualified Americans applying if you offered more money.
We pay on par with the most in-demand employers in the San Francisco Bay Area, all who also hire people who require visa sponsorship. Anthropic hires many H1Bs and O-1s.
Good for you! What I said is still true.
It's demonstrably not. NVidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Jane Street, the National Basketball League, Bridgewater, Apple, etc, all sponsor visas so they can recruit the best. Raising pay for basketball players doesn't reward exclusion of global talent.
What demonstrates that the market for programmers is not subject to the basic laws of supply and demand?
I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals. I can absolutely believe that your company can't afford to pay what it would take to meet your goals with only US persons. But "we want more than we can afford" is very different from "there aren't enough."
I don't understand why you keep mentioning other companies. What does the fact that a bunch of big companies all sponsor visas have to do with the fact that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, just companies wishing they could pay less and hire more, and acting on that wish in various ways?
The company I work at pays a similar distribution to the H1B salaries offered by Anthropic: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic .
> I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals.
You can't make that guarantee. These companies spend lots of money to hire immigration lawyers to sponsor visas and process H1B -> Perm processes. The market would absolutely reward a participant who could bypass this headache and hire only people who do not require visa sponsorship. But the counterfactual has been tried. Many startups do not sponsor visas and they get outcompeted frequently.
I can make that guarantee. You're telling me you wouldn't have enough people if you hired away every single employee of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft? Because that is something you could do with enough money.
Labor isn't some magic thing exempt from supply and demand. Pay more, get more. It works.
If you can't afford to pay more to get more, well, that happens. We don't always have enough money to buy everything we want. The fact that I can't afford a Cirrus Vision jet is unfortunate, but it doesn't mean there's a shortage of jets.
Except this doesn’t make sense if the argument is that there are a ton of unemployed CS people sitting around. The labor market is like any other market.
It makes perfect sense. I interview unemployed CS people all the time. Some excel at interviews and some don't. I was unemployed for many months myself. As an interviewer I don't see a strong correlation with unemployed status and ability to pass a rigorous software engineering interview.
The labor market is like any other market, which means there’s no such thing as a shortage, just supply and demand.
The solution is staring you right in the face: Move your business to a country where these "qualified people" live, hire there and serve that market instead.
I should tell my leadership team to move a company whose business relationships are in San Francisco, to other countries? All to avoid sponsoring people on work visas? And offshoring a business is superior to hiring people from other countries?
They made a mistake to make their company in San Fransisco, since it obviously is a pitiful backwater compared to the superior technology hubs of the world where all the greatest and leading talent comes from. You'd want to have your business there if you want to stand any chance of being in the forefront.
Besides, moving a business is a whole lot easier than uprooting people and their families and putting pressure on the local population.
I don't buy your claim of "high-paying". If you don't pay as per US resident and urban standards, good domestic candidates obviously won't bother applying.
That sounds like a serious systemic issue. What are US candidates lacking that you find in candidates elsewhere?
for interviewing 10+ candidates a week, that is just a BS claim - USA is nowhere that small
There's never a labor shortage, only a compensation shortage.
If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.
Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.
And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.
I dunno, I don't work in Big Tech and I feel the commenter you're-replying-to's concerns. There is some sort of mismatch if my pipeline is this empty and this many qualified applicants are jobless and unhappy about it. Comp is fine and people can live wherever they want, but there is no way my team is going to meet its goal of doubling in size by the end of the year.
I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.
I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.
> There is some sort of mismatch if my pipeline is this empty
The mismatch may just be that you have no idea how to set up your hiring tools or operate your hiring process.
Your empty pipeline is telling you that your comp is not, in fact, fine.
It’s really that simple. If you’re not getting enough qualified applicants then you need to make your offer more attractive. That could involve culture, work environment, or perks, but the biggest thing is pay.
Of course a company’s ability (or willingness) to pay is not unlimited so that may not be a possibility. But then you have to accept that you’re not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet your hiring desires. That’s ok. I am not able (or willing) to pay what it takes to meet my luxury-sports-car desires either.
There is an apparent contradiction: you’re offering good pay and not getting many applicants, but there are a ton of jobless programmers. How to square that? The former is something you’re directly experiencing, the latter is something you’re hearing through the grapevine, maybe getting some broad numbers for. The obvious conclusion would be that the jobless programmer situation is not nearly as bad as people say.
> only a compensation shortage.
This is said all the time, and don't get me wrong, I like "compensation" as much as the other guy, but to me this just sounds like a race to the bottom (or sky) for companies.
It's great for those compensated for sure. But what happens once the companies with deepest pockets, FAANG and such, pay the most and drain the job market, what happens to all the other companies then? It raises the bar significantly for any new startup, makes it ever more impossible for any boring, middle-of-the-road company to find anyone remotely capable. Ultimately growth of the tech sector is limited by the number of people you have available, regardless of how much you pay for them. If anything, another country with more potential talent could even surpass the one playing alone in its own sandbox.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and maybe in an economic downturn it's even a good thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't come with no tradeoffs.
If your business (including your startup) relies on paying sub-market wages, that's a "you" problem. You're not entitled to underpay employees because your business can't survive if you don't.
I see this with startups all the time. Cofounders get 30-50% equity with preferences and then want to hire a lead engineer as a first hire... with 0.5% equity and a $100,000 salary.
Big companies already do a lot to pay as little as they possibly can. AI is just the latest foil to suppress wages.
Oh I don't disagree. I don't think of it in terms of entitlement, I think of it in terms of growth and competitiveness.
What I disagree with is "it's not a labor problem, it's a compensation problem" framing.
I think it IS a labor problem, and also a compensation problem. Compensation itself only solves for the local maxima.
When I see a comment like this, all I can say is that I don't believe you. You are a liar.
Do you interview people?
Not being "qualified" is simply a euphemism for not willing to work for the low wages we'd like to offer to offshore talent.
look harder.
doubt.
"qualified" : adj , willing to work for 60% of market rate.
Most developers are still overpaid from the pre-AI boom, so this sounds about right.
Which has an easy solution: you want to be part of the program, the state announces your opening nationally and internationally. That way the state knows exactly how many are applying and why
More state control? Isn't that haram around here?
I prefer state over corporate all day of the week. I have legal pathways to force the state to do things... I do not have for corporate for the same thing.
In the UK, we simply removed that requirement, so company doesn't have to give evidence of shortage and also we set the wage limit to a quarter of median earning for given profession (Labour government increased it to just half now). This means corporations have no incentive to hire local workers as it is vastly cheaper to hire (and exploit) immigrants, as they don't have means to pick and choose once they are in the country. Meanwhile local people can't find work and have to battle increased rents and pressure for access to public services. All by corporations who are very shy when it comes to paying taxes.
oh and that entry level web developer on lowest band is actually a senior systems engineer? Worry not, Home Office don't check that.
Corporations have been pulling this scam for forever. Governments too.
Department budget doesn't allow for a new Desktop PC ? Call it a "data collection terminal."
Just change the words to the ones you like, and cash those checks, easy as flying a kite ! :D
That's true, but what's new about it is the scale. It's called Boriswave and since Labour have not scrapped it, should be called Keirwave or Andywave.
The PERM process is a bit ridiculous. If followed in the spirit it was written, then PERM would be restricted to top-tier professions.
My own PERM would have had no chance of passing certification.
There are valid criticisms to be made of the current immigration system but saying "this sucks" adds nothing and is of zero value. Here, let me help:
1. Doing layoffs at the same time as hiring temporary workers is antithetical. Which is it: you can't find someone to do a job or you have too many workers? Yes, jobs aren't completely interchangeable but large companies like Microsoft hire generic software engineers. Retrain;
2. the H1B->GC funnel where H1Bs have no pre-country quota but GCs do creates a massive backlog for India, in particular, and allows companies like Infosys and Tata to keep "temporary" workers in indentured servitude for decades;
3. Despite safeguards, it's clear that temporary workers get underpaid, particularly at the outsourcing companies, so visas are used to suppress labor costs for both citizens/residents and temporary workers.
Try saying something like that.
They were also often doing basic stuff, like database programming. Even in AI, most of what they produce didn't have marketable value. So, I don't buy that they couldn't find or train anyone here to do the job.
"golly, we can't find a human being for the job, we'll have to use AI"
all that is left is to hire that human that will use AI and do job of whole department of people we did not hire...
In my experience finding good people is hard when the entire world is on the table. Limiting the pool based on stupid concepts like "nationality" is just a jobs program for the low quality people.
As long as you don't mind people remote working then no need to limit the pool nor pay visa fees.
I live near Mt. Rushmore. When my mom was a kid, working there during tourist season was a very common summer job for high school kids. Now it's not, because now temporary foreign labor by means of seasonal visa programs, complete with housing, fills those jobs each summer instead. Are American high schoolers physically/mentally unable to do these jobs? Of course not—yet these job opportunities have been taken from them regardless, replaced with what is essentially seasonal foreign-labor indentured servitude.
Honestly, a lot fewer American teenagers want/are allowed summer jobs these days. They are all focused on doing enrichment activities that will look good on a college application, and low-wage menial jobs don't count for that.
I actually think it's a great thing to let young people from around the world have working holidays in America https://www.usit.ie/experiences/working-holidays/j1-usa/
I work in the public school system and I can definitely assure you that nowhere near “all” high school students are doing what you suppose they are doing.
Sure, but the ones who might plausibly end up junior SWEs at Microsoft are.
Yes, perhaps now that they don't need to compete against all of India, they might actually have a chance at that.
Pay better.
It’s not always about pay. In some special disciplines there are only a handful of people with sufficient training or talent. We don’t hire more Americans by cutting the candidate pool. We hire more by growing the economy with innovation, startup formation, academic research for basic concepts that aren’t commercially viable, government investment in core infrastructure and long horizon moon shots that aren’t commercially feasible.
There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that
To follow up on this, US PhD programs are not generally packed with US citizens, they're frequently the cream skimmed from the rest of the world. For many subspecialties, there's just not going to be enough US citizens to do all the cutting edge work that could/should be done.
We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.
Exactly this. And these talents are both sufficiently scarce, valuable and not included in o1 visas that it makes sense to expand h1b by 10x
I mean, we also break a lot of PhD programs because due to glut of foreign workers, the work environment is hell. I've known several citizens who dropped out because it was 996 type environment and since they didn't need to visa to remain in the US, they could just move on.
Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
What does it mean to "break a lot of PhD programs"? Research is competitive, and hard work. Yeah, there are easier options, but in the long run, the countries with the people willing to work their butts off academically are going to outperform ours if we can't get their best to come here and work their butts off here.
>Clipping a green card to every PhD is probably political non starter. As American, I'd be very leery of such a scheme.
There is actually bipartisan support for trying to make it easier for PhDs to stay - both parties have repeatedly introduced legislation to help with that - but it seems to keep getting derailed by arguments about other aspects of immigration reform.
Ok, but those people aren't H1B's. They were on O-1 visas.
These body shop firms are not hiring world-leading geniuses, they are getting mostly-okay Java devs who will do boring scutwork for the chance at life in America.
O-1 is a strictly regulated visa. Limited to Nobel Prize winners, Influencers, and Underwear models.
H1B is for cheap java devs.
