This is actually smart. Many H1B visas are used to undermine fair labor wages for already local talent. We should ensure that H1B visas are for actual unique talent and not just to undercut local wages.
H1B is ripe with abuse - this article by Bloomberg says that half of all H1-B visas are used by Indian staffing firms that pay significantly lower than the US laborers they are replacing:
This is very short term thinking, in that it assumes a constant amount of work and ignores the global competition for labor.
If the US loses its massive lead in the network effects of a large labor pool, the amount of work in the US will shrink, both by moving to other countries and less overall innovation.
This is not a beneficial move for most software engineers.
A common problem in latam and other geos is brain drain. Most of their best minds simply leave the country looking for better opportunities. That is impactful for the countries economies, the country invest a lot in people,but others see the benefits.
During last century, USA has been the most benefited from that kind of immigration.
Personally I think that this is a very short sighted decision by USA administration. But overall, I think that this will benefit the rest of the world. Maybe in a few years even USA will start exporting their best minds abroad!
> During last century, USA has been the most benefited from that kind of immigration
This is inaccurate. The U.S. had a highly restrictionist immigration system from 1921-1965. The foreign born population dropped from almost 15% to under 5% by 1970.
During that time, the U.S. had a small number of highly skilled immigrants, such as German scientists fleeing the Nazi regime. You’re talking about a very small number of truly exceptional people. A $100k/year fee is not going to shut down this kind of immigration.
Between 1921 and 1965, about 9.6 million people were admitted as lawful permanent residents. That's not what I'd call a "very small" or "highly restricted" inflow.
We have been around 1 million per year for decades. If we still had that policy, adjusted for population you’re talking about cutting legal immigration by one-third to one-half.
And that’s not counting a large increase in “gray market” legal immigration (TPS, asylum, etc.)
Employers pay these fees, not the employers. A white collar worker already costs close to $100k in overhead, benefits, and payroll taxes. The true geniuses are easily worth $100k to a university or employer.
> How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.
/me
I started in Slovenia, considered London, actually got an offer in Canada, but ultimately chose San Francisco. Figured that if I’m going to the trouble of moving abroad, I might as well go to the center of the industry.
Got lots of friends who chose various EU companies based on desired lifestyle/work/partner balance. You have lots of options as a good engineer. Especially before the last 3 years of market shenanigans.
They had a choice. Whether intentional or not, London, Canada, and the US were competing based on which country could offer the best lifestyle. If the US becomes hostile to immigrants, then people with a choice (who are typically the most talented candidates) may choose to live elsewhere.
Those countries were not competing for high skilled immigrants. They built themselves into places that high skill immigrants seek, but that is more of a side effect than a competition.
The leaders/parties supporting immigration in those countries are ambivalent to receiving high skill immigrants or refugees.
> Those countries were not keeping for high skilled immigrants.
The US, UK, and Canada all have special provisions in their immigration programs aimed at attracting and prioritizing highly-skilled workers.
Both the UK [1] and Canada [2] both use a points-based ranking system that prioritizes highly-skilled immigrants. The UK system is clear in its goals:
> introduce an Immigration Bill to bring in a firm and fair points-based system that will attract the high-skilled workers we need to contribute to our economy, our communities and our public services.
And while the US H1-B program is lottery-based, 20,000 slots are reserved for people who hold a master's degree from a U.S. institution. Proposals have also been made recently to change to a points-based system. [3]
> They built themselves into places that high skill immigrants seek, but that is more of a side effect than a competition
Wherever there is choice, there is competition. 55% of billion dollar startups in the US have immigrant founders, employing an average of 1,200 employees each [4]. If these people don't come to the US and start companies, the US will feel the effects - even if they were just "side effects".
A country picking high-quality immigrants ≠ a country competing for immigrants. The opposite, in fact.
This choosiness is actually a sign that immigrants are competing to enter those countries. The points based system is (in theory) a way to identify the ones we want.
That said, illegals and “refugees” outnumber H1Bs, further reinforcing that Western countries don’t care about global talent.
> A country picking high-quality immigrants ≠ a country competing for immigrants. The opposite, in fact.
It goes both ways. A more streamlined application process and straightforward path to permanent residency is a draw to would-be immigrants who qualify.
I won't discuss illegal immigration or asylum here as those exist for different reasons, other than to say that it's a logical fallacy to assume that just because A is bigger than B, a country doesn’t care about B.
Exactly. The tech pay disparity between US (and particularly in California) and everywhere else is so large that it’s not even close to being comparable.
I relocated to Amsterdam from India. When I got to know about the salaries my peers were making in the same company but in the US I felt like a fool. Being a manager I had access to compensation data so yeah it was hard to not feel being done by.
>There is a global competition for coming to Western Europe, Canada, and the US.
As someone who lived in all three geographies and interacted with immigrants who lived in there, here is my raw take:-
Western Europe:- Love it and people are so nice but they are also (I am sorry to say) racist. Proof:- How many immigrant CEO's do you see from companies based in Western Europe? The top 4 largest tech companies in the US have two indian CEO's for more than 10 years now.
Canada:- Super nice and immigrant friendly more than the US, but the size of the country (approx 10% of the US) doesn't have the financial/economic/social infrastructure that is needed to support a large number of immigrants. Also tech salaries are miserable compared to the US
US:- For all its faults, US is truly the only country where immigrants looking for a better future can immigrate and assimilate into. For how long this lasts remains to be seen but I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.
Same, three actually, none of which the US. A closer representation for the US brain may be who is considering between different states? Here is the thing, other countries do not necessarily work exactly the same way as the US or individually have large enough local markets to contain all aspects of the overall tech industry, just locally.
The slate of policy choices in the US is removing it from that list of countries, and will strengthen those countries' labor forces.
Right now SV salaries command a huge premium, because all of SV is predicated on increasing productivity, increasing the economic pie, and rewarding those who do so with a fraction of that gain in GDP.
Treating SV labor like plumbing or construction labor fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics and the creation of wealth.
Keeping the lights on is an absolutely essential societal function, and for keeping an economy running. But expanding the technological capacity of the US is what made us so much wealthier than any other country in the world. And expanding that technological capacity faster than the rest of the world comes from attracting the best technological innovators from the rest of the world. However, with China's and India's size, it's likely that they will now be able to overtake us without relying on much immigration.
I was about to ridicule this, but then I thought about it. My wife is in a skilled trade in SV, and that actually sounds about right. She has nothing to do with software, but probably earns, dollar/hour, about the same as a mid-tier L6 SWE at Google. I do R&D program management, government though, so the conversion to quality of life is kinda weird. Most people would see our house and assume I'm a director.
Did you have to choose? Or did you have the option? I would wager to bet that a significant amount of people in the US cant afford to move to another state.
I can confidently say yes. Choosing between working in two different countries separated by an entire ocean is an option. Moving to a different state is expensive for many, but moving to another continent is only afforded to a privileged minority.
By US you mean corporate America?
What if they maintain that massive lead on the backs of the US citizens?
The exploitation of the US worker needs to end, if the company does not have 100K to bring in global talent then that company cannot "massively lead" in any domain and the "talent" is neither global nor talented.
I am an American-born worker at a giant tech corporation. My coworkers are all immigrants, my job was created by immigrants, if they left I'd be unemployed because there's no way I can build this whole thing by myself. The work would simply disappear without them.
I think you underestimate the capabilities of the American worker, after all, they have created the circumstances in which your company surrounds itself and succeeds.
If your job cannot exist without an endless stream of underpaid, overworked Third word country immigrants then you don't have a job, you have a mill.
and so who owns the shares of "corporate america"? Newflash: Teachers' and firefighters' and cops' pensions are all invested in "corporate america". As well as pensions of union workers. As well as 401ks of all the other middle class people. Come on.
"the exploitation of American worker" ? American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.
To me that just reads like following the gamblers fallacy. Just because you already threw a bunch of money into the pot doesn't mean you have zero choice but to keep playing until you likely lose it all.
How many American teachers or firefighters would trade their own kid's job away to a foreigner in exchange for some hypothetical marginal increase in 401K returns? Not many. The only Americans who like that deal are managers who care more about their headcount than they do about their countrymen.
you keep thinking about it in Soviet zero sum terms. First of all, the foreign engineer doesn't disappear if you don't give him a visa, he or she just works somewhere else and still takes your kid's job away. Secondly, it's not a zero sum game ! that's the most important thing to realize. Number of jobs is not fixed ! it's not a fixed pie! you are on hacker news. A startup forum. And you are talking about number of jobs as a fixed pie.
1) India does not meaningfully compete with the US and never has. We are not going to actively harm our own people now to stave off some imaginary future threat.
2) Tell that to the 100K+ unemployed Americans in the IT space.
Oh now they care about teachers, firefighters, cops and puppies? Is that what this H1B is about?
> American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.
What are you even talking about? Being able to hold more tokens that can buyback the products of the asset class does not make for a "rich standard of living".
Having to run gofundme's for medical care is not "rich standard of living".
Them trembling on every unscheduled meeting with their boss is not "rich standard of living"
if you are going to argue that Americans don't have a rich standard of living, that is just an absurd argument. It's obvious to anyone who has lived or worked somewhere else.
The competition isn't for labor, it is for net productivity. These are not the same thing. As anyone who has ever worked on a team can tell you, "more team members" absolutely does not equate to a more productive team. In fact we have a plethora of phrases and anecdotes which indicate the opposite is often true.
... and is done for these employers already (though not to the level that is being proposed)
Public Law 114-113 (December 2015 to September 2025) : additional fee of $4000
Public Law 114–113, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, imposed a fee of $4,000 on H-1B petitions and $4,500 on L-1A and L-1B petitions. The additional H-1B fees would apply to all petitions postmarked on or after December 18, 2015, and until September 30, 2025.
I suspect the very best engineers will be worth every penny of that $100k/yr and the amount of abuse will drop. There is the very real risk that companies will move to outsource more roles, but I will personally be boycotting them.
I’m incredulous you’d expect otherwise? This is clearly pandering favor with a certain demographic, in a way that didn’t upset the big money going to Maralargo.
Why would they intervene with outsourcing the jobs instead of H1Bs? And more importantly, how?
There is no way around it, you either outsource or lose (and they already outsourced almost all factories). Companies will move HQs to India and "outsource" some operations to the US.
You're applying economics when the problem is fundamentally racial. Trump has exposed the dark underbelly of the US. The comments in this thread as well as elsewhere just show the fundamental lack of empathy - which I know is a made up word unless someone with the "right" political leanings was harmed.
Of course the visa is a privilege and there are tons of abuses associated with it. There are methodical ways of going about it and actually fixing the problem. Slapping a $100k fee with unclear language and no heads-up uproots while uprooting lives of so many people have lived in the country for years if not decades, maintained legal status, and paid taxes including Social Security and Medicare is "a smart move" according to the top comment.
But we all know what the real problem is. If majority of the H-1B visa holders had the right skin color, they would be welcome with open arms regardless of any abuse of the system. Just like how South African refugees are welcome while other those from the "wrong" kind of country are not.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." ― Lyndon B. Johnson
It has nothing to do with “skin color,” but economics, culture, and worldview.
“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family. The opinion advanced in the Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived, or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.” — Alexander Hamilton
he hasnt been particularly right with that, in hindsight. the people most excited for freedom and republic are the new immigrants escaping dictators, while the american born folks are either accepting of or promoting a move towards monarchy.
maybe it was true before the US became the global propagandist, but almost everyone on earth is a native born american now.
That’s only true if you define “native born american” as someone who watches Marvel movies. There is no immigrant community of significant size that is culturally American below the surface. None that embodies the self-flagellating communalism of Yankee America, nor the reflexively anti-government individualism of southern america.
Even the groups who superficially assimilate into the progressive culture embraced by Yankees do so as subordinates, not peers. The Yankee will condemn his own ancestors and discriminate against people who look like him. Most immigrants are happy to be the objects of that pity, but do not behave in the identical manner. They respect their own ancestors and retain their own ethnic attachments.
Virtually everything Hamilton worried about applies to contemporary immigrants to a T.
Chicago still suffers from the political machines that were created during mass immigration of Germans and Irish in the 19th century! Immigrants engage in block voting, and political machines arise to whip that vote. That results in corruption, because people’s vote is based on ethnic loyalty and group interests instead of the merits: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/24/illinois-d...
The whole argument sounds familiar. "Those entitled minorities have the nerve to make not being discriminated against a high priority when voting." It is all classic scapegoating and assigning sinister forces who conspire to make people do things that they would all do on their own anyway and refusing to accept any responsibility on your part.
The obvious solution of "stop being a racist douchebag so minorities can actually feel secure enough to be able to act on other priorities" being of course completely off the table as the speaker views such behavior as a birthright and sacrament. It does happen. Now voters of Irish descent take 'is an Irish Catholic' as a nice to have at most instead of an essential.
But the same counterproductive behavior is doubled down upon as their sacred sacrament of racist douchebaggery shall not be denied. Look at how a very religiously conservative bloc, Muslims ended up shifting to the left by necessity from the racism they encountered post war on terror.
In what way? The cited portion, which discusses theories in the field, says:
“The rainbow theorists argue that the machine was a functional body (Merton 1968) that pursued political incorporation of many ethnic groups in the political party. In return for loyalty to the political party, machines delivered a variety of social services to ethnic immigrants, in addition to jobs, friendship, and opportunities for social and economic advancement. The rainbow coalition of mostly white-ethnic groups was sustained through a virtually endless supply of ‘municipal gold’ (Erie 1988) that the machines controlled. This exchange system seemingly guaranteed ethnic loyalty to the machine.”
The remainder of the article shows how Irish domination left the Polish with the short end of the stick: “Through this study we try to show that Polish Americans in Chicago were on the short end of the exchange arrangements in the machine, receiving few rewards, especially as their independence from the Democratic party expanded during the Daley era.” The Poles were punished
This is basically Pakistan, except instead of clans it’s immigrant groups voting for their own co-ethnics and jockeying for advantage. It’s a far cry from the political debates of the founding era, which were based on principles and political theory, not ethnic tribalism.
It demonstrates that the Irish, for a time, had outsized political power, at the expense of the Poles, who outnumber them dramatically. In the time scale you're talking about, essentially everybody is an immigrant. Meanwhile: what's the immigrant ethnic bloc exercising outsized power in Chicago today?
The problem isn’t about which ethnic bloc has more power, it’s that people have such strong ethnic identities that they’re forming ethnic political blocs in the first place and doling out patronage on the basis of ethnic group. That’s a recipe for dysfunction and corruption, as we see in Chicago. People will forgive a lot of corruption and graft for their ethnic tribe. And the winners of those elections are robbing the treasury to pay for benefits targeted at their co-ethnics.
150 years after their inception, assimilation of ethnic whites has largely ended those political machines. But the effects are cumulative. Chicago still lives with the consequences of the machine politics of the Cermak to Daley era. And ethnic politics still plays a large role in Chicago between whites, hispanics, and black people: https://www.hispanicfederation.org/news/new-poll-shows-dead-... (“One interesting finding is that one-third of Latinos think Vallas may be Latino.”).
But that's exactly what your source doesn't show. There are more Polish people living in Chicago than in Krakow; it's the largest population of ethnic Poles in the world anywhere outside of the largest metros in Poland itself. And they don't effectively exert power as a bloc. Your source shows one bloc, of Irish; today, the most effective wielders of power in Chicago are Black. There's no coherent immigration story to tell here.
It comes off a little bit like it would if you claimed that immigration brings with it organized crime, because La Cosa Nostra was dominated by Italians. But LCN is not in fact the story of Italians in America, and wasn't replicated by other ethnic blocs.
People share affinities and affinities structure interactions, and naturally some of those structural affinities are going to be ethnic. But if they weren't ethnic, they'd be religious, or political, or economic, which is what US history actually demonstrates.
If you're going to make the case that any of this matters in Chicago politics, though: cite the immigrant bloc that controls and distorts Chicago politics. Which ones are the illegitimate aldermen? I don't like most Chicago alderpeople, so you're not going to hurt my feelings.
The article says Poles did have ethnic identity: “What little has been written about Poles suggests that the Wolfinger view may be correct: Polish Americans still vote for Poles if they have the opportunity to do so.” The article’s thesis is that Poles were unable to effectively exercise power as a block because the Irish got there first and froze them out of the ethnic grifting.
Whether or not tribalism exists among white ethnics today is besides the point. Corruption is self-perpetuating. The real question is what Chicago would look like today if it had never experienced mass immigration, starting with the Irish. I strongly suspect it would be a better governed city today, like Toronto before the recent mass immigration.
There is a single well-governed city in the world that has experienced mass immigration from multiple ethnic groups, and that’s Singapore. And that’s got an authoritarian, top-down government, and seems to be engaged in selective immigration to maintain a stable ethnic composition and Chinese supermajority.
> But LCN is not in fact the story of Italians in America, and wasn't replicated by other ethnic blocs.
There’s two different things. Mass immigration alone gives rise to ethnic, religious, and cultural conflict, which undermines democracy. Then sometimes you import specific problems from specific places. Organized crime is a bigger problem in Italy even today than in England or Scandinavia. And it was a definitive part of the story of Italians in America. It took decades to eradicate that problem.
I didn't say they didn't have an ethnic identity! I live just outside of Berwyn! I used to live on the north side! There are obviously Poles in Chicago. I asked if you could point to a way in which Polish concentration in Chicago had distorted our politics, especially since your source is mostly about how the Poles got stuffed by people who were here longer than them.
Now we're talking about Singapore for some reason. Is that a concession that you can't identify the aldermen who are illegitimated by their immigrant support?
That’s not a helpful lens because it overlooks the patterns of settlement. Nearly all the founding fathers were British. During the 18th century, German and Scandinavian immigrants formed their own communities across the midwest. Ethnic politics had little opportunity to arise in these communities, which were individually mono cultural. That result of that is quite different from a mass influx of a foreign population with a distinct group identity into an existing city or town.
In terms of what we could do now, we should stop illegal immigration and asylum entirely. We should also end family reunification. And skilled immigration should be spread out around the country (there are top universities everywhere). All that would prevent the development of ethnic enclaves, and over time lead to the weakening of disparate ethnic identities. That’s what happened during the immigration restriction from 1924-1965, when the foreign born population share dropped by 2/3, and the salience of ethnic identity among European Americans was greatly reduced.
Being born in a British colony in the early 1700s to British subject parents did in fact mean you were also a British subject. Several were also born in Great Britain proper. They were also nearly all ethnically English or Scottish.
Indeed, most of the founding fathers were British.
You perfectly exemplify the right-wing hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance by saying "it has nothing to do with skin color" followed by a quote by a people who did not consider black people to be people.
Yeah the guy who referred to African countries as "shithole" while wondering why the US can't import more immigrants from Norway puts insurmountable barriers to a program whose beneficiaries are overwhelmingly non-white people and that has nothing to do with race or skin color. Smartest HN chatter.
You racists really want all the "benefits" of racism without actually accepting the label. Why is that?
Urban-environments in the hyper-individualist age have no culture (no, drinking and watching "football" is not culture). Even Church-attendance is so low that these people you hate are buying up these abandoned buildings to create communities.
What you're complaining is that "they" have a culture, while you don't. I guess it's semi-understandable if it results in mob-violence and ganging-up, but I haven't seen this happen outside some Islamic-communities (even there, I think it's typ. only the S. Asian ones).
Saying that culture doesn’t exist is like a fish not realizing it’s swimming in water. Everywhere has culture, and it’s mostly below the surface://bccie.bc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/cultural-iceberg.pdf.
Don’t play the race card, you sound emotional saying that.
You admitted that there were tons of abuse. This gets back to the law’s original intent. This is the best fix that corporations “pay up” for.
It’s just politics. You have CS grads facing employment headwinds against AI, H1B, and high interest rates. They aren’t going to vote for the incumbents if they’re unemployed. Now they’re going to have a $100k discount to hire them instead of from a WITCH company. FAANG will still hire H-1Bs.
Do you think those countries will be nice and invite us to be reverse "H1Bs" into their countries or will they keep the pie to themselves? If they think like you they'll invite the whole world talent pool into their countries.
The US has the nicest biggest pie in the world. Why would somebody move to a place with less opportunity?
The opportunity created in the US is due to the concentration of talent, high productivity, and extensive networks of people creating innovation that inflated the pie even larger.
Go ahead and move to any of those countries from the US, it's prettt easy, because everybody wants to be like the US! The only possibly better passport was a Canadian one!
Something deeply sick has infected the US when we no longer recognize the source of the wealth of our nation. Nobody could touch us. At least until we started to intentionally make ourselves poorer.
Yep. There is a huge amount of American talent wallowing in low-level, dead end jobs because corporations have been actively incentivized to hire cheap, captive foreign labor rather than foster American talent. I am absolutely thrilled to witness this return to sanity.
Strong disagree. This is a dumb move in that the US wins wins when people move to the US, especially young, skilled people.
There are big issues with the h1b, particularly how strongly tied to the employer the employee is and how few of these we give away. But this basically closes the door for hiring foreign talent to anyone but BigCo.
It is a sad shotgun shell on the right foot on a long streak of the US feet shooting it's way out of relevance.
Student visas still exist. O1 visas still exist. Other routes I can't remember off the top of my head exist. The door is not closed. Indeed, even H1B visas still exist, assuming that young talented person is worth $100k more than a US citizen.
> the US wins wins when people move to the US, especially young, skilled people.
I personally lean towards this being true, but it is a claim that needs to be demonstrated comprehensively for your argument to hold water. It is not trivially true.
How so? Anybody who has a student visa had to prove that she or he has strong ties to the home country and no intent to remain in the Untied States, and that she or he only needs to get education in the US to come back and apply it for the home country's benefit.
If these people have not defrauded the US then they would not know what to do with a work visa as they'd be hurrying back home as soon as they received their diploma, pulled by those strong ties and the desire to finally put the education to use at home.
Student visas in the US come with the right to work for some time after graduation. If the foreign student isn’t valuable enough to stay after a degree and multiple years of work I think it’s fine to send them home.
But me personally, I advocate many fewer student visas.
What world are you living in? Many Chinese come in on student visas, get jobs at FAANG and then have to move back to their country after losing the H1-B. These are the people we want, doing the jobs that we want them to do, and we’re too nearsighted to figure out how to keep them.
Again, these are the most talented, most affluent minds that China has to offer. Sure, let’s have them work for the CCP rather than keeping them in the west.
You are showcasing your ignorance as lucidly as possible, bravo. Befriend some Chinese students studying in the US and you will quickly learn hardly any are fans of Xi and the CCP.
Indeed, though if you make that route too easy (or with limited oversight), you end up with diploma mills that aren't actually educating anyone. Incentives are hard to align well.
It wouldn't be hard to select and accredit at least the better universities. Giving an automatic work visa to every foreign Ivy graduate should be a no-brainier. You could take the top 30% or 50% ranked US News universities and accredit those, or some similar heuristics.
Brazil isn't a great example here since it is a Portuguese speaking country leading to relatively low immegration, but for Germany, for example a work visa takes 1-3 months to process, and unlike h1b there is no quota.
This doesn’t really tell us much, and isn’t really relevant to H1B either. If we had 0 immigration, all S&P 500 companies would be founded by non-immigrants.
This is a useless “technically correct” rejoinder. Yes, the top 500 would by definition still have 500 companies in it. Yes, the net value of the s&p would almost certainly be lower without the innovation brought by immigrant founders. Which is obviously the point being made.
These other visas are incredibly complicated to get. And funneling everyone through student visas is just inflating demand for uni degrees.
What someone's labor is worth is up to the market to decide. Also those $100k are taxed out of the employer and employee's value.
On the benefits of people moving to the US: it's been widely studied and it's basic economics, immigrants bring both supply and demand, so the size of the economy grows and so the opportunities to current residents.
Take the extreme: when people leave a country or city the economy there collapses, see Detroit or the increasingly old and depopulating European countries.
Or take the extreme on who comes: fiscal studies show that even low skilled immigrants are net positive fiscally. Only very old and unskilled immigrants are a fiscal burden.
Finally, thinking that we can capture the world's economy in a bottle and live lavishly without competition is delusional. If we stop letting people build here, they will build elsewhere and without us. We are increasingly less relevant.
Let's turn this around - would the US win if young, skilled people were net-leaving it?
Imagine spending 25 years raising, educating, feeding, and clothing a person, investing over a million dollars of money and labour in them, and then they just pack their bags and leave.
Educated, skilled, young immigrants are a colossal gift to the host country, and a crippling debit on the welfare and prosperity of the country they have left.
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Anyone who has ever given it more than thirty seconds of thought knows that countries become wealthy when people living in them work - and make stuff. So what do you do to improve a country's prosperity?
Obviously, in backwards-logic, you start raising barriers to people who want to do useful work in it.
(Because dealing with the systemic issues that have resulted in the country becoming prosperous not being correlated with the plurality of people in it not becoming prosperous would upset wealthy people who don't actually build anything.)
I genuinely don’t know: how many H1Bs were granted this year while we have read about numerous layoffs? Were those H1Bs truly necessary? Were they paid at or above market rates?
My limited experience with H1B labor is not folks who are young nor particularly skilled. They are cheaper and faster to staff.
I'm by no means xenophobic. Bring in all the immigrants you want. But I can't agree that H1Bs are working as designed and pull in labor that doesn't otherwise already exist in the US.
But if you want to attract young talented and skilled people into the US, I don't think H1B is a good way to do it. I would imagine is more likely to result in people leaving after gaining skills and experience and set up shop back home where the money they earned stretches farther. Many of them are forced to do so after their employer tosses them away so why would you come here with any different plan to start with? There is no clearly laid out path to come here on an H1B and guarantee you get to stay even if you do stellar work.
The only way to do that (and preserve H1B) is to entirely disconnect the subcontinent from the application process. Their top companies exist only to scam immigration programs around the world, it is their raison d'être.
Yeah exactly. And they embrace that fraud and turn it into a cornerstone of their economy. I too have worked with extremely talented people from the subcontinent and not one was on an H1B. The H1Bs I worked with were less competent than an undergraduate intern. Thankfully I only had to do that once during an on-prem install in Tyson’s Corner.
I’m curious what visa the “extremely talented people from the subcontinent” were on. If they have a green card or are naturalized citizens, there are very few paths to those statuses that doesn’t involve an H1B.
I'm against these top sweatshops, but is the answer to that is ban the entire subcontinent?
Also, I don't know how many h1bs have you worked with. I have worked with many (hundreds), and it's the same spectrum of talent you'd find anywhere. This is probably not the intent of h1b, but banning a set of countries is not the solution. Changing the criteria is.
The fact that it’s the same spectrum of talent (in your experience) is a glaring indicator that the system has been systematically abused by Indian WITCH to the point it’s no longer fit for purpose. Unfortunately systems constructed in high trust societies (1950s USA) must adapt with the arrival of low trust societies. Much like the European refugee conventions established in the echoes of WW2 and now gleefully exploited by these same low trust societies.
That's what I said. This is not the intent of H1b and exploiters must be punished. Classifying countries into low trust/high trust without understanding the full context of history and exploitation (by the so called high trust societies) and saying they are "gleefully" exploited, is disingenuous. Also see https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe... , and it's not just WITCH. In fact American companies have the biggest slice
Stop using British colonialism as an excuse for shitty behaviour, no one is buying that lazy argument anymore.
So many places were under the yolk of the same historical forces and managed to pull themselves together - India is rather unique in its inability to do so.
I didn’t include China. I also don’t think there’s any reason to close the borders to Indians. Rather, simply close off access to their Frankenstein cottage industry of scammers.
I agree that H1B abuse should be fixed. Its also bad for other H1Bs which have the skill and didn't abuse the system (which many of them are).
Maybe this 100k thing will fix it and maybe this wont. My main complain with this administration is always the chaos and impulsiveness which doesn't bring much confidence that they are actually capable of actually fixing the problem, as it always doesn't seem well thought through or executed. More like headlines to get some cheering from MAGA crowd.
> My main complain with this administration is always the chaos and impulsiveness which doesn't bring much confidence that they are actually capable of actually fixing the problem, as it always doesn't seem well thought through or executed. More like headlines to get some cheering from MAGA crowd.
I think it could also be that they don't want to fix any problems, but they do want the chaos and media attention that provides catharsis to the voting base.
Why are you using quotes around steal as though I used that word somewhere? Read what I wrote, repeat it to yourself when you fall asleep, come back tomorrow.
Yes, scam. Scam. India. Scam. India. You’ve never heard of these two together? Google is your friend. Diploma mills, good old fashioned racial discrimination, hiding job listings in obscure outlets to avoid domestic applicants, man they are truly talented in this endeavour. Maybe if they put so much muscle into improving the home country everyone would be better off.
That’s a cute ad-hominem but ultimately off base because that’s not how the diploma mills scam works. I really encourage you to research those topics a bit - it is genuinely fascinating how complex the scams get. There’s also a bit of self-reflection that arises when you learn that these people don’t understand why scamming and cheating is wrong - they’re genuinely incapable of comprehending this. It makes you appreciate people who aren’t like that, including yourself! (hopefully)
> these people don’t understand why scamming and cheating is wrong
Moreover, they openly brag about it. My wife's brings stories from her hair stylist that's very chatty about the ways they literally move their family from India to US and Canada. People fake marriages, divorces, report abuse etc etc. I'm still not sure if it's all true, but the very fact she brags about it is astounding.
Great, so if they're as obviously bad as you claim, then it should be easy to weed them out for any competent HR department. And if the HR department isn't competent, the company is going to fold. Either way, problem solved.
You felt it appropriate to jump on your little throne and pass judgement on large groups of people, but cried ad-hominem when I slightly criticized you. Sensitive much?
How is the problem solved? You have an entire industry dedicated to scamming immigration systems around the world and your solution is to simply avoid getting scammed? It’s a lot easier to cut them off as per the article. The problem IS the scammers.
This dialogue suggests to me you are incapable of conceiving of a high trust society. So much like the people we’re discussing, yes we need to harden the system because of people with your mentality. It might sound crazy but there was a time when we didn’t, and that’s when these immigration systems were designed. Hence the easiest thing to do is simply unplug such low trust societies from access. They are detrimental to the well being of the host.
IMO, the larger economic framework and current political climate is whats causing the breakdown of trust, more than anything else. Many citizens have switched off from politics, simply don't care, or are busy trying to put food on the table. The presence of an insignificant number of temporary workers isn't going to change whether the US becomes a high-trust society. We're going around in circles here, so lets move on..
Do you personally know any H-1B visa holders? I can only assume that by your comment that you do not. The ones who play by the system have their entire livelihood and home held over their head while under an H-1B visa.
Punish the companies and staffing firms abusing the H-1B visas instead of creating a blanket, anti-immigration policy that will only bolster those abusing the H1-B visa, because those already abusing are the ones who have the funds to pay this fee. Companies who do things legitimately will not be able to easily absorb this fee.
I will lose friends and colleagues because of this imposed fee. This will kick out all the good people we actually want working in this country. This will further reduce good people wanting to come to this country.
If we’d fix the green card caps so that Indian workers could get green cards we wouldn’t see as much abuse. The system is broken, so you’re suggesting break it further? The US benefits from a lot of smart immigrants, we should be making it EASIER, not harder, to attract and retain the best talent from all over the world. The United States is ceding its leadership here and we’re going to pay for that for generations.
As always with this administration using a cannon to kill a mosquito for the right reasons. And then people debating the reason rather than the cannon.
The logic from this administration and it’s supporters is opposite of Benjamin Franklin. Rather than thinking that it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer. They think it is better a hundred guilty persons be punished than one innocent person’s suffering. We have seen this from the South Korea detainees debacle and here too.
There is fraud in H1B system. People do take advantage of it. People do suffer from ghost jobs. But the question at the heart of the matter is what is the basis for a flat 100k fee? Because lots of numbers from this administration seem to be pulled out from thin air. There are reasons fines are set low in comparison to a company revenue but POTUS doesn’t seem to know.
this is not smart. If you want to reform an H1B program, reform it. This is not a reform, this is a bizarre attempt to do what? stop companies from hiring foreigners? they will simply hire them in their foreign offices or offshore.
reform is a type of action that tries to identify a concrete set of issues and fix those issues, implies a positive change.
this is a change in the direction of significantly reducing hiring of foreign workers by American companies, which is bad for everyone. It's bad for American companies, because it will reduce their growth. It's bad for American workers because when our companies don't grow, neither does our economy and that hurts Americans. So it's a change, but it's a dumb change.
In other democratic countries, reform is mostly proposed in parliament. Experts and other government institutions are publicly consulted. Reform is seldomly passed under emergency grounds, and H1B rules are an unlikely area for emergency executive action that has a transition period of not more than 2 days.
Of course in other democratic countries their parliaments haven't purposefully and willingly seceded their powers to the executive branch and spent the last 50 years completely ignoring the entirety of the people's will, needs, and desires as they gathered and concentrated as much additional power as possible.
I don't think that is true from the perspective of the initial comment I was replying to. Clearly the crux of their concern was not "this ain't an act of congress".
So the replacement is the talent stays in their own country, making local wages there where their talents are leveraged via offshoring instead. They still work to their skillset, wages remain suppressed but their country of origin get their personal taxes instead. But at least the talented individual gets a lower quality of life, that will teach them to roll the dice wrong on the geography they were born into.
We can still use policy to disadvantage the economics of offshoring, we just haven’t gotten there yet. This took time, that will take time.
Does it suck that billions of people were born into lesser global economic circumstances? Absolutely. Does that mean we should allow corporations to exploit labor (both imported and citizens who have to compete against that imported labor) at the disadvantage of domestic citizens? No. This is workers vs capital, not immigrants vs citizens.
There's a logically fallacy in there. Throwing up border walls does not stop capital. Capital can still exist outside the borders and work with the supply chains of the other countries minus 1. And pick an inflow metric that capital cares, and the US does not control more than 50% of it. number of consumers, GDP, income growth, all of it. The capital will continue to service the bigger number that remains offshore through cutting the US out of that pie reciprocally.
The US as a feature of it geography and population (Japan, UK and the Philippines) can choose isolationism as a policy. But the rest don't have it as an option due to direct contact to neighbors or economics too small to sustain. Most of the world will not follow the on-shoring path, because they cannot.
There is nowhere else to invest. China, Russia, and Africa? No trust. Europe and Japan? Too old. That leaves India, which may or may not attract material capital inflows.
Who, funnily enough, will probably be the largest impacted by such things as locking down H1Bs.
Old and still accessible beats inaccessible. BTW the source of the USAs demographic resistance to aging has been the sheer fact it was that immigration melting pot of bringing in young talent to offset its local aging population. A few decades of this path and the US can be just as dismissed as Japan who have taken this path decades in advance.
All countries will end up like Japan, it’s just time (explained in the links I cited). Some countries are likely willing to eat some economic gains out of other preferences. That’s a choice. It’s not all “line goes up.”
India’s total fertility rate is already 1.9, below 2.1 replacement rate. Its demographic dividend (and any potential capital investment opportunities) is already on borrowed time. So capital would rotate and reallocate there, while there is still time, regardless.
Per slide 8 of your second link: Except Africa and half of Asia who will still be above replacement rate for the remainder of our natural lives.
Per exhibit 5 of your first link: The US still to be as bad as Europe and Japan you disparage as "old" and that is based on 2024 analyses. A few more years of these events if sustained will drop that further.
And per Exhibit 1 of that same link, sure India will be at 1.9. And the US was at 1.6 two years ago, which is worse.
Most of the world will be below fertility replacement rate by 2030. This is important, because the faster fertility rates decline, the faster the light cone of capital returns into the future shrinks (people = profits = returns).
So, to tie this all together: for the reasons I’ve laid out in this subthread (with citations), I’m not too concerned about the need to cater to the demands of capital. It needs returns more than humans need it considering population growth is almost over, and it will continue to slowly exhaust investment opportunities as the global demographics transition continues.
Over a long enough time-span it isn't zero-sum. Under any sort of limited time span, which is what people with limited amount of life live deal with, it is zero-sum. It doesn't matter how much money you spend, the economy has material and man power limits than cannot be exceeded no matter what someone manages to pull out of their butt. On top of that, the value of money IS affected by the total amount of currency in circulation as history has shown many times over, and only in a theoretical economic vacuum where customers are infinite does one guy holding a trillion dollars not devalue someone else's $1.
I am an American-born tech worker and every job I've had that didn't involve bagging groceries was created by immigrants. Without these workers my career wouldn't have been possible.
Why does America have all the tech jobs in the first place? It is because of people like Elon Musk immigrating to the US and building the tech industry.
Ha! And who worked at Bell Labs, the US company? Immigrants.
Mohamed "John" Atalla, raised in Egypt, and Dawon Kahng from Korea, who together invented the MOSFET transistor, which underpins modern electronics and computing. Both immigrated to the United States for graduate engineering education and made their breakthrough at Bell Labs in 1959.
Yann LeCun, born and raised in France, immigrated to the U.S. in 1988 to work at AT&T Bell Labs, where he became head of image processing research and contributed significantly to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born inventor of the telephone, was a founder and major figure in the creation of the Bell Telephone Company; AT&T, created by American Bell in 1885, later established Bell Labs.
Immigration has always bolstered the American tech industry, but the bulk of the industry has always been American. Just look at the distinguished members of Bell Labs. Many are immigrants, but most are American. The reason why immigrants come here is that American industry is already very strong. It’s not mutually exclusive to claim that Americans build a strong tech industry and that skilled immigrants have invented many new technologies here in America.
You are right about Bell Labs, the majority were US-born.
But let's consider one of the biggest innovations of recent times: Artificial Intelligence (transformers/LLMs specifically). Where was it invented? In America. Who invented it? Let's take a look. The seminal research paper that kicked off this revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. So only 25% US-born.
Have you watched OpenAI's demos and how many of their researchers are Asian? Would you prefer for them to remain in Asia and contribute to DeepSeek instead?
This is idiotic. We’re already pushing China and India into a partnership with Russia. The sheer volume of people in those countries mean “on average” more brilliant people than we do.
The US competitive advantage is built on us being a destination for the best and brightest. Between this and the crackdown foreign students at US Universities why would the anyone want to come here?
The misuse of H1Bs is a small problem compared to the value it provides.
Doubtful. Not sure I'd be hired. I was hired at like $160k/yr. Would my employer have paid over half my wages to import me? I'm not so sure. Am I not bright enough? Do ya'all not want me here? It's possible. I'm no genius but I think I'm pretty good at my job and I dare say above average, and I don't think my employer could fill all the positions they have with equal or greater talent with only American citizens.
The question is more are you irreplaceable - is there no way an American could do your job even if they may need more training?
We pay taxes, we compete for limited schools and jobs, yet far more people want to come here than leave. Americans have become a lot less wealthy the last 40 years relatively thanks to stagnant wages and skyrocketing prices.
The last thing we need is an unlimited supply of competition that only moves in one direction. Average H1B salary is like 60k, rich companies like MS are employing thousands of IT workers. These are jobs that anyone here could do with a 1-2 year online technical degree.
> I don't think my employer could fill all the positions they have with equal or greater talent with only American citizens.
I assume that's because the wages are too low, since you have already described your skill level as merely above average. Unless I'm significantly misunderstanding something, Americans would be better off if your company had to pay higher wages, even if the company ended up shutting down as a result.
Speaking as an employer, I’d be a lot more picky if I was going to sponsor a candidate to make sure I could make my investment back. (We’ve never sponsored someone though)
The potentially sad thing/abuse that might come out of this is that employers will keep even higher margins from the H1 person and make them pay back that money faster. Even through some shady deal back in their home country.
$15K extra per year? Absolutely. $100k pre-payment? No. That's impractical since the visa holder may get hit by a truck or return home due to an emergency, etc.
Sure - to those that can afford it. But this basically wipes out the ability for smaller companies to use H1Bs as an incentive to draw talent when they’re already behind the gun compared to the FAANG’s of the world from a hiring perspective.
Are H1B visas undercutting wages significantly? I haven't really looked since the zero interest rates era, but back then H1Bs were getting paid the same as everyone else. I got the impression that companies would like to hire citizens (for their own convenience), but there were more jobs than people.
The economy kind of sucks right now but it ain't H1B visa holders that are the problem.
Please read the Bloomberg article I linked in my original post. It says that half of the H1-B visas are taken by staffing companies and they pay their staff significantly lower than the US laborers they are replacing.
Looking at it solely from a perspective of competition between labor glosses over the fact that insufficient labor is also bad because it keeps companies from growing and hiring more people.
So sure, while the fewer jobs that they can fill could have higher wages (not a given, because lack of labor can stunt or kill companies) there could be much fewer people employed overall, which is clearly bad overall.
Of course, that assumes there is enough room for companies to grow. There are strong indications (e.g. the various labor and unemployment surveys) that this is the case in the US. In fact, there is a credible theory that the reason the US managed the inflation crisis so well was due to the immigration crisis.
I elaborated more here (along with a couple of relevant empirical studies about how H1B actually impacted employment and wages of native workers): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308311
Did you look at the Bloomberg article I linked in my original post? It says that half of the H1-B visas are taken by staffing companies and they pay their staff significantly lower than the US laborers they are replacing.
I could not read the full article so I don't have all the details about the report, but the scope pretty limited. There are equally numerous reports about e.g. BigTech H1B salaries being much higher than typical. So that raises the question, which is the greater effect?
Better instead to look at larger scale studies out there, including the ones I mentioned in the comment I linked. The results are much more nuanced, but generally they find negligible or mildly positive impact on native workers, suggesting they are largely orthogonal to foreign workers.
The point is that the dynamics are more nuanced than simple supply vs demand.
H1B holders have to be paid the higher of the prevailing wage or their employer's normal wage for similarly employed workers. So if a contracting company can ensure that the position their employees have is sufficiently different than the position a parent company is seeking to replace, there's an arbitrage. (This famously happened at Disney in 2014-15, with some workers directly training their H1B replacements.)
I believe that the United States has long benefited from being able to attract talented people from other countries. They pay taxes, they participate in the economy, and they make the US more innovative and competitive in the world.
If there are abuses, then let’s fix them. But this is too heavy handed, and may have an impact on US competitiveness for generations to come.
Is it really? Given the current salaries for AI talent ( or whatever future most desired skill sets are ), 100k seems like a decent enough spot to do the following:
- keep the program limited to what it was intended to do ( bring in the best people in, keep US competitive -- on tech, not on low wages )
- keep populace in a state, where they don't see a reason for a leadership change
Unless, of course, that is not what the program is used for ( and anecdotally, that take does not seem that far fetched ).
So my overall response is: good. Frankly, this made Trump's election worth it.
Having learned more about the details, it's honestly not as heavy-handed as I originally thought. The Reuters article linked said it was "$100,000 fee per year" - but it has now been clarified to be a one-time fee per new H1-B petition. I also thought initially that it would apply to existing H1-B holders, but it does not. And I've learned is that it's structured as a temporary change lasting for 12 months (of course it could be extended in the future).
So - it's less heavy-handed than I thought. Given recent layoffs and the current state of the job market, I could maybe even be convinced that it's a good thing in the short term.
I do still have concerns about US comptetiveness in the longer term though if we incentive companies to hire in other countries vs bringing talent to the US.
It can be a cheaper source of human resources without direct outsourcing. This will just offshore jobs, not foster recruiting of citizens.
The intent is obvious, but the foresight into potential outcomes is shortsighted.
Labor is expensive, more competition will rise overseas, as it will become more expensive to operate.
It also crushes the opportunities of a gigantic number of individuals who are here today who had a plan in place to exist in this ecosystem. Additionally the institutions that supported them will also be hurt. Although, they might have been aware of the writing on the wall over the past year.
The policy topic is irrelevant. This is not normal reform. Looking from the outside, the United States is clearly democratically backsliding and is imposing decree upon decree of emergency measures, without a functioning parliament, with a sand-in-wheels judiciary, along with an enormous cult of personality, without any empathy towards the victims of sudden policy changes and black-bag jobs.
H1B is ripe with abuse - this article by Bloomberg says that half of all H1-B visas are used by Indian staffing firms that pay significantly lower than the US laborers they are replacing:
- https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c...