No doubt h1b is abused. Corporations use it to structurally underpay tech labor. Shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy - it hurts both domestic workers and underpays migrant labor. The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
> shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy.
In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes.
Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation.
It’s a dual intent visa.
The visa itself provides no immigration benefits but it’s explicitly designed to then allow for a permanent residency and then citizenship application.
> what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed.
I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing.
There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.
Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple.
These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
Not disputing this, but working thru this, lets say H-1Bs suddenly become really hard for companies to get. I dont think it follows that a ton of IT jobs suddenly open up for Americans. Isnt it more likely that all those H-1B jobs are replaced by workers in offshore locations?
Or, that those jobs disappear and are not replaced at all. Or, that the jobs go and the work is expected to happen (somehow) with AI tools operated by whoever is left.
My point is, whatever you or I might think about H-1B misuse, both the people who want to keep it, and the people who want to eliminate it are not really friends of the American worker.
Many of these roles, such as the ones where people just push buttons and send emails, could be done by Americans with just a little bit of training. But there is no incentive for Apple to train Americans or invest in their existing employees when they can just claim “labor shortage” and hire someone from India instead.
We know this works already because this is how the country worked until 1990, when they created the H1B and massively increased all other types of immigration. By 1990 the US was the undisputed powerhouse of the world, and it was built completely with native born labor.
There was plenty of offshoring that happened during the 90’s but the companies that rely on it heavily do not end up winning. In the end nothing beats Americans working in America and that’s obvious just by looking at the stock market.
The people who want to eliminate the H1B are absolutely pro-worker in my opinion. It’s a tool that’s used almost exclusively to suppress wages, the quality of the workers is almost always significantly worse than the American equivalent and serves only to boost profits for the company owners at the expense of their own workers.
My point is that even if H-1B were eliminated and all the people that hold them today returned to their home countries, employers' response is less likely to be "we need to hire and train more Americans, asap" but more like "let's expand our overseas operations, so we can get work done without paying Americans".
In other words eliminating immigration like this is only half the solution of you don't also have a way to stop offshoring.
Because they are an American company which benefits from all of the advantages of this country, and indeed would not exist at all without this country's people. They rely on the tax incentives, stable society, culture, cities, infrastructure, and PEOPLE of this country. It's a company founded by Americans in the USA, they have reaped the benefits of everything that comes from this country.
Do you think that Apple could or would have been founded in India? or China? Or Brazil? Obviously not. It's obviously the product of this country.
Is your argument that since Apple makes money in other countries that they should transcend nations and become their own super-national entity? That they should not have to follow the rules or even try to benefit their home country?
At the end of the day that is what's happening. These mega corps have basically usurped the power of nations and made their own rules. They have changed the immigration system to give themselves the power to import cheap labor at the expense of the country that allowed them to exist in the first place. We as workers are saying that we should use the power of government to push back against this practice.
I think Apple benefits from the tax incentives, "stable" society, and freedoms in my country too. And it employs many people here and elsewhere around the world and there is no chance it could sell as many units as it does without those people
> These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
H1Bs are not getting approved for these for years now.
Infosys and TechM exploited the crap out of it to do shit like this which caused the rules to be tightened massively.
These days you are only getting H1B for folks atleast earning 200k+ base.
I mean you could read the linked website where it points out we aren’t talking about top tier talent. It’s just shit IT jobs we used to pay Americans to do so they could be furries. Now we pay Indians to do it so they can act like they are better than Mexicans.
Many of the top tier companies (meta, Amazon, google, microsoft etc) have had massive layoffs in the 10's of thousands range. Those workers were top tier programmers. So you need to be quite delusional or uninformed to have your view point on the work force.
Bar was lowered massively during the COVID employment boom (with the exception of Apple really).
Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly.
All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.
They are rewarded for cutting the budget, and undercutting domestic workers. Until that changes, this problem will continue. Or workers could unionize.
As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.
You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise companies its very bad.
As time goes on I'm finding AWS on a resume less and less impressive, regardless of citizenship status. Lots of resumes where they were at AWS for 1 or 2 years, I guess they got stack-ranked out. It makes sense. Everyone knows AWS is a revolving door.
If there is a correlation to company size or company popularity (e.g., FAANG) I would have actually thought it would be large companies/FAANG are hiring the low-quality H-1Bs. I usually work at medium sized companies (50-200 engineers company-wide is my definition) where maybe 2-4% of the engineers are H-1B or green card. They've all been great. Even the one at Allstate (Allstate was also hugely reliant on India-based Infosys "developers" who I will yell from the mountaintops were straight garbage and very much net-negative).