We could also try something that has not yet been attempted: investing heavily in developing people who show signs of talent at an early age and streaming ALL children's education according to their capabilities and interests at a young age, in order to eventually bolster the available pool of highly talented people without having to rely on poaching talent from elsewhere in the world (depriving those countries of an opportunity to benefit from the highly talented people that they sweated and paid to train).
We already do this.
Is there something preventing this right now?
Political will and priorities. It seems like there's always money and enthusiasm for another war, but not to pay for uniformly decent schools with reasonable class sizes and happy, fairly-compensated teachers. Sounds too much like the S-word, probably.
What I'm suggesting here is going to require serious investment on top of what should IMNSHO already be made, because we're talking about creating 3 parallel class streams for different tiers of ability. 3 sets of lesson plans, 3 very different kinds of student with different goals and ways of approaching life. They can't just throw that at one teacher and expect success, but their current track record suggests they would sure and damn well try.
There are several reasons my mother burned out from the classroom, and she's one of many many many such cases: low compensation, vast amounts of unpaid work time developing lesson plans and grading when not in front of students, larger class sizes and no aides to help handle the stress and chaos of another 20 teenagers on top of the 25 you already had in the room, corporatization/enshittification/growing lists of demands placed on teachers to shoulder more classes or pericurriculars, and so on. Hell, I know one (1) current schoolteacher, and they're also presently burned out and on leave. Could just be a coincidence, I guess!
But it is always the pay. Corporations could easily hire American interns and train them, for money. There's millions of people that would love to leave their retain jobs for an internship at a tech company, but there's no economic incentive for the mega corps to train these people.
Tech megacorps already hire interns and pay them very generously. Like annualized 6-figure pay.
There's been plenty of incentive for people to learn to code or study other skills to get a job in tech. Why do they need extra handholding on top of that? If they could do it, they would.
That's not to say more can't be done to strengthen early childhood education or reduce the cost of college. But it's unrelated to whether big tech companies hire foreigners or not.
They train a fraction of the actual labor force. Why should the social cost of job training be put onto taxpayers and individuals, and why should employers be allowed to import labor? Employers should foot the bill for any and all education and work training expenses, and should be allowed to import 0 labor for any reason. Employers would have to compete for the best employees, driving wages up. It's not rocket science.
> Employers should foot the bill for any and all education
Why? That means any education not directly useful to employers won't be funded at all. Not how you build a society. Education should be funded by taxpayers and society because it benefits society. "Taxpayers" includes companies too, not only individuals.
> and work training expenses
They already do. Every company trains employees on their own processes and systems. New employees aren't productive for several months.
> should be allowed to import 0 labor for any reason
Then the work goes abroad. Or these companies don't grow. (Referring solely to tech companies, not outsourcing body shops).
> Employers would have to compete for the best employees, driving wages up.
I understand if you say outsourcing body shops are a problem here. Tech megacorps pay a king's ransom in wages. They've already driven wages up. Any citizen not already working there either doesn't want to for any amount of money or is not good enough.
Companies are going to spend as little money on everything as possible, labor included. If importing labor wasn't cheaper, they wouldn't do it. It's cheaper than the alternative of training Americans to do the role.
> It's cheaper than the alternative of training Americans to do the role.
These people don't exist. Not for Big Tech roles.
You already hit the nail on the head - companies don't want to spend money. You think they like paying new grads (citizens and foreigners) $300k? Why would they do it unless they had no choice?
Sorry but I’ve hired hundreds of people. Not everyone is motivated by pay. I’ve successfully recruited people that turned down hiring pay for better title, project type, flexibility for family reasons, and been unable to recruit people with higher pay.
American policy should be to increase the total number of jobs not restrict where we hire from. We can and should increase our population to 1billion people. If China can employ that many so can we.
What you mean is the pay wasn't high enough to convince people to do a particular job, not that you couldn't find qualified people. Alternatively, you could have made 1 role into multiple, so things like 'work life' balance weren't impacted. This would cost the employer more money, so obviously can't be considered.
American policy should help average Americans, not corporations. There's a larger wealth disparity now than ever. Importing millions of white collar jobs to suppress wages only exacerbates that.
Than $228k? That's what Microsoft pays an entry-level SWE right now. Where are all these qualified people for whom $228k out of college isn't enough money?
I dunno, parent claimed he can't find good people. He could hire them away from his competitors by doubling their salary if he needs them that badly.
Remember how competition was supposed to work? (psst https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall... )
So the competitors also pay more. Existing workers, domestic and foreign, get paid more (hurray). But it doesn't mean more domestic workers get jobs.
Instead work is either not done (less revenue for the company to expand), or is sent overseas. If management gets more comfortable with work going overseas it becomes a very big problem for domestic workers.
I've seen the comp packages. I'm pretty sure that's not the problem.
Same words are said by hotel owners unable to find eg. cleaning ladies for hotels over here in my small country.... touristy area (=very few locals), relatively far away from larger towns with more local population, everything is expensive there (eg. lunch and parking), and they offer minimum wage and then complain.
For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.
The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.
Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.
This might sound controversial but an office job at Microsoft is a teensy-bit more desirable to a citizen than a job cleaning motels.
Microsoft pays new grad SWEs close to a quarter million dollars. Plenty of citizens would gladly take that money if they could land the job.
Sure, but op wants 'good', how much are those people paid?
Also, how much does rent in a 20-minute-drive circle around microsoft cost? And proper health insurance?
I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back, because while earning less in numbers over here, they can get a normal 8 hour job (no overtime, no weekends), proper time off (25, 30 days per year, unlimited sick days of course), and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails, they'll have enough to live comfortably.
>And proper health insurance?
You think Microsoft doesn't pay for "proper health insurance" for their workers?
It's 100x better than the failing public system I have in my rich EU country.
>and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails
In which country is that so? 40h is more or less standard for full-time everywhere I've been so far in white collar careers.
> Sure, but op wants 'good', how much are those people paid?
You're proving my point. Paying more, beyond a certain point, doesn't increase the supply of "good" people. It just moves them around. After that the work starts going to overseas offices.
> I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back
Usually with several hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Financially they're at least 10 years ahead of their peers who stayed home. And that's after paying the higher rents and health insurance in the US.
Not close to that much left over, a lot of money is spent in USA, you're in a foreign country and you spend money on tourisy stuff, plus you're usually "alone" there, and spend more in bars, restaurants, etc.... many came home with very little left over (except a nice line in their CV).
You're paid good money here for 37.5 hours per week, for ~10 months per year, sure the net number is higher in US, but calculating what's left over per hour of work is not that much in favour of US, especially considering what you can buy with that. One of the friends who worked there (google in sf) spent over 80hours per week in office, something like that is not just unheard over here, but also illegal. He was basically working two jobs there while being paid for one.
And yes, of course at some point (when you earn enough to live comfortably) your priorities become free time and other things, but again, that means that the company needs to pay more, to get another person to split the work. That's why everyone who did that says that the experience was great but that it's not worth it, neither financially nor health-wise.
>You're paid good money here for 37.5 hours per week
In which country? I'm also in Europe, but never seen such low working hours. Maybe some nordic country?
I'm interviewing for a major french company now and their work week is still 40h and money isn't amazing at all.
So can you share this utopia where I can make great money for 37,5h/week?
Crazy that they hit MS for this and not Amazon
They either didn't kiss the right ass or pay the right bribe within the current administration I imagine.
Ironically, this makes me like Microsoft slightly more. I guess they didn't splurge for the solid gold painted copilot logo as tribute.
MS has been particularly extreme for longer (decades, at least). Surely it is a statement of intent to others as well anyway.
Rather surprised MS didn't kiss the ring enough to avoid this or offer to fund the renovations to the Trump Kennedy Center.
Perhaps they performed appropriate groveling and flattery before the naked emperor, but he forgot.
I read that MS was looking to supply some of the 'load bearing' material for the Arch.
amazon is paid up until the end of the year. they funded the 'bezos toilet' in the ballroom.
As someone with inside knowledge of both, yeah, it's wild. I bet even conspiracy theories will fall short of explaining what's going on there.
Orange man saw that tech CEO was from India. Case closed.
amazon is far worse than microsoft
Bezos has been paying bribes/donations to Trump. MS has not. This is just a shakedown.
Over a decade ago someone on here commented that H1B1 visas should goto the highest paying jobs requested instead of random or whatever it was.
At the time we all saw the H1B1 program as a way for companies to hire cheaper labor that they can treat poorly.
H1B1 visas are for citizens of Chile and Singapore and is not the same thing as H1B.
Teams are international already. Why do they bring people to the US at all?
A nice office in Bukarest or Krakow or if you really need Munich or Zürich is good enough for most Europeans. I am sure there are equally nice places in Asia.
I don't think India has any city with remotely comparable quality of life to Zurich lmao
Honest question and I'm probably going to ruffle a lot of feelings:
In the age of AI coding, what is the point of outsourcing your programming to TCS, Wipro, et al? These consultancies are not building groundbreaking innovative stuff, they're building the drudgery enterprise software to handle taxes or business intelligence tools. Things that are perfect for AI (don't get me wrong, AI is perfect for a lot of other types of coding too).
Or is it that outsourcing is cheaper than AI tokens?
The nice thing about these types of questions is that the market is very good at finding who needs what; we don't need a central planning committee.
The market IS very good at that, what it's not good at is handling externalities for citizens of a country that arise from taking the most efficient market path.
Cool theory. But there are confounding factors: H1B employees get exploited like a species of indentured servants. Lazy managers like that they are compliant and happy to implement stupid ideas.
> we don't need a central planning committee
Ironic phrasing, as in my experience the steelman argument in favor of these companies is "The customer is really bad at thinking through their own requirements."
Then let that customer fail, and others prevail.
I agree that we don’t need a central planning committee.
But if you’ve ever worked with the public, you know there is almost no cultural onus on nontechnical people to properly hire or contract technical people for technical tasks.
So…no: The market isn’t very good at this - yet.
When was the last time the federal/state government failed to collect taxes? Or disburse social services? When did your bank not credit your interest?
This stuff is all contracted or subcontracted to these sorts of companies. You don’t need technical geniuses. You need good enough at the lowest cost.
The IRS getting okay work out of a contractor is not the same as a random food manufacturing or trucking company trying to contract work out.
Consulting companies, especially the largest ones, are known to employ more hacks than competent folks - because they can. (This is the “lowest cost” you mentioned.)
Just read the stories here about the big names.
Succeeding in not being sued - most of the time - doesn’t mean you’re doing good work or good business.
> we don't need a central planning committee.
That is an ideological creed, not a fact. It might be true, but you're just smuggling in your priors with no evidence.
Is it though? Markets may be perfect, but humans are not. There’s plenty of laziness, incompetence and corruption, even in capitalism.
I guess it’s the least worst option we’ve found. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need any guardrails at all though.
I always marvel how “hacker news” is so pro capitalism and pro billionaire class. Site should be named “silicon valley hub” or something.
Late stage capitalism is a scourge for humanity.
Hey man, I don't bite the hand that feeds me.
Sir, this is HN, not Reddit.
Could have fooled me, especially with completely useless comments like the one you just posted.
1. Risk - you throw an SLA on services and can point fingers when shit hits the fan
2. Circular agreements - you get them to sell your goods/services in the region of their home country
3. These count as "Services" on the P&L and provide massive tax advantages to the company because these aren't treated as labor costs.
This may be from an old context in my brain since I worked with some of those companies, so those reasons may have changed or impact may have with various regulations, etc.
Addendum to risk: larger companies can throw bodies at escalated issues.
Good luck trying to get a 6 person shop with a full calendar of other-customer work to suddenly prioritize a show-stopping bug that's only affecting you.
Oh totally. This is a playbook for a Fortune X00 company. Layoff your staff and create a "services" SLA contract with a third party company to deliver IT services. Just the legal team to get thru all the docs alone means you need a legal and procurement/contracts department. Not for startups.
I had a chat today with a friend about this. I think my working thesis is that AI is bad news for outsourcing/offshoring.
What was it good for? Well, often it was prompting a person in a low-cost location what code to write. He would pick it up in his timezone and implement it overnight, and present findings/questions as a response.
The problem is, coding has made implementation super cheap. It is now so cheap you have to compare it to the cost of dealing with someone in another timezone, who does not have the same cultural context on the problem. They also can't ask you clarifying questions while you're asleep. AI wins against the offshore guy, on both money and context.
Who does it help? Amazingly, the experienced onshore dev who thought he was going to be unemployed past 40. This person is now able to implement several things concurrently, has experience in making technical decisions, and has local cultural context.
For me and my engineering friends I hope you are right.
Based on the last 5+ years at working at FAANG adjacent companies - less than 5% of a SWEs time is dedicated to coding (Exceptions of course for crazy things like porting massive code bases to Rust...) - If anything - now that "coding has been solved" - it significantly reduces the need for body-shops, because now you require strategic product decision making - much harder skill to hire for/develop than yet another LeetCoder.
So - definitely agree with your general thesis.
And that's also why the quality of FAANG products has been going down for the last 5+ years.
It's really palpable, developers in these orgs just stopped caring about the quality of their work.
Is it possible that individuals or groups use outsourcing as a way to funnel money into their private interests? IMO we're looking at good old corruption.
The employer/employee relationship is an important one, and it doesn't work the same way with AI.
No, people should honestly confront your question. The “skilled labor shortage” premise for the H1B is dead, at least in tech. Maybe we still need to bring in a handful of superstars. But at this point I think TCS, Wipro, etc., exist only due to foreign lobbying efforts.
They tend to take care of sustainment and certain tasks more cost effectively.
This is a pretty stupid thing to do, btw, as whatever isn’t AI will just be offshored, which reduces government and social security revenue and closes a pipeline to get smart immigrants, who tend to vote Republican.
The village head typically prefers people from his own village. Not rocket science.
Not always. Many places will avoid hiring people to do the work instead they just contract it out. Saves them money in short term. Why hire someone at 100k, pay 401k, insurance, pto when I can simply buy it for 50k.
If you build anything worth building you’ll know contractors are a net drag in the long run. It’s a mistake most rookie middle management make and learn the hard way.
Almost all of the graduates hired by my company are migrants, and they then chain migrate other people over by putting in referrals for random people.
From the company’s perspective it is great, you can pay them less and artificially suppress wages.
From society’s perspective… well 30% of young people are unemployed despite record low numbers of young people. No births and no jobs! It’s genius!
Where is the 30% unemployment figure coming from?
I'm guessing he is posting from somewhere like Spain or Portugal where the youth unemployment is really high.
Youth unemployment was over 9% in 2025 [0]. 30% seems off
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLUEM1524ZSUSA
"disconnected" -- aka no longer in school and gave up on finding a job -- is 16%. Added to the 9% unemployed gives 25%. Add in the underemployed who have a job, but are only given a few hours per week and that number jumps way higher.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/jul/how-are-d...
30% sounds correct to me. None of my friend have gotten any jobs after they were laid off. Some of them are doing some part time job like uber or doordash, and those aren't counted.
Same in China, PHD people are working as delivery driver....
This is just a straight up lie and it'll take you 2 seconds to talk to the AI to figure out how the immigration system / referrals / "chain migration" work.
> and they then chain migrate other people over by putting in referrals for random people.
I have one of the worst passports in the world. It was already difficult to travel to many places, and now more and more countries are soft-banning everyone from here.
The reason being that whenever a country makes their tourism visas more accessible, people from here known as "labor exporters" or "visa brokers" apply for visas for hundreds of other people, often poor and uneducated.
When those "tourists" arrive at their destinations, they have their passports confiscated by the broker's foreign counterparts, and they start working odd jobs while on tourism visas in places like Dubai, Thailand etc.
The brokers tell them that they owe a large amount of money for the privilege, often amounting to many months of their salary, and those brokers are the only way for the workers to send money back home.
They overstay their visas and when they get caught they can't even speak in English to explain their situation, and even if they could they wouldn't expose their handlers.
All of this has made it pretty embarrassing for the rest of us from the same country who just go for actual travel and tourism, and we can't even really complain about the racism we face because we know it's our country's fault...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/its-your-sense-...
"Y Combinator India Scandal"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq-C4dM9SUw
Take this problem : “cheap outsourcing of simple coding work”, and replace outsourcing with AI, which will be far cheaper, much faster and much more compliant than any human being, and you can just imagine the disastrous situation we’re sleepwalking into.
To all the idiots who claim AI will create new jobs, will only change the work humans do, why didn’t that apply to Indian outsourcing?
As someone who uses Opus 5.5 daily, I feel like this admin is trying to put out a small fire, while completely blind to the all encompassing forest fire just around the corner.
First time hearing LLM hype will "create" jobs. I have only heard stories of executives foaming at the mouth of getting rid of jobs/assets and replace with 24/7 available AI/LLM.
One of the few things this administration has done that I actually applaud. These huge corporations have been abusing the Greencard and H1B system for decades, and it has gotten so out of control that people are really starting to notice. This is the kind of thing that can cause serious civil unrest, and justifiably so.
The problem is, no matter how carefully the regulations are worded, dirty lawyers will figure out how to work around them. Suspending the programs is probably the only fix at this point.
Any company that does layoffs should immediately have all their visas revoked as well as all of their contractors.
> Any company that does layoffs should immediately have all their visas revoked
This is dumb, but not directionally. Any company that has done a lay-off shouldn’t be allowed to apply for visas for 2 years, with a 5-year probationary period thereafter during which if they do layoffs again the penalty jumps to 5 years.
Seems like if you learn you have too many experts in X and instead need experts in Y you should be able to have layoffs for X but still hire for and get visas for Y.
We absolutely have companies that systematically binge and purge on employees. The WARN Act thresholds seem apt for such limits.
I agree. The externality of layoffs gets partially transferred to the company and they're required to provide 3 months of salary for each impacted employee. It appears to work better for American companies AND workers. Both earn far more than their European peers who don't experience comparable layoff frequency.
warn act is a joke and a mockery
I was glad it was in place when I was impacted by a layoff. It was the difference between severance and none.
what makes you say they gave you severence because of warn. severance has been a thing way before warn usually to save the hassle of legal challenges, employees badmouthing on social media ect.
> warn act is a joke and a mockery
Irrelevant. Is its definition of a layoff good for these purposes?
Flat 20 year ban would be simpler to implement.
> Flat 20 year ban would be simpler to implement
And structurally advantageous to incumbent firms with access to easy capital with which to ride downturns.
Why wouldn't they just layoff their visa workers in a downturn.
> Why wouldn't they just layoff their visa workers in a downturn
Which they?
Hell, if this law passed I’d bet there would be opportunity for PE to buy the assets off a company that has done a layoff, fold the original company, and reboot it. Being locked out of 95% of the world population for twenty years is a real competitive disadvantage.
What if there's a few year downturn, so they lay off and want to hire back when it passes? Force them to hire offshore instead?
Are they incapable of hiring Americans? Like it's treated as a given no company would ever hire an American, it's absurd.
Microsoft is declared fraudulent but not Tesla, one of the leading H1B visa companies? Seems they just want to label it as fraud but not actually investigate any fraudulent activity, they want that $.
It's really bizarre to hear admin officials talk about H-1(b) workers as "indentured servants" but not ever mention or touch the L-1 visa program.
It is over-the-top hysteria either way, but it is at least actually true of the L-1 program that you cannot change employers (at least without first getting a change-of-status to another visa). H-1(b) workers can and do change employers all the time.
Cynically I believe this is just blackmail for midterms.
The current administration will promise to Microsoft (and others) that they’ll reverse this decision as long as they are provided proper funding/support.
It is so dumb to think of an immigrant as someone who steals a job from a "local", American or else.
When I left Italy to work for Amazon I was 30 years old. Until then, the Italian government (but really, my parents' taxes) paid for my education and healthcare.
Briefly after I became a "productive" member of society, I moved to a few countries and eventually ended in the US at age 35, and worked there for ~10 years. The US got the equivalent of half a million dollar, perhaps more, for free, and had the luxury to use it for these years.
A skilled immigrant is a gift to the country he/she moves in.
We should tell our politicians to stop this BS.
There are atleast seven other companies and not MS alone..
Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/ussuspends-micro...
Microsoft does hire a ton of people from Infosys, Tata, Wipro, and HCL
"People"
Lots of debate going on here, I know this boils down to hire a local if they exist, versus someone who will accept a sub-maximal rate due to getting extra value from coming to the USA, or extending a visa, or the sunken cost of already being here and not wanting to leave.
IMO companies should just say "fine we'll hire off shore contractors who pay nothing in taxes then."
So many other top firms committing this kind abuse.
1. Non-paywalled dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50006948
> Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling added that some of the largest IT firms in the world would also be suspended from that program, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini.
> "We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies," Sonderling said.
2. I'm kinda surprised those firms were even trying to get green cards for their employees. I thought their whole model was to rotate offshore people into the US for temporary assignments on H1-Bs.
> Under the PERM process, employers seek certification from the Department of Labor that there is no qualified, willing or available US worker for a specific job. It's a step required before filing petitions for most employment-based green cards.
3. That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B. Delaying it actually made me pretty sympathetic to the attempts to game the system to prevent and American from getting the job. Even if H1-Bs were technically for temporary workers, everyone saw them as a step on the way to permanent residency.
4. So have they done anything about offshoring yet? Because focusing on H1-Bs and green cards is focusing on the problems of 20+ years ago.
It's probably been 15 years since my employer sponsored any significant numbers of employees for H1-Bs, it's all offshore hiring in Asia to company offices in Asia now.
The trick for those companies is that their employees get stuck in the green card line forever
> 2. I'm kinda surprised those firms were even trying to get green cards for their employees. I thought their whole model was to rotate offshore people into the US for temporary assignments on H1-Bs.
Certainly not at Microsoft.
> 3. That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B. Delaying it actually made me pretty sympathetic to the attempts to game the system to prevent and American from getting the job.
There's a similar evaluation done for H1B.
> Certainly not at Microsoft.
I was specifically responding to the list I quoted, which did not list Microsoft and was mostly Indian consulting firms.
> There's a similar evaluation done for H1B.
If so, they should tighten that up then (if they haven't already) so it can't be gamed, then drop it from the PERM evaluation if it's already been done.
you might be surprised to learn that there are people who apply for eb-2 on work (or non-work) visas other than h1b.
> you might be surprised to learn that there are people who apply for eb-2 on work (or non-work) visas other than h1b.
That's why I said "if it's already been done," to cover such cases. I understand and agree with the need to perform such an evaluation, but I disagree with doing it long after someone's already been settled and working for years. That's just crappy and unfair.
> That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B.
It actually is a required step for the H1-B. I've heard it's more relaxed than the green card check, though.
> It actually is a required step for the H1-B. I've heard it's more relaxed than the green card check, though.
If that's the case, that's ass-backwards. The H1-B check should be more stringent, and the green card check should be more relaxed (or not be done at all).
They're suspending the PERM process for H1-Bs but are they suspending microsoft from filing for new H-1Bs? It's my understanding the wait list for Indian workers to get a green card is like 100 years, so what difference would it make anyways?
I think they need to file PERM in order to be able to renew the H-1B indefinitely, otherwise they are only good for 6 years. This is true even if the PERM filing takes decades to lead to an actual green card.
So it's possible this development will lead to people getting kicked out after their 6 years of H-1B.
Given Trump's attention span and track record, it's very likely this is squarely aimed at optics before the mid terms. I'd be willing to offer good odds that this gets quietly rolled back post midterm for companies willing to bribe the administration..... er become patriots via a donation to "America First fund.
Good, the market is dropping. Now add a tax to American corporations that outsource. Then you can fix h1b etc
Wish they’d do this here in the UK.
So, what particular thing was it that Microsoft refused to do recently? There has to be a link here.
The Green card program needs to be cleaned up but this administration isn’t the one to do it, and the way things have been going in the last 60 years I don’t think anything will be done that will be clear headed and fair all round.
Special interests in the business world at the upper end likes the status quo.
Curious nobody sees this as retaliation for Bill Gates very firm stance against AI. Even though he’s not running anything at MS is not a random blogger stating bold stuff.
Other large companies are massively abusing the employee sponsored green cards too.
Thats why many large companies are included in this.
Why did it took decades to see this simple H1-B industry practices thriving in glory? The post-grad visa machine, core practices of consulting companies, salary differences etc?
Once you have hard-working foreign workers available for less salary, it is highly natural a huge industry would come up and work hard to make gains of the worker supply chain. Elementary, Uncle Sam.
I'm surprised at how easily some of you are convinced. It's the midterms coming up; this programme has been abused for years (to my understanding) the timing is a little odd, no?
What did poor lil' Microsoft due to piss off the administration?
Change PERM requirements.. this is well within their powers in the executive branch. Otherwise this just seems like a targeted vendetta against MS
I've always thought that employers should just put in applications with a minimum salary. The top N applications by minimum salary should get visas.
I understand this is a politically charged topic, and every comment is going to be a flame war nonetheless, so here we go.
No matter your political inclination, overabusing green cards to import cheap labor in detriment of the American wage is not even a secret: everybody does it. So the claim is, at least, correct in its formulation.
However:
- It doesn't include Amazon, the biggest offender by far?
- Suspends green cards but not H1Bs? so what the point is exactly? replacing cheap labor, for a potential revolving door of cheap labor? make sure cheap labor is never guaranteed to stay, so they don't dare to think about not being cheap anymore?
- People really thought that Microsoft was different to Tata in methodology and discipline? Did you really have to interact with people in either company? I did, and let me tell you, "highly skilled" or even "skilled at all" is nothing short of an exaggeration.
Hopefully H1B is next, or at the very least capped so there can only be a certain number at a time, and if someone wants to get another h1b visa they need to ensure that someone who is here currently is gone before it's issued. Too many "temporary" workers who come into the country, work "temporarily" then end up moving here. Ask yourself how many people from Indian origin own houses in San Francisco and the surrounding area? Are we sure they aren't putting pressure on housing for Americans? How can they prove that, until they can prove they don't impact citizens in any way, they shouldn't be here.
Its easy to take a telescope to a fruit bearing tree, point at the roots and say look its sucking out all the nutrients from the soil.
I do not condone abuse of any system, including visa/gc system, it should only go to those that truly are builders and contribute to growth of the overall system and not act as parasites, but that's a trait not exclusive to just the people (some targeting is probably legit) you're targeting.
I love that analogy "take a telescope to a fruit bearing tree, point at the roots and say look its sucking out all the nutrients from the soil."
But, can we say that H1B and immigration is what fueled the current boom. Or maybe it just went along for the ride.
It is a fact that many immigrants have played a pivotal/transformative roles in many different industries and their booms, nothing as great as the tech boom though. It is one of the few core engines of US staying on the frontier, but not the only engine.
If there was no H1B program in the US, I would guess that Silicon Valley would be in Hong Kong instead of California.
If there was no EPA then Shenzen would be in the SF bay area instead of China.
H1B is explicitly a dual-purpose visa (e.g. temporary and permanent immigration).
When I was in the US on one myself, my company kept pushing me to go for a green card, but I never intended to stay permanently, which made things a little awkward... I remember basically ghosting the immigration firm they assigned to me.
Tactics that were mentioned to be used by Microsoft are unheard of in Europe. I wonder how much of perceived American tech superiority is based off of plain immigration fraud. Would the people that hammer Europe about regulation be ready to only hire bonafide equally-paid people?
These companies are not going to need all the middle talent, or lower tier talent. Its a slap on the wrist for a wrist that isnt even there anymore.
PERM certification it looks like
Is the new visa lottery suspended for these companies or just the green card permanent residence part? If the latter, what becomes of the current H1-B visa holders?
I doubt this can save the midterms.
Combined with Iran destroying LA and San Diego and with the $90 check to Medicare recipients, it should do the trick.
Is a person applying for roles at Msft more likely to use Google search or LinkedIn to find the openings or read a newspaper?
As an Indian in tech in India, I feel bad for the people affected.
From a policy perspective though, India should probably consider providing incentives for American companies that move workers and data centers to India. This is probably a great time to do it. GCC growth has been generally resilient despite the impact of AI.
If your competitor is determined to shoot themselves in the foot. Just hand them the pistol and step back!
If that starts to happen I'm pretty sure Trump administration would introduce policies to keep the jobs in US the same way they are trying it for manufacturing jobs.
Is there a full list of companies?
Good
I wonder if MS is going to start hiring for more remote (global) roles as a result.
This means that they could shut down the H-1B program today. Every day they choose to keep importing foreign labor they harm the American worker.
Making political hay now that AI is expected to suffice.
I did not start out this jaded.
The irony that the U.S is a relatively very young nation that was built then thrived entirely based on immigration.
Do you keep pouring gas in the tank watching it spill all over your feet and say, "Ironic, the engine needs this fuel that is now spilling everywhere"
americas peak mid-20th century was in an era of no immigration.
americas soul and institutions were forged more than a century earlier in an era of adventurers striking out on the frontier. these men and women were not scab labor.
and what was so inspiring about e.g. the waves of say italian or irish immigration? the import of ethnic rivalries, tribalism, factionalism, and organized crime was just as well a result of the ellis island wave, don't see much admirable about that.
As a percent of the population we have as many foreign born residents as we did in the 1800s and more than we ever did in the 1900s. In fact, some stats even show we have more foreign born residents as a percent than we’ve ever had and it could be even higher than reported given how many folks are here illegally.
People forget that we shut down immigration for a few decades in the 1900s to let people assimilate.
We’ve overdone it, we need to slow the influx again.
At the start. Didn't the U.S, then not yet united, have 100% foreign born residents?
That is a myth. Americans were already locally born for couple of centuries before they declared their own independence.
I referred to the colonists. It cannot be a myth that they were by definition all foreign born.
We don't have a clear ratio of how many were born in the Americas, when Independence was proclaimed. I concede the majority was likely born on that soil. I find that irrelevant to the parent comment stating immigration was controlled in the early 1900s.
Also to note, the shut down of immigration in the 1900s wasn't a shut down.
It was quota was set at 2% of each nationality's population as recorded in the 1890 census. That date is revealing.
The mass migration of Southern and Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc happened after 1890. The act anchored the quota to 1890, Congress deliberately set the baseline before those groups arrived in large numbers.
The result: nations with large post-1890 diasporas, and of course all of Asia and Africa, got tiny quotas, while Northern and Western European nations got huge ones.
I don't call this stopping immigration. Rather codified national selection. It may have helped with "assimilation". But no one can deny the maneuver was for national discrimination.
I am extremely suspicious that the White House is going after Microsoft for not cozying up to Trump the same way OpenAI and friends have..
a move to satisfy nationalist and ai hater at same time.
I don't like nationalism, but I see no way out of it.
most of the comments are about the h1b rules, but can we also talk about this?
> The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday proposed a $70,000 fee for international students seeking to work in the United States. The proposed rule would require schools to pay the fee for every student who participates in the Optional Practical Training program, known as OPT, which allows students to work in jobs related to their major during or after their time in school.
Absolutely insane. Nothing infuriates me quite like this administration’s consistent willingness to absolutely destroy the engine of progress that has led to American greatness over the last century. I know so many people who are in this country doing fantastic work, who later got O1 visas or green cards, because they were able to do OPT.
What are the perceived methods of fraud in the PERM process?
I'm always reading about how much of a meritocracy these tech places are. And that the US is a bastion of free market enterprise compared to backwaters like the UK.
So if this was really true, how come there aren't AI recruiters who scan the supposedly obscure newspapers for job ads like these and bring them to their clients and make a fat commission when their (clearly superior US based candidate :lol:) demonstrates throughout the interview process that they are capable of doing the job.
Microsoft Comment on Recent Immigration Questions
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2026/10/08/microso...
Can you imagine discussing this rationally when you know it's being done be a kleptocratic government?
Man, people are so easily deceaved because it some how aligns with their favored prejudice.
We have many visa programs
The section H, subsection 1, subsection B visa program has standards of review from the late 1980s. They should all be updated to 2026, inflation adjusted for base salary or compensation expectations, as well as notice requirements
If the administering of it doesn't require Congress to do, then that's fine, I hope the Democrats keep this going if they wind up being in control of appointments and oversight after midterms
Aren't a lot of these companies with H1Bs not sponsoring the green card anyway for some reason? I wonder if this will be the first of many. I always found it weird that the company could choose to not sponsor the green card but could employ you via H1B. I always wondered why anyone would work for such an employer long term.
I think the path to green card part is actually good. It's the H1B aspect that I find problematic. Once a person is no longer tied to an employer (e.g. via having a green card) then they're in a better position to negotiate wages and less of an indentured servant. That should happen as quickly as possible but we shouldn't be letting almost anyone in via an H1B.
In some sense - this is "directionally correct" but it should be cutting off letting them use the H1B program itself. I don't know why they didn't do that but maybe there's some legalese reason.
I find it weird that people in this tech sphere are so pro-immigration when you can clearly see that our wages have gone down over the last 5-8 years and immigration has been relentless in this sector. Yes, if you've stuck with one company for that entire time then you've likely seen great appreciation in your ISOs or RSUs but if you're looking for a new offer... It's the same $400k/yr for a senior engineer but cost of living is up, inflation is way up, etc. You should be seeing wages at $500k/yr to keep up with inflation alone but that's not happening. It's still $400k/yr.
Remote worker FTW!
All sorts of good and interesting arguments ITT, but at the end of the day it's all academic; companies are going to compensate by offshoring. I doubt this nets us more citizen-jobs, pressures salaries to increase, or provides any benefit other than the messaging to the base.
How many critical job functions can you offshore. The world isn’t like it used to be, everyone is woke and will not work for less.
Tata and Infosys too apparently, which is actually good. Those were the real abusers of the h1b program.
Party of free market
Trump is not a free-marketeer. That much is clear, and I don't think it's controversial to say so. Party != official.
Dey took er jerbs!
GCCs
OK, now do Oracle to prove you actually care about the issue and aren’t just manipulating the stock market and helping your friends in competing businesses.
Seems Microsoft forgot to deposit their "contribution" into this administrations slush fund.
It's frustrating that my first thought, with this administration, even when they do something objectively defensible, even good, is "OK, so what bribe did Microsoft refuse to pay?"
> Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, said it looks forward to “providing the Administration with additional information.” Of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications it submitted in the last fiscal year, the company said 80% were “to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees.”
> “These were not to hire new people,” Microsoft said in a statement. “The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country.”
H-1(b) critics often (ignorantly or dishonestly) compare visa petition numbers to layoff numbers (essentially a stock vs. a flow), so it is nice to see this addressed by the company and in the article.
I suspect the H-1(b) program is the subject of so much scrutiny (instead of L-1, O-1, or OPT) specifically because every employer has to report the number of H-1(b) petitions they make each year.
> H-1(b) critics often (ignorantly or dishonestly) compare visa petition numbers to layoff numbers (essentially a stock vs. a flow), so it is nice to see this addressed by the company and in the article.
Do visa petition numbers not reflect a 'flow'? Why should the petitioned number not go down as visas are granted?
The complaints I've seen are that massive layoffs happen then are followed by visa petition increases by similar numbers. Or perhaps massive layoffs happen while massive numbers of visa petitions are open. Now, perhaps the two are for very different types of jobs, but one might want that to be checked.
This sill last about .. 4 days, 2 weeks at most, before a federal district judge puts an injunction on it.
So they are repeating the false promises until the midterms are over, just like they did before the 2024 presidential election.
This is just what MAGA wants to hear so they drag themselves to the voting booth despite having been betrayed on:
- isolationism
- controlling inflation
- no more foreign wars
- pro worker policies
- full Epstein releases, including intelligence operations
It won't do shit b/c Microsoft can just hire subcontractors to pull off the same shit with even less stable pay.
The language is confusing for folks who haven’t experienced or researched the US immigration scheme. A few terms first:
* H1B visas are work permits issued to foreign-born workers sponsored by a company to work in the USA. These visas are bound to a specific employer with limited ability to transfer elsewhere, and on their own have ZERO ability to convert to a Green Card
* Green Card is Legal Permanent Residency (LPR), the first real step towards Naturalization. It lets you live and work anywhere in the USA, provided you generally contribute more than you receive in benefits (though this is very fungible depending on political incentives). Obtaining a Green Card is incredibly hard to do outside of family, with employer sponsorship being one of the few other viable routes.
So what seems to be happening here is that the regime wants to block Microsoft et al for applying for Green Cards for workers currently on H1B visas - not unheard of, but a rarity among the hordes of H1Bs employed yearly by technical firms. I suspect the goal is to discourage workers abroad from applying for H1Bs since employer green card sponsorship is off the table, but it won’t necessarily stop green cards via other routes (like marriage). It also doesn’t address the real grievances around H1Bs themselves, like how it coerces labor into taking more toxic or abusive working environments and lower wages while also robbing domestic workers of opportunities.
In other words, and assuming I’m understanding this messaging correctly (a big if), this is a nothingburger. It doesn’t stop H1B abuse, it doesn’t help American workers, and it punishes the handful of folks who deserve the Green Card conversion from their employers. It’s a packet of lies and misdirection meant to look bigger than it actually is.
It does impact H1B abuse. How the pipeline works:
#1. Young, eager tech employee from India enrolls in Masters program at US mid-tier university.
#2. Completes course work with 90% other students from India in Florida, Texas, or California.
#3. Gets internship job as part of OPT. (Optional Practical Training)
#4. After 1 (or 2 years for STEM), employer puts in for H1B.
#5. After a round or two of H1B, employer starts the PERM process for a green card.(Tough journey for someone from India... I agree)
Young techie is now 32 years old. Perhaps they marry a US Citizen, and a different pathway opens up. Perhaps they transition to a "genius visa" and then have a different pathway. Perhaps the US government changes policy. It takes a long time but you are living and working in the US during the whole experience.
Stopping this path breaks the chain. If there is no path to citizenship, even a long one, then H1B will stop being so attractive.
Note the pathway for foreign students has been closed. Check on the MS program enrollments at most mid tier schools. Down 50%, 70%, 95%....
> If there is no path to citizenship, even a long one, then H1B will stop being so attractive.
Not really, the backlog for a greencard is so huge that no one seriously plans for one when they go for a H1-B. They can hope of course, but the other pathways you mentioned are more likely at this point.
---
H1-B demand will remain high since people here in india that aren't able to land a target job with high salary use US employment as a resume patching tool. It just happens that the masters is the safest path to that employment. And then they return and become an engineering manager at some company here, as an "ex-MTS 3, Nutanix" demanding a salary that they never would have been able to demand with their pre-US resume.
> Down 50%, 70%, 95%....
Many other factors, one of which is that target companies across the comp band now hire much more in india. More quants/big tech, as well as more mid-comp GCCs. For example, walmart's tech team pays 35L INR to my friend in a city where this salary lands an extremely comfy life. This did not exist even 10 years ago and my friend's resume would have necessitated migrating to the US to get the same QoL. Of course, at the extreme top end people keep going e.g bay area founders/AI unicorns. But that was always a minority. So unless you are aiming for and have a good chance at a unicorn/FAANG-level payout, OR on the other of the spectrum you want resume-patching, there is no reason to migrate anymore.
For reference, at 0YE quant TCs reach 2cr in the top colleges, and stripe/databricks almost 1cr. At a tier-2 university, local unicorns like zomato pay 60L. The former is slightly lesser than a bay area salary and the latter two are europe-level salaries even without any PPP adjustment, so you can imagine why there is less migration.
> Not really, the backlog for a greencard is so huge that no one seriously plans for one when they go for a H1-B.
That's really only a problem for Indians. If you have an MS in a STEM field, and are not from India/China, the backlog is tiny. Before the pandemic, lots of people I know were getting it within 2 years of employment.
Looking it up now, the "priority date" for EB2 is Jan 1, 2025 (it was always "current" before the pandemic) - so they're now running about 2 years slower than in the past. Still not a huge backlog.
Well, the subject of this article and discussion is indians.
thanks for the insightful reply.
> Young techie is now 32 years old. Perhaps they marry a US Citizen, and a different pathway opens up.
I mean, one of the reason the green card line is so long for Indians is that they have one of the lowest intermarriage rates for immigrants (not just for Americans, other immigrants as well, if you look at the census data for children it’s very obvious): you can “pick” which country your green card falls under based on either person in your household. If Indians married immigrants from any other countries their own line would not be as long
> So what seems to be happening here is that the regime wants to block Microsoft et al for applying for Green Cards for workers currently on H1B visas - not unheard of, but a rarity among the hordes of H1Bs employed yearly by technical firms.
Rarity? This is the standard path to green cards via employment. At my previous company, they did not hire a foreigner with an H1B unless they intended it to sponsor them for a green card (i.e. they started the process of applying for their green card as soon as they legally could after hiring). And they hired lots of H1Bs.
> It also doesn’t address the real grievances around H1Bs themselves, like how it coerces labor into taking more toxic or abusive working environments and lower wages while also robbing domestic workers of opportunities.
For many people, the appeal of an H1B goes away if they don't have a path to permanent residency. I guess some foreigners may do it to claim "US experience", but that's about it.
Green card backlog is so big for indians that this makes no difference. Except for one thing: this program apart from putting you on the green card waiting list, extends your H1-B beyond the initial phase, and also lets you change employers without restarting the whole process. Now that you can't change employers, the effect on employer leverage and salaries just worsens the existing situation w.r.t the stated goal of the government.
My two cents:
Private Businesses should not be able to offer citizenship as a side payment to their employees, they should stick to offering cash. If you are the french foreign legion and you want to reward military recruits with citizenship, then at least it's a government that is receiving the benefit and selling the citizenship, but private business should not be able to sell citizenship, or an easier way to get citizenship, to anyone. It's not a resource that belongs to them.
This requires a constitutional amendment to actually make reality - as long as the Birthright Citizenship clause of the 14th amendment stands, any program that lets you physically stand on US soil is de facto offering citizenship to your children (who can then sponsor you + other family members for family immigration later in life).
only USCIS, the federal government, is granting citizenship
But you need an employer filing petition on your behalf. That's the fucked up part. It should be like in any other country: If you have lived in the US for at least 5 years (assuming you got here legally), you should be able to file a green card petition, or even directly apply for citizenship yourself, without your employer even knowing.
Gangster capitalism.
We need clawbacks from these companies’ c suites, present and past, that were awarded compensation based on criminal practices
Great. Now do H4, PERM, and OPT next. Close all the loopholes. Numberwise H4 is 4x bigger than H1B.
H1B is a lamb big tech is willing to sacrifice to satisfy the populists. You want real change, get rid of the rest.
what's the purpose of a nation, this question was debated at knife's edge a hundred years ago, and the answers then crystalized quite clearly (bolsjevism, fascism, anglo-liberalism/americanism).
after an 80 years detente in the west that it exists solely to safeguard cheap gas for the proles and safeguarding cheap labor for the bourgeois, it's interesting to see that question being asked again.
1791473080 | US suspends Microsoft, major IT firms from key green card program | https://www.reuters.com/business/us-suspending-permanent-res... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50006948 | 2 comments
1791474350 | US says big tech barred from sponsoring H-1B workers for green cards | https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/08/vance-microsoft-ado... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007254 | 1 comment
1791474414 | Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program | https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-program-vance-microsoft-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007267 | 1 comment
1791478236 | Vance says Microsoft, Adobe barred from sponsoring H-1B workers for green cards | https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/vance-says-microsoft... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50008266 | 1 comment
1789787791 | Executive order on H-1B nonimmigrant visa administration | https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/enha... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762960 | 52 comments
1790909964 | Apple is now censoring anti-immigration material you send in your PRIVATE texts | https://twitter.com/drjoshcsimmons/status/210582382160975909... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929422 | 4 comments
1791389914 | Student Lender Collapses as Immigrant Crackdown Roils Loan Book | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-07/student-l... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994923 | 0 comments
This is interesting because it means that the ultra-right agenda and ideology of Trump (or rather, the whole network behind him - see how the prepare the eyeliner-boy to seize power once Trump loses elections), is bigger than individual bromance-corporation connections, such as Microsoft can effect on a smaller level.
On the big level they are all still in cahoots of corruption, but on a smaller scale the ideology is still in place and overrides some of the corruption in place.
Didn't Satya Nadella give $3.5 million to various Trump grifts? Gotta hate when a mobster doesn't stay bought.
Note that this appears to be about green cards/permanent residency rather than h1b.
It is an open secret that consulting companies (Tata, Infosys, Capgemini, etc.) are abusing the employee sponsored green cards.
But I'm surprised that Microsoft is accused doing it. I was under the impression that Microsoft will sponsor your green card but is still very strict about whom they hire and retain, regardless of immigration status. But maybe that has changed?
Tata, Infosys, HCL, and similar body shops are definitely a different story.
If you’re laying off employees en masse and still processing green cards that in itself is a red flag.
Companies have usually gotten around it saying we r laying off in 1 division but hiring in another. Maybe that hand waving can’t be swept under the rug anymore.
That doesn't feel accurate to me. If you're laying off employees en masse while getting new h1b visas, maybe - but everybody I know who's gotten a green card from tech employment was employed and working for a long time before that process even started.
If one is just waiting on a status change that’s ok. The labor certification is complete. If labor certification is being applied for as layoffs happen or if large tranches of new H1B are applied for at about the same time - that’s clearly an issue.
Not if the category of employees is different. You are assuming all candidates and roles are fungible.
How is it hand waving? It's literally true a large corporation can fire a customer support agent while sponsoring a software engineer, it is not interchangeable talent
If we had a union we would be training people from customer support to engineer.
I truly believe that software would be improved immensely if all developers spent a few years doing tech support for the elderly.
> If we had a union we would be training people from customer support to engineer
This, to my knowledge, very rarely works.
> software would be improved immensely if all developers spent a few years doing tech support for the elderly
This, on the other hand, absolutely does.
I've worked with several excellent people in my career who progressed from customer support to QA to QA engineer to software engineer.
It's not common though, and I don't think it's a case of "training". Some people have the drive to figure that path out, and those people should be encouraged and supported.
> Some people have the drive to figure that path out, and those people should be encouraged and supported
Totally agree. I don’t think that means institutionalizing that pipeline is likely to yield those folks. They’re rare.
> This, to my knowledge, very rarely works.
Strictly a function of management quality and experience.
Not everyone is interested in programing. Some people are amazing at customer support and super extroverted and seek out jobs where they interact with customers and would be miserable looking at code all day. The opportunity should be there, but some people are just never going to be engineers. Management quality can't fix that.
I'm sorry but this is just absurd. Not everyone has the same aptitude for every job. For a company or country to function you have to acknowledge this and put people in jobs suited to their natural talents.
I doubt that's the argument they're making. They're saying they are laying of a software engineer in one org, and hiring another software engineer in a different org. Not cross functional roles.
The army of developers stuck working helpdesk right now because they can't find work, would like a word.
Maybe they weren't exactly doing that. Calling a developer something else doesn't make it so.
Talent can be trained, less across jobs (although it's often what public services ask to entrepreneurs in some European countries), much more across departments.
I mean in the LLM era you need fewer employees and you need them to be very good to not become 10x bad engineers, so you could be processing green cards for your super stars while having to do layoffs
In a lot of cases they are claiming that the layoffs are not based on performance. The government's argument is that if there are high-performing American nationals or green card holders that are being laid off, then there is no point in giving more green cards, or H1Bs.
That's the playbook Microsoft has been accused of running in various tech press for years, and is backed up by the fact that all of their products are going to shit. Azure, Exchange, XBox & first-party titles, just to name a few of the things I've seen takedown posts about how the departments are staffed exclusively with inexperienced devs overseen by burnt-out seniors, using Copilot to duct tape shit into a somewhat-working state.
I remember not to long ago we got a service impact email from Microsoft saying they expected exchange services to resume normal operation in a sodding WEEK. Completely unacceptable for a provider my company, a smaller one, pays six figures per year for services.
> are abusing the employee sponsored green cards
As a foreigner: How does this work and what do they do?
For one thing, if you get laid off you only have two weeks to find another job or you need to leave the country. This balance of power is lop sided so the employer can get away with abusing the employee unreported.
No, green cards actually remove that constraint. You are a permanent resident, and you’re allowed to live in the US permanently. Irrespective of employment.
The future green card is dangled in front of the employee as the carrot to get them to put up with this situation for years.
And depending on where you are in the green card process, you might have to start all over again if you change employers.
not true, you can only "dangle" the PERM which gives you an I-140 petition. PERM is usually approved within 12-24 months. That's it. You cant dangle anything and cant force a bona fide employee to be a "subservient slave labor" like some people would imagine this process.
Once the I-140 petition is approved (14 days), and I-485 is pending for 180+ days, and employee can easily leave to another employer, it only takes them to file couple forms like transfer of H1B and transfer of I-140.
So the most you can keep the employee on a leash is ~2-3 years which happens to be median tenure at tech.
the immigration discourse is filled with false information, and for this reason I prefer only immigration attorneys discuss the matter as they are the most qualified of all the quirks and nuances of the US immigration law.
Employers can and do require a certain length of employment before initiating sponsorship.
Say that’s 12 months. If their I-40 is approved at 30 months, the employer can withdraw it for 180 days and the approval will be revoked.
So we’re talking 36 months until changing employers doesn’t set you back.
That is longer than the median FAANG tenure. That means you have an employee whose floor tenure is longer than the median.
And even then if at anytime the employee is fired (until they get their green card, which can take many many years), they have 60 days to find a new employer or leave the country.
silicon valley starts PERM from day1, lower tier firms require like couple years.
that's still absolutely normal regular tenure. You work for couple years, show your performance and convince your manager to initiate the perm process.
I have never ever seen anything even close to resembling the "servitude" conditions where tech workers are kept at one company against their will. Nobody is revoking your I-140, because you just transfer it when you change jobs.
re 60 days I agree, this is brutal and should be abolished. I believe H1B workers should be able to remain until the duration of their I-94 even without the job, to seek the new employment in case of job termination
OK,got this part - this is referring to abusing the employees.
I read the former comment like that they are abusing/missusing the "technical Greencard mechanics" to get their employees past some checks/approvals/permissions/whatever or acquire whatever "special benefits" by working around whatever rules
It's pretty simple: you work as much as we tell you or we fire you. And good luck finding another job super fast with another company willing to sponsor a visa. This is the abuse. Plus, I think the pay is also not that great compared to US counterparts.
not true, the tech is not a coal mine or a cotton farm. you cant whip your employees and keep them on a short leash.
please spare me stories of "abused tech workers" who have middle six figure comp, free lunches, unlimited PTO, bunch of perks, generous 401k matches and infinite matcha lattes.
absolutely delusional discourse.
Which also "conveniently" means those employees can effectively never unionise.
US citizens in tech never unionized themselves, because unionization will lead to stagnation. and tech industry is the opposite of stagnation
The government will take action on this, but not cruise ship visas. This has nothing to do with "explotation" and everything to do with trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers.
> trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers
It is the color of the skin of those workers that matters to this administration, not their skill levels.
> trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers
No, it's not.
I know plenty of of software engineers, good ones, who can't find work. Businesses which abuse the H1B and Green card programs to import cheaper workers when there is not a shortage of same here, are acting in bad faith and they know it. They are lying that the people they're bringing over are exceptionally skilled, and they are lying that they cannot find similar workers here at any price.
There's not a shortage of workers domestically anywhere in IT. Especially not now. There's a shortage of them willing to work for the shitty wages Amazon, Microsoft, etc. wants to pay those roles. So they hire companies like Infosys etc. to supply them, which they have done for decades by means of lies and fraud.
If they were bringing over truly exceptional individuals, that would be a different story.
To be clear none of this is even a knock on the skill and integrity of these workers they're bringing over. I'm just saying they are very similar to the tons of US-citizen engineers early in their careers who are out of work, and that if we were a real country, we'd prioritize citizens' need for a job above FAANG profits, by saying "Tough shit, pay more if you can't fill a position."
As discussed upthread, the PERM process is widely understood to be a farce, so it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if the government has evidence of a Microsoft executive who wrote down that they didn’t want to replace a senior developer with 6 years of tenure. Everyone including JD Vance knows that’s a dumb outcome, but under the PERM regulations, you can only get that guy a visa if you tried and failed to replace him first.
Agreed. It's a farce on all sides. Most companies abuse H1B and PERM. We could reform immigration, by A. only allowing visas for people demonstrably very talented, stealing star performers from other countries instead of just taking bulk new grads. And then B. allowing green cards just on the basis of them paying lots of taxes, advancing in their job, establishing a family, etc. Because yes! Of course it's good for the American company to keep the tenured developer who has established themselves here!
But of course Congress is inhabited by people with the maturity level of children, so one party wants us to admit anyone who doesn't like their home country, and the other party mainly just wants to impress Trump, so no one will work on or negotiate on serious policy proposals.
From where is MS’ CEO now again?
It's an open secret that the US administration uses regulatory system for bribes and kickbacks, and no one should take them seriously regarding any rationale.
Not surprising seeing those names, that list of companies are notorious for exploiting H1B too. The main reason it needs stronger enforcement and per country caps/ratios.
Per country bans.
This is an open secret. My dad was an H visa (H1B didn’t exist yet) in an industry that uses a lot of H visas because the job involves recruiting public health experts for projects in foreign countries. He said that companies never advertise these jobs to Americans and will hide the posting in some obscure newspaper or whatever to bypass that requirement of the law.
As someone who had to interface with Cognizant,Infosys for many years while working for the US corporation - GOOD ! They should loose their privileges for H1B.
And Microsoft and Adobe added [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5cfecbba-69ed-42d0-98fd-3ae019144...
Earlier they included Cloudera and Cognizant.
Indentured servant body shop to perm pipeline, usual suspects.
It's relatively straightforward to transfer a H1B, describing it as indentured servitude has always struck me as hyperbolic.
The situation could be easier, make approved I140s portable and issue an EAD, but you aren't trapped with an employer.
The green card process is not transferable. Once its started the applicant is stuck. I personally saw the company slow roll the process for one of my directs. I kept hassling them to move it along but to no avail. I saw this happen to colleagues at numerous companies.
Yup. I had a star developer on my team that we had been planning to sponsor but the company was being sold and our future was unclear. I had to advise her to go find a new job, because if she started the process with us and got laid off, even finding a new job willing to sponsor, she'd have to start over. She would run out of time on her existing visa and lose her legal status altogether.
It is transferable under AC21. But that’s not the point. You are not stuck with an employer on H1B.
Never heard of that. Apparently a lot of other people haven't either or consider it too risky as the government has to approve the transfer (as I found when searching for this now).
AC21 is the law that allows H1B to be renewed indefinitely with an approved I140.
It’s the reason Indians are allowed to stay in the U.S. whilst their Green Card is being processed. A bandaid on a completely broken system that caps Green Card allocation by country of birth.
> completely broken system
Absolutely
> that caps Green Card allocation by country of birth
?????
No more than 7% of EB Green Cards can be awarded to a single country and where you are born (not citizenship) determines which country you are allocated to.
The backlog for Indian born persons is over 100 years as a result.
https://www.cato.org/blog/18-million-employment-based-green-...
How is that a US problem?
Why should other people from other countries not be able to come here because a billion Indians want to migrate?
I don't think it's a US problem, that's a India problem.
I will say, I think the whole immigration system is a mess and I think it should be much easier and faster to immigrate to a different country as long as you can find work and meet the new country's various requirements. The systems that we have now globally pretty much suck.
It's fine to think this way but don't claim to be for meritocracy if you elevate one useless trait above the merit of others.
It can be a meritocracy while allowing equal access regardless of where one is born.
The whole idea is to allow for assimilation into the culture, not a replacement to any new dominant culture.
Then it’s not meritocracy.
That’s not the idea of the U.S. immigration system at all if that were the case these limits would apply to family based immigration classes too.
You want FIFO vs SFQ.
SFQ:
"Prevents a single aggressive download, peer-to-peer stream, or Denial of Service (DoS) attack from starving other users or conversations on the link. Requires very low CPU overhead compared to strict per-flow fair queueing."
Maybe a little hyperbolic, but the point is that it adds an additional significant shackle.
If I decide my company treats me like crap, I can apply to any* job in the US that I'm qualified for.
If an H1B feels the same way, they need to search within a smaller subset of jobs that are willing to do that paperwork. Last time I was hiring (2025) we were not open to sponsoring H1Bs or green cards. It's just a lot of extra work and legal expense, and frankly we found plenty of talented developers so we were right to not do it. Tons of employers don't deal with it.
* Note: Adjust this figure down somewhat to reflect the fake job postings that I never had a shot at, because the employer is just pretending to look for domestic candidates to satisfy H1B or PERM requirements.
So nothing close to "indentured servitude"? Let's give it another name and not undermine the history of slavery.
Same guys who flooded the UK IT market. Can't shed a tear for them.
I mean those Indian firms do abuse the visa system so good riddance
Now, you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent as you make it clearer and clearer that you don't want them. This is the talent we want most.
Even if you're a laborer, it's quite hard to argue that the absolute pinnacle of the labor pool is dragging down your wages and not increasing total jobs.
If other countries are giving you better alternatives, why bring your talents to the US?
I don't think "top talent" is very well represented in the companies listed above...
It is when you think high salaries = top talent.
None of the above companies have what I would consider to be high salaries relative to their tech peers.
Microsoft is also included [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5cfecbba-69ed-42d0-98fd-3ae019144...
> the absolute pinnacle of the labor pool
You can't be saying this in seriousness
most of these places are body shops, pretty much the opposite of “pinnacle of the labour pool”
> you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent
Just hire them remote overseas. One of the competitive advantages of hybrid organizations is they natively support international teams.
LOL. It's not "top talent" it's "cheap talent" or even just "more talent so the supply is larger and wages go down".
If you're EG a PhD+ and working in a frontier AI lab on cutting edge problems, then fair enough. If you're developer x of 100 writing Java CRUD apps in the finance department of some corporate, you are not.
> Now, you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent as you make it clearer and clearer that you don't want them. This is the talent we want most.
No. It’s not.
> other companies that would be suspended […] included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE.
These companies are D tier talent, at best.
Top talent exists domestically, this is to hold wages down. It’s fine to impair the import conveyor and see what happens. If and when there is a labor shortage or wages spike horrendously (highly unlikely), certainly, we can revisit.
Neoliberalism ignored domestic worker concerns for shareholder returns and corporatism, and an alternative was offered, here we are. It’s a natural experiment we might not otherwise had had the opportunity to run.
You are correct.
It also exists non-domestically...
If the US can bully countries into releasing 100M barrels of their own petroleum reserves, what makes you think the US can’t solve for that too? Other countries!
Everyone has a leverage point, everyone has a point at which the pain is worse than the ask. Companies and executives are easy, and usually of weak constitution. They fold fast, based on the evidence so far. US Big Tech fell in line super fast, right? “Fall in line or else.” If trillions of dollars in enterprise value and the resources it commands won’t save you, I’m unsure if anything else would.
It’s not right or wrong, it just is. We are living through a “might makes right” era. It’s not the first, won’t be the last (if history is our guide). This too shall pass.
> wages spike horrendously
Anything but that!
WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE SHAREHOLDERS!!
Frankly talent doesn’t matter any more with AI - the skill floor for software has dropped to zero so an average dev now competes with the best devs. Marketing and capital matter way more.
It still matters a bit for architectural direction - but those roles are so few I wouldn’t be concerned as an American.
In a normal world, I would praise the government for taking a action to address issues with a program that has definitely been abused by major tech companies for a long time.
However, it's really hard to separate the message from the messenger here.
Beyond the fact that this is obviously a political stunt designed to make headlines just a few weeks before the mid-term elections, there is little reason to believe that this is being done in good faith targeting the worst offenders. The people who have been chosen to run the federal government are simply corrupt sociopaths who will do anything to promote their extreme ideological agenda and are not to be trusted in any way.
Until proven otherwise, I have to assume this effort has to do with kickbacks or political retribution mixed with blatant racism, rather than for any sort of public benefit. I doubt this will result in anything besides a larger donation to the Republican party - or direct payments to Trump family members - by the affected companies.
The messengers come from the political party that freed America from the worst abuses of slavery. It still exists today, and I regret that H2A workers are not more represented in this conversation. However, this administration condoning indentured servitude is a relief.
https://archive.ph/5B8mZ
not much in there beyond the headline but quotes from the admin
The AP blurb[0] has different quotes and includes an accusation of fraud that's missing from the Bloomberg article.
> Vance said Thursday, “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.” Vance spoke in a White House news conference announcing the decision.
[0] https://apnews.com/live/trump-midterm-elections-news-updates...
Accepting Vance's premise, is he saying that the solution to replacing American workers with indentured servants is... removing the path out of indentured servitude? It sounds like they're not touching H1-B itself, just the path from H1-B to residency.
If you remove the path from H1-B to residency, you reduce the incentive for a lot of people to go through the H1-B hell to begin with.
Speaking personally, my Dad put me in a university in Canada instead of USA since the path to permanent immigration was so much smoother.
They've been limited in what changes to H1-b they can make without legislative support, so they will take any other option to make H1-b less desirable and harder.
Correct.
Narrator: He did not do the math.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...
>The report finds that a broad path to citizenship would stabilize jobs and prices across the construction, hospitality, and care industries that families depend on while raising wages for all American workers.
The article posted is about suspending a Tech company's use of h1-b. The report makes no mention of the Tech sector and all the purported gains are in low-income high-physical labor industries like construction and hospitality. The whole wage and cost of living stabilization they're saying is due to immigrant labor is due to the fact you can exploit them for lower wages.
It further argues that Citizenship, not temp work visas, is the correct path. All while calling out that Tech companies, like Microsoft, are the primary beneficiaries of the current system.
In that light, I don't think linking this report arguing what you think it does.
You're at best naive if you don't see the big picture of sum of the immigration policies of this administration.
The Ministry of Truth has deemed you are not doing the right kind of math. /s
gotta love our post-truth world...
Did he do the math? Or are they still eating cats and dogs?
Is that 2 or 10 nom's of furry friends, the numbers look the same to my binary eyes, math is hard with an ai buddy?
This admin has demonstrated many times they will misuse Ai and blindly trust whatever it spits out. Would not be surprised in the slightest if that was the case here.
It's "funny" that organizations like the AP, NYT, etc, still quote Vance after that. He never really had credibility beforehand but any he may have had was lost, surely.
Thanks! Unfortunately archive.ph requires passing an impassible computational paywall for some browsers/ips/etc. Since the article is so short it seem fine to just quote it in full here,
"The Trump administration said Thursday that it would suspend an immigration program for multiple tech firms, including Microsoft Corp., alleging widespread abuse of a worker visa system. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vice President JD Vance said, during a briefing in Washington. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said other companies that would be suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE. He said there were multiple active federal investigations ongoing into the matter. The move is the latest by the Trump administration to crack down on legal and illegal pathways to migration. The program at issue allows US employers to help sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. “Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them, they do a lot of important things,” Vance said Thursday. “Our message to Microsoft is not that we want to harm your company. It’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans.” Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
This is about these companies having the ability to sponsor employees for green cards. They can still employ people on visas. It's more accurate to say the government wants to prevent these workers from eventually becoming American.
As in: come here, work, pay taxes, contribute to the society but then fuck off.
Most developed countries are at least this hostile to immigrants. And if they aren't, it's because they aren't desirable places in the first place.
Yeah was about to post this, this reads that it's the PERM program so just about the path to getting a Greencard, different from H1B1s, etc.
What is a "computational paywall"?
Some proof of work type thing to prevent bots by changing the economics, presumably. It's that "checking you are a human" thing without forcing you to click images
https://anubis.techaro.lol or one of its brethren
What do ya'll think about the conjecture that the elites in the USA want to destroy the actual economy while keeping their world of financial bullshit going?
The current K shaped economy being just the beginning. The elites realised that making more money wont change much for them, but they can make everyone else poor and then live as feudal lords.
Sounds like Yanis Varoufakis's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism
Varoufakis is a member of the World Economic Forum, comes from a wealthy family and his wife is the daughter of the biggest clothing manufacturer in Greece. He's part of what he complains about.
In feudalism, there is some mutual dependence despite hostility. The peasants need the nobles to defend them from other depredation, and the lords need the peasants to feed them and fight their wars. The only problem is that during the future, if automation continues, the proletariat/peasantry will be surplus to requirements, i.e. not needed by the ruling class, so it won't really be feudal.
Everything I've seen feels like the aftermath of a leveraged buyout.
Yeah they don't want to destroy everything, they want to own everything, and shrink the costs of ownership by any means necessary. Labor costs are one of the more untolerable aspects of ownership of entire industries.
This only works if they are able to detach wealth from the cost of labor (ie. AI for service jobs robots for physical jobs). At that point the populace will have no way to generate value so the elites dont need them anymore. It remains to be seen if this comes to pass. My daily AI screwups need to be fixed if we are to even consider this.
I haven't seem much evidence of them wanting to destroy the economy. Trump may do some damage with his trade war everyone and run up the debt policy but I think he wants America to do well even if the policies are kind of dumb? (Brit here - I may be quite wrong).
That’s what they get for not donating enough to MAGA Inc
For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law
I think the problem is the opposite. “MAGA”, both the ideology and the workings of the administration, are largely internally self-contradictory and incoherent.
You might say “okay there’s still some corporate-cons who’ll take my money and do what I ask” but then there’s guys like Miller pulling the strings whose entire purpose is opposed to yours.
This might sound crazy, but maybe getting behind a stable and predictable gov't that has ensured corporate dominance for over a century would have been a smarter strategy? But hey what do I know…
fwiw they donated everything they could; still not enough.
Will they learn their lesson? Find out next time!
> they donated everything they could
Citizens United means unlimited money in politics is free speech, they can always give more. Often, non-monetary tributes to king midus, praise or peace prizes, go much further.
The corporate-government corruption is out of hand and I am glad more people are making it a top political issue. I have my doubts this latest from the admin will make a positive difference. It's primarily performative politics for the base with zero consideration for secondary effects or real causes.
But also maybe they got there by paying and lobbying previous admins to the detriment of the local workforce (though likely good fiscally for the orgs taking advantage of the program).
It is completely possible this is a legitimate issue, but the current administration has been so corrupt about everything else it is impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Even if the claim is valid I’m sure the enforcement is targeted.
You think they’d go after palintir or spacex for the same issues?
My impression is that those companies might have many jobs requiring at least US citizenship or security clearances.
There is a likelihood of some targeting though this isn’t the only admin to do that. Remember when the IRS was directed to audit conservative organizations (you know maybe they had a higher likely hood of fraud, maybe, but that was not proven)
That said, it seems this is targeting body farms. Firms that specialize in corrupting the process. Yes some people they bring over have unique talents, but a lot of them are run of the mill folks looking to become “manager” so they can attract a mate back home.
> Remember when the IRS was directed to audit conservative organizations
It was directed to audit them less, because they were complaining about being audited as much as other organizations. Yet another case where conservatives make themselves victims out of nowhere, to get preferential treatment and then continue pretend they were victims after proven wrong.
Louis Lerner later apologized for subjecting the orgs to overscrutiny.
Generally apologizing to people with persecution fetishes is unhelpful. He shouldn't have apologized.
He admitted that the majority of the targeted auditing was against conservative orgs while also targeting a minority of liberal orgs. He admitted to the targeting and also that it greatly focused on conservative orgs.
I'm not against going after fraud, but you have to be even handed about it.
You can read NPR's take. They admit they targeted conservative groups but also had progressive bycatch.
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/05/555975207/as-irs-targeted-tea...
But did he admit it was because they were conservative or because they were committing more fraud?
I can't see any quotes there except claims of keyword searches. I haven't yet read the pdf.
If its true that it was based on keyword searches, then I would hope a future government gets the balls to do the same for the current Trump admin's keyword based banning/removal shenanigans.
There was no wrongdoing on his part. Only conservatives, as usually, feel like being persecuted when they cant defraud freely.
Which is why they created the most corrupt admin in history.
yes see last weeks of previous president and number of pardons there.
If the talent can't come to Microsoft, Microsoft will offshore near the talent.
The issue is they might run out of normal countries. In developing countries they would quickly become target of local corrupt officials. They would basically suck out whatever they can from companies that would attempt to do billion dollar business there. You can think of them as some mob from mafia movies. There is no way Microsoft would prefer to deal with that kind of folk instead of just hiring American people
Microsoft is located in Bangalore and Hyderabad. Both of those cities are not exactly known for their corruption. If you want corruption, then Delhi is your best bet.
What if the bribes are still cheaper than paying a US citizen? It would still be cheaper than hiring a Us citizen I think
I generally find Microsoft to be talentless regardless of the location.
Full disclosure: long MSFT.
Pretty much all Big Tech already have offices in Europe, Latam, India...
In only a few countries in LATAM and Europe, in LATAM they are only present largely for sales but no development. I would guess the same is the case in Europe
I entirely agree. They are looking at many countries like those in Latin America, to hire cheaper labor there either vis local subsidiaries or local outsourcing/consulting firms
Like this?
https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-idc-celebrates-25...
Ya big tech firms are hiring like crazy in Canada but mostly offshore talent not local talent
Mind sharing a source? Anecdotally, the Canadian job market is brutal (barring some sectors)
I worked at MS Vancouver office in 2019, majority was people with visa issues to US. Even I was Canadian from Ontario who ended up there because I couldn't get visa to move to SF
All you have to do is go look at their active GitHub projects. Azure projects, etc.. Take a look at who is doing the work and where they live.
Yup.
As a card-carrying member of the "fuck off we're full" club, excellent.
Nothing wrong with saying that.
Generally I would rather them offshore talent than bring in foreign workers to our soil. I would make an exception for the actual exceptional people we need for jobs but not for the run of the mill developers or whatever we seem to be bringing in by the truckload.
> “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”
> ... Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.
I'm glad someone is finally taking this more seriously. There are a lot of big tech teams where you can't even get a job there unless you're Indian. H1B's should be for unique, foreign talent, not senior software engineers.
In the best case we could hope this will lead to increased wages to American citizens, but realistically I think the most likely impact is it pisses a lot of people off, causes a lot of headaches for a lot of people, and has no real impact for most.
Edit: Would love to hear a coherent argument as to why my comment is off topic and deserving of downvotes but I'm sure that won't happen.
I hope it causes some people to return to Europe and do some good work over here.
I'm never sure how to feel about this kind of thing. On one hand, it's kind of interesting to see the self-destruction, and having qualified people return to Europe can only be a good thing for Europe. OTOH, it's scary to see, and I'm unsure whether I prefer a world where China gains much more power.
This ruling is not targeted towards Europeans. I doubt this will significantly affect European workers in the US. The reality is there aren't that many European immigrants in the US and not many at all on H1-Bs. The vast majority of immigrants are from the Americas (with over 22% from Mexico), India and China. European migrants as of ~2023 total around 10% and have been slowly decreasing over the past few years. Bear in mind a lot of people are still here from the post-WW2 period when immigration was much more liberal.
Anecdotally from the people I've met, the majority of Europeans are here for academia on F/J/O, entertainment, are spouses of US citizens or get temporary transfer visas like the L1. Those who go to the US because of high salaries can afford to figure out employment based green cards and they don't have multiple year waiting periods. Otherwise it's a huge pain to get permanent residency or even a normal work visa compared to the EU, but qualified Europeans generally don't have much trouble.
I think there are plenty of qualified and hard-working people in China, I'm not sure this change would increase the number of people there the same way it might in places like Europe or India.
For about 5-6 decades all the qualified and hard-working people in China came to the U.S, because they could enjoy more freedom, fewer arbitrary government dictates, and better economic opportunities. This brain drain was a huge factor in U.S. global dominance.
That conveyor has now reversed, because all of the drivers have reversed as well. China will be fine; it's the U.S. I'm concerned about.
So the US underinvested in the native workforce and now the chinese have gone back there's a big gap that a native workforce would have filled if they hadn't been temporarily replaced by chinese? Seems terrible short sighted.
Yes. The mechanism is that American kids stopped learning useful things like STEM skills. I remember when I went to college in the early 00s, every single person in my physics class was either an immigrant, child of an immigrant, or Jewish. Now we have a shortage in engineering skills that has to be filled by H1Bs, and a population that all gets service jobs and consumes disproportionately because of an overvalued reserve currency. If that currency ever stops being overvalued, we're fucked.
Americans stopped learning or they were rejected?
Stopped learning. Physics classes at my college were about 12 students. CS and math would be about 20-30ish, History and English and Psychology classes were about 40-60, PoliSci could be upwards of 100. I don't think any science or math course there ever filled up. There was zero barrier to anyone wanting to take a physics course or be a physics major, other than the work being really hard.
Come on.
The U.S. will always dominate because they consume everything and make really nothing. The second people in U.S. stop consuming everyone else pays the price.
The U.S. is 4% of the world population. Back when the world population was 2B people and the developed world population was about 400M and the U.S. was 130M of that and the only market whose capital stock hadn't been totally destroyed by WW2, we were crucial to the world economy. But now the world population is 8B, the developed world population is 6B, and the U.S. is 330M of that. In terms of raw size of consumer markets, the world can ignore the U.S. The tricky part is the dependence on U.S. software and financial companies for significant parts of the global information infrastructure, but there's already a strong movement to that.
Is this the same Europe that's cutting work visas, tightening restrictions, and increasing naturalization requirements across the board?
What's really interesting to see is your blindness to that self destruction.
A European returning to Europe from abroad doesn't need any visa, and doesn't face any restrictions.
While true, the question should be: is each European nation/the EU collectively doing those restrictions sensibly, or poorly?
If done in a similar fashion as the US has chosen, i.e. due to incoherent populism, it would limit the number of competent e.g. Americas, Canadians, South Africans etc. from joining the European workforce.
If done in a sensible fashion, it would only exclude the would-be migrants from those (or other) countries who have shown a wanton disregard for democracy and other constitutionally required values.
this made me chuckle, considering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odyssey_(2026_film)
Well they do depending on which country they are citizen of and where they are working.
The UK is considered non-EU so there would need to be a visa for a Brit working in the EU.
A nitpick here, but "visa" gets tossed around a lot. A visa is a document which allows you to request permission to enter a country for some purpose. To work in a country you need a work and/or residency permit. Even in the US, there are situations where you can work with a an expired visa, provided your other immigration documents are current. But if you leave, you need a new one. Similarly UK citizens can still work in some European countries without a visa, because there is no requirement for them to enter with one (but the officer at the border might still refuse entry).
You can be grandfathered in, but since this was about somebody returning to Europe, it likely doesn't apply to them
Since the word used was "returning", that would mean that they go back to where they came from, where they are citizens.
"I like burgers."
"Why do you hate pizza, jackass?"
"I hate burgers covered in shit, I'd rather eat pizza"
"That pizza is covered in shit too, so do you actually hate shit?"
"Who said anything about shit!!1!"
That won't happen. There is no reason for it to happen anyway given that AI agents are more efficient anyway.
Microsoft and others are more focused on building data centers (homes for AI agents) than hiring humans at this point.
Fewer people means less qualified applicants for the same jobs, which means wages go up. Maybe companies like Microsoft have enough dead weight that they will just absorb the losses in growth but most companies don't have that luxury and this is hitting staff aug body shops so it will hit mid market and small employers as well unless it gets overturned.
A good step in the right direction. What I voted for.
Many comments here claiming immigrant tech workers undercut native workers, yet somehow in the software industry, where H1B has been the most widely used, unemployment rate has historically consistently been much lower than the overall unemployment rate, and the wages have been higher (and growing faster) than average wages.
Like 25% - 40% lower unemployment and 60% - 100% higher wages. Even during the dot-com bust software was much better off! It's right there in the BLS data (though a bit hairy to slice and dice due to how they categorize jobs.)
The "immigrants displace native worker" narrative is too simplistic. Consider maybe that without those workers the work simply does not get done.
I mean, we've all lived through this. How many people here, for most of their careers, did NOT have mountains of backlog they would like to clear out if only they had more headcount? How many have NOT spent days on quarterly planning because of the need to be extremely judicious about what you put on your roadmap? And how many have not bemoaned, oftern right here on HN, how hard it is to find people who can actually code?
It's not just you, this dynamic plays out all over the place, and puts real constraints on the expansion potential of companies, which reduces future hiring all around. There are studies on this. Yes, there is naturally some downward wage pressure on local employees due to a larger pool, but on the whole the expansion and faster growth of companies, and hence the overall economy, more than compensates for this.
Feel free to ask your favorite AI for more... You know, the thing actually taking our jerbs! ;-)
Even before this current AI wave and awful economy/hiring environment, corporations have been turning their noses up at workers. When there were "jobs a plenty", you only need to speak to anyone in the industry to see how much talent is overlooked because they can. Corporations and the economy at large should work for the people, we should not be burning down the lives of citizens to grow the economy at all costs.
Here is the evidence that even 10 years ago there was way more talent ready-to-go and easily cultivated talent that could be honed with a few weeks or months of training: ATS keyword gaming (make sure you have the right SQL/Java version mentioned), need to lie about your exact stack to get an interview, hiring gauntlets where it's "a numbers game" and you go around and around till you get just the right leet-code questions that you happened to already know, age-ism where anyone over the age of 40 is worried about a lay-off and never getting back into the industry because corps/hiring managers only want younger for technical work. All of those anecdotes, which anyone whose been in this industry is deeply familiar with, points to an absolute glut of talent even in employee-friendly times.
I'm all for H1B's and bringing in foreign talent, I'm also all for holding corporations accountable and ensuring they don't get a pass to treat humans and labor as disposable. If a large corporation can bin resumes because they don't match a plethora of exact keywords and if they don't want to train for even a few weeks and need someone to "hit the ground running", they are drowning in too much talent.
so these are just indian companies and microsoft which is lead by an indian guy? is the government signaling something here? i know amazon, meta, google are all doing the same thing- but amazon and meta are licking the ass.
giving the same excuse of "oh these companies post jobs where they are not seen" is the lamest excuse you can give. are you saying this government is so poor and incompetent that it cannot verify where the job was posted? how many people saw the jobs, how many clicked and applied?? are you really saying that the most power country, with SI is not able to do this basic check??
People on H1B and students have to pay US Taxes and into social security even if they may never see that money. And they also spend money here.
So to all the morons, they took our jerbs, they are full people acting in the economic system
And they also remove a lot of those funds from the domestic economy in the form of remittances to their families in their home countries.