And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
I've heard anecdotally that Stryker is really bad about this (throw it over the wall mentality) and I remember thinking when I heard that, how the fuck are employees of a company getting away with being assigned work and just reassigning it to someone else? But then I think about my Allstate days and I can see it. I think you're being downvoted because people reading your comment haven't witnessed that sort of dysfunction in a company, but to anyone reading this- it is how some companies operate. The execs at these companies will deadass hire garbage people (usually offshore) and then brag about how much money they saved the company vs hiring U.S. citizens. Either the bill comes due years down the road when prod goes down due to a bullshit bug from the offshore team and it ends up costing the company millions, or U.S. employees are picking up the slack.
At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.
> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.
I would challenge that by saying SO MANY "software engineers" are net-negative producers, be it offshore teams in Asia or Eastern Europe or U.S. citizens. Partially a result of coding bootcamps. The recent tech layoffs in ~2022 that we are still reeling from is further evidence that maybe we don't need H-1B for software engineering roles. Medical? Absolutely.
You are being downvoted but you are totally correct. The tech industry existed before the H1B and was growing rapidly. There’s no evidence at all that the industry would have stopped growing without the H1B or that any company started by an H1B wouldn’t have been started by an American.
44% of unicorns founders between 1997 and 2019 were foreign born. 20% of those were specifically from India.
It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest.
Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders.
With all the discourse around H1Bs recently, I ask what the alternative is? Offshoring and workers paying taxes in their own countries? The common argument of X number of CS grads unemployed fails to hold as CS has been a monkey degree over the past few years due to the rush for money. Some investigation will show many graduates are not able to perform software engineering duties up to par, and sub par graduates compared to pre 2015. Of course its nuanced between training that companies used to offer etc.
No the solution is hiring American workers and implementing strict on soil laws for pii just like other countries are doing (India for example).
I have learned a great deal and been enriched by my friendships with foreign born workers, but to act like h1b workers come “ready to perform software engineering duties” at any higher rate than new grad higher is funny.
This, I don't understand how we have tons of un- and underemployed American workers and yet somehow businesses have convinced the government that they need to import workers.
The answer isn't one a lot of people are willing to talk about, but personally, I don't care.
The problem isn't "businesses", it's other Indians. They take entire tech orgs over, then only hire each other. They make up bizarre reasons why US workers won't fit while spamming H1B applications.
Before you grab your pitchforks, or try to dox me for racism one, please understand it's not all Indian people, obviously. There are so many in the US, and the majority are good people. But there's an extremely clear pattern that's emerged that you'd have to be blind not to see.
The pattern I’ve seen emerge is that the only successful candidates just happen to be of the same ethnolinguistic background as the hiring manager. Merely being Indian is not enough.
I suspect this has happened to me at least once. I was a shoe-in, checked all of the boxes, recruiter was saying they really wanted me, and then for the final interview they brought in a mid level guy who asked me questions unrelated to the role (purely a Data Engineer role but he was asking me about the intricacies of ML models). All interviewers were Indian. I would wager they ended up hiring another Indian guy for the role. I would imagine this happens to people of color all the time so I don't "mind" in that sense. The bigger issue to me is U.S. citizens unemployed because roles are filled by H-1B people (which is difficult to prove, but the evidence seems to indicate).
We'll never know what actually happened, but I suspect they had to choose between me and an Indian guy and by throwing me ridiculous questions in the final interview, they had evidence to whoever (their boss, HR, me, the recruiter representing me) that they passed on me because I didn't know enough about a subject area and therefore I wasn't a good fit for the role. I can't capture the full interview experience in a Hacker News comment but I realize the information presented isn't a dead-giveaway case of racism.
I am well aware that it could've just been that A) their requirements for the role changed mid-interview process, B) they didn't like my personality or I came off as an asshole, C) the mid level guy didn't want me as their "superior" for a non-racial reason or D) Other. But I think it's dangerous to just write off any suspected racism and blame something like personality or soft-skills. Racism is disproportionately detrimental to people of color, but it's still wrong when it's directed towards a white person.
> They take entire tech orgs over, then only hire each other.
No. It is stupid politics to blame Indians or other Asians for this when they are just following company policy to hire cheaper labour. Like it or not, H1B Asians (in IT) are hired because they can be exploited - they work cheaper and longer hours than their American counterpart ( US companies save nearly $100,000 per H-1B hire as workers earn 16% less: Here’s why demand stays high - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/us-compan... ). Blaming immigrant Asians for this kind of exploitative politics that exists because American businesses lobby for it is irrational. (Also, do not forget that America is a country of immigrants. The H1Bs also act as a "vetted" immigrant pool from which American citizenship can be given). By demanding $100,000 to hire an H1B, the Trump administration has now tweaked this policy to make it costlier for businesses to hire them (and force them to seriously consider AI). But immigrant workers are still cheaper and can be made to work longer hours.
In other less racially charged terms, we can see the West also as having a serious addiction to dignity culture. Take Australia, for example. You will easily get into fisticuffs with your average Australian whose dignity you affront, through any means.
The only reason you see Indians is because Indians knly hire Indians. It can’t be anything else.
Completely unrelated, have you walked into a non nuclear/biomedical engineering engineering department in any IS college in the past 2 decades? I’m guessing those are also filled with Indians because their managers are insisting that only Indians can study engineering.
Actually it can and almost certainly is multiple things - not just that Indians prefer to work with other Indians (by the way this phenomenon isn't exclusive to Indians).
Australian universities make billions and lobby the government to import students from developing countries, the agents of these universities tell the students that getting jobs and a permanent resident visa is easy, just pay the huge fees and you will get the chance to live your dreams in a developed country.
Why were those underemployed and unemployed people getting hired as tech workers for the past 2 decades when it’s one of the highest paying jobs in the country already?
Is our discipline so trivially easy that the only barrier to being hired is choosing to do so?
You missed the obvious - foreign workers can be exploited by paying them less. Are there Americans with an engineering degrees that are also willing to work for 10+ hours daily, at $150,000 annually, for a job that usually pays $200,000 to $300,000? That is all the H1B (in IT at least) is about - cheap labour, and a potential immigrant pool. Blaming Indians or other Asians for this (like some others do here) is just stupid politics. "Indians hire Indians" is just Indians following company policy to hire cheaper labour.
This is so much bubble thinking. The average senior developer in America barely make $150K. Most will never see $200K inflation adjusted in their entire career. Hell the way comp has stagnated for software engineers in tier 2 cities - where most work at banks, insurance companies, “the enterprise” - may never see $200K nominally. You can even look and see what most YC companies pay their “founding engineers”.
Yes I know what BigTech an adjacent makes. Been there done that.
Yes, these are probably inflated. I should have clarified these are example figures. Note though the $150k I quoted is a factual figure - there are other jobs in IT besides developer for which H1Bs are hired too. For example, I had system administration or database administration in mind and the $150k I cited is what some H1Bs I know in this field earn in NY today, in telecom or finance. Interestingly, when one of my friend on H1B in Texas became a US citizen, he immediately got an offer with a $50k pay hike from another firm. Another thing to keep in mind is that most H1Bs in IT are contract workers. The outsourcing firm may charge $150K for their work, but the actual salary to the worker will be way less. So there is indeed often a big pay gap when you go through the actual convoluted way this system works.
People always make the huge salary argument. But youre totally right. Your average senior engineer in US is making $130k. These $300k salaries are relatively rare. But people hire H1B to pay them $90k and save on benefits and salary.
The monetary saving is almost never the reason - the inability to push back on whatever crazy half-assed, maybe illegal horse shit that an incompetent manager wants to be done without blowing up their entire lives is the reason they are hired.
True. But the common man on the street wants things to be cheap. This is not sustainable unless on imports cheap h1b (or other overworked foreigners).
Edit: This is not meant to support h1b.
Ideal case - people that are not on H1B and work in these companies - contact your CEO/managers. People don't do that. Instead are happy to argue (or downvote) here.
How are you going to make a law telling companies with offices and that do business internationally that they must hire Americans?
As far as PII, any reasonable company only lets a select few developers see production data anyway. You just don’t let non Americans go near production if you work in an industry where that is necessary
And American software shouldn't be bought by foreign entities/customers anymore. Because why would we?
Just make it only by Americans and sell it only to Americans and see how that goes.
I’ve been chewing on this for fifteen years, now. There is no pretty or simple or even palatable answer, just a bunch of proposals with tradeoffs.
1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to…
2) Data Sovereignty Schemes. American’s data can only be processed inside American borders by American (or Green Card) workers. It’s absolute protectionism, which means you just shift the negative trends (“credential” mills in particular) onto domestic shores. Rural states and colonies become the new Indias and Philippines for outsourcing companies, depressing labor costs.
3) Unionize the technical trades. This lets the professionals set skill and comp floors, potentially offload benefits burdens to the Union itself rather than the fickleness of the employer, and even undermines the “contractor class” of companies deflating labor through precarious contracts by setting floors industry-wide. The downside is that Unions, like any power structure, can and will corrupt with time and incentive, leading to jams in the marketplace - less an issue in the age of AI, but still one worth noting.
4) Taxation. Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American? No tax breaks for you, pay up. This is a very bad idea on its face, because companies will just shift the transaction offshore to dodge that rule and gum up everything else in the process, but some form of punitive tax scheme for exploiting social safety nets in lieu of fairly compensating workers is sorely needed to stop, if not begin reversing, the current wealth pumps. For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program as a means of depressing their pay has robbed taxpayers of billions, increased the national debt, and robbed workers of the fruits of their labor. It must be fixed, somehow.
There’s a number of other policies to get into, but that’s the “highlight reel” as it were. The important thing to keep in mind is that the status quo only works for the monied interests, and neither the H-1B workers coming in nor the Americans being shoved onto welfare programs for corporate greed. If a program or system enriches the rich while harming everyone else, it’s a bad system, and needs to be replaced rather than overhauled. Will it be painful? Yes. Will it piss people off? Of course. Will it feel like nobody really won? Ideally, because that means it’s balanced compromise rather than a gift package.
After Tiananmen Square we let Chinese students in the USA stay. I gained a ton of great colleagues during that time. No one freaked out, no one cared. We need to bump up immigration and remove the artificial power H1B/sponsorship gives companies. Perhaps the difference was that those new Americans weren't able to bring their families in due to Chinese policy so racists didn't SEE a huge visible difference?
2. Rural states were what you state already historically. Hence the existence of the rust belt. The existence of lots of towns who's manufacturing was outsourced from Clinton on. They were already this model, just with small/midsize factories and/or call centers.
> Rural states and colonies become the new Indias and Philippines for outsourcing companies, depressing labor costs.
Depressing labor costs, but only to a point, no? They would be subject to American minimum wages; and, presumably, American labor, even at its cheapest, is more expensive than the offshore alternative.
And, assume there is no price differential... Would Americans not be better off if companies outsourced to other American (i.e., not foreign) companies? Thereby keeping currency within the U.S.? I've been hearing that remittances represent a substantial outward cash flow nationally.
I've never heard of such "Data Sovereignty Schemes," but they seem like far and away the best option. And thanks for writing this up, btw.
> 1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to…
Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.
> Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American?
I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.
> For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program
H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.
You're deliberately conflating different arguments to suit your preconceived opinions rather than read them as the individual arguments they are. Even so, I'll respond in earnest to each counter-point you're attempting to make:
> Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.
I do, actually. I've navigated the immigration system as a sponsor, and it's hell. It's deliberately engineered to make it as difficult and expensive as possible to navigate successfully, and it's needed an overhaul for half a century. Using that as a wedge issue to deny reform, however, also hasn't worked for half a century, and has only resulted in a fatigued populace embracing fringe populism and naked fascism in an effort to see any movement at all on the issue.
Seriously, this was a big topic leading up to the 2008 election. Congress has dropped the ball dozens of times.
As for self-sponsoring, I'm not ready to open that can of worms given the immense exploitation it allows (essentially indentured servitude - which, to be fair, so is H1B, so let's not shift that exploitation further down the ladder either).
> I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.
Yes, I do. If an employee decides not to Naturalize, then they're free to seek other employment on the job market with employers not phased by such penalties. Employers will naturally shift to only hiring Citizens or permanent residents pending Naturalization, not Green Card workers. This shifts the exploitation further down the chain rather than up front via temporary visas with no direct pathways to Citizenship, but to be clear, it does not eliminate exploitation of immigrant labor.
Immigration to another country is a serious decision to make. It comes with tradeoffs. We should want people willing to integrate - not assimilate, necessarily - into the country's fabric, put down roots, raise kids, contribute back to communities, and be good citizens. We don't want or need more rich tourists stopping by for a decade or two as permanent residents before fucking off back to their home country where the cost of living is cheaper, not when so many of our problems require long-term thinking and strategizing to solve - something citizens are best equipped to see through.
> H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.
I'm aware. You're conflating every single proposal after the H1B point in bullet 1 with all of them targeting H1B specifically. In this case I'm referring to the fast food industry, the retail industry, the service sector, the multitude of American enterprises who refuse to pay livable wages by design, so that taxpayers have to spend more on SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8, and other welfare programs for the working poor just so Walmart, or Amazon, or McDonalds can pay their shareholders and leadership panels even more money. This isn't even an "open secret" anymore, it's literally the business playbook for some of America's largest employers.
You're making decent enough arguments, but you're not doing the barest minimum research before making them. C'mon, you can be better than this, I know it.
> Most people want to stay in their own country with their own culture and close to their friends and family.
But not all people otherwise we would all live in one giant city. Some are willing to greave the frontier in search of better outcomes: the early American Colonists, those that expanded west-ward into California, even the early Silicon Valley workers were all willing to move
H1Bs and international workers are not most people
Clearly the real problem in America is the industry with the fastest growing number of jobs, along with the fastest growing salaries coming off a base where it was already one of the highest paid jobs, all numbers which don’t even include equity payments, despite this being an industry which pays far more in equity relative to any other industry.
Maybe AI changes everything, but there is no evidence that immigration has hurt Americans working in software over the past few decades given that software salaries have been growing faster than any other job in the U.S., but also (and this is critical), it’s been rising faster than salaries in any other comparable country as well, including countries with strong tech industries but limited immigration in the industry such as France (the other country with almost as high growth as the U.S. in software dev salary is the UK, which also has high immigration).
it's an own goal end of day - led by myopic thinking about foreigners stealing the jobs
a foreigner worker pays taxes, rent & other bills thereby contributing and circulating money in the economy
now if that foreign worker stays in their home country - yes - they might get paid less - but who losses overall ? the country that would've imported labor or the worker ? - it's always the country - hence why brain drain is devastating.
remember the foreign worker only gets a better life - but losses social connections, culture etc
the countries & companies wouldn't be sponsoring these things if ultimately it didn't benefit them & them only
The solution is simple, but unpalatable to us. With AI, SWE-1 becomes a minimum wage job, with SWE2 (1.5X), SWE3 (2X) and SWE4 (3x). With such a rationalization we will retain more of the work here, or this will move. Government policies cannot control this as it will mean losing tech hegemony.
Is it worth taking a hit on higher compensation for longer term peace of mind?
Then why companies aren't offering minimum-wage SWE-1 jobs already? Could it be that the output of an AI tool still needs a modicum of skill and craft to evaluate?
Well not exactly. An internship is a temporary position, which people mostly just take to improve a CV at an early career stage, or as a fallback after being laid off. A "minimum wage job" is... A job.
Hell I had an internship in 1995 and they paid $10 an hour then and provided housing.
For context, my take home was $650 every two weeks - my total quarterly tuition at school and the next year the cost to rent a one bedroom in the northern burbs of Atlanta.
This site explain that H-1B is abused, which is rarely disputed and there are ways to make it less prone to abuse. It doesn't tell that there is no shortage of skilled workers.
$196k average at Capital One? Even with HCOL, that's a very good salary. I feel like they could certainly find competent citizens willing to work for that wage...
There are huge advantages to co-location within the same time zone (plus or minus 2 hours). India is practically half a day away from the US, meaning you only get overlap for an hour or two at the end of their working day.
The H-1B system is obviously flawed. For some reason, we've decided to tie the ability to live where you want and take advantage of your pursuit of happiness to having an employer. This creates massive power imbalances that are avoided by not engaging in national segregation policies. We don't demand that anyone born on this side of the border do anything like what people born somewhere else have to - how can a law applied differently based on how you were born be just?
This is a cool website and it highlights just how little data is out there regarding H-1B visas. There's some data on a government website but it's usually several years out of date if memory serves. It's basically impossible to prove that companies are abusing the H-1B program without hacking into their servers or someone whistleblowing.
Here are a couple of common misconceptions about H-1B visas:
- "H-1B workers must be paid the same as U.S. citizens" - The issue is companies can hire, say, staff engineers from India as SWE IIs or whatever. As we all know, tech hiring is a mess and it's trivial to place a candidate higher or lower than they really are.
- "Companies cannot hire from the H-1B program if there are U.S. citizens able to fill the role." - There are some asterisks to this statement. Companies can favor H-1B workers over U.S. workers so long as H-1B workers make up less than 15% of their total headcount. And again, it's trivial to build an interview pipeline that tends to filter out U.S. candidates. Heck, leetcode style interviewing has done a phenomenal job of keeping U.S. citizens out of FAANG. It's actually quite clever - design an interview process so difficult and irrelevant to the actual job requirements that most qualified individuals wouldn't bother applying. Anyone who's left probably has special circumstances motivating them to push through and grind leetcode for months, et al. (like not having to go back to their home country).
I think the spirit of the H-1B program is great. Makes total sense. But as is tradition, there are loopholes that allow abuse... and frankly, companies like Meta and Amex and JP Morgan have an obligation to minimize expenses and maximize profits. It's the same with the tax code - loopholes out the ass, but can we really blame companies for exploiting them? It's legal.
Exposed what ? It has brought some great talent to the country and helped with talent immigration for sure, everyone knows it. There is a phase when there is a sacrifice for the candidate but then people change jobs even when green card processing is throught the stages.
No. The talent shortage is not a myth.
The unemployed/underemployed American programmer that can actually keep up is a myth. Everyone good (without additional baggage) is either a) employed or b) could be employed whenever they feel like it.
If you aren't good enough then don't be surprised the companies prefer an immigrant. You don't get an automatic American free pass for having less skills, experience, interviewing poorly, etc.
i.e skill issue.
Ending immigration for tech would simply mean far more global workers/offshoring in order to access the top tier talent via different means as that is the real reason all along.
Wage suppression was the old (and now largely incorrect) story. The visa is still exploitive, it should be amended to be a 10 year visa that is independent of employment so immigrants aren't screwed by layoffs.
Work at faang/etc. I don’t see any notable difference between immigrant and non-immigrant. Arguably, one could say the Americans are better because they typically have less education and still manage to do the same job. Somehow managing to do the same job but with less training? That sounds like someone who is “better” to me.
You are proving my point - FAANG hires the top tier talent, and makes extensive use of both the global talent pool and sponsoring immigration in order to meet their needs.
The Americans you work with (along with your other co-workers) meet the bar.
If there were more Americans that met the bar they would employ them before taking on all the extra work and cost of immigration.
I'm not talking about Americans you work with. I'm talking about the mythical ones you don't work with that are somehow disadvantaged by H1B and thus unemployed/underemployed. You don't work with these people because they don't exist.
You’re not really responding to my point. I’ve told you that Americans are in faang and don’t have the same level of education as all the immigrants. This goes in the face of what you’re saying. Americans by your measure are more intelligent and require less education to achieve the same results. (Entry to faang and doing the same quality of work)
I interpreted this:
> I don’t see any notable difference between immigrant and non-immigrant
As your main point.
More educated or not doesn't actually matter, whether they meet the bar or not is all that matters no?
My over-arching point is if there were more Americans to be hired that meet the bar they will usually be hired before immigrants because they are less paperwork and money (immigration lawyers fees).
Also I think comparing to immigrant education isn't necessarily a great idea, immigrants need more on-paper education to simply clear the immigration requirements because most governments around the world place a higher emphasis on that than work experience or their salary. US in particular values years of education at a roughly 2:5 ratio vs work experience with 10 years of work experience necessary to qualify vs a 4 year degree.
If you are somehow implying immigrants are fundamentally less intelligent then yeah I don't know what to tell you but that is probably not correct.
You may be correct about many US programmers not keeping up, but the H1Bs I've seen in action, other than being more compliant, didn't seem to be much better and often worse.
"Top Talent". Ya, no not generally. Not from H1B. May get OK talent from time to time.
My argument is that the H1Bs meet the bar to be hired at their respective companies. Neither pool is inherently better but availability matters.
There are only so many American engineers that meet said bar, they are all either employed or choosing not to be employed.
The ones that don't meet the bar are either employed by smaller employers with lower bars that don't use H1B anyway or yes, maybe unemployed or transitioning to a new industry because they couldn't hack it.
The mythical group I am saying doesn't exist is engineers that are somehow perfectly capable of meeting FAANG bar but are somehow being displaced by H1B. That group doesn't exist.
When the incentives are so strong for a company to hire someone who will remain loyal for less pay, skills is definitely not the issue. The company can invest in the employee that is smart enough (and utterly unskilled), even if it costs them $100k up front.
No doubt h1b is abused. Corporations use it to structurally underpay tech labor. Shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy - it hurts both domestic workers and underpays migrant labor. The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
> shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy.
In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes.
Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation.
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260...
It’s a non-immigrant visa. I believe E* are the immigrant employment visas.
It’s a dual intent visa. The visa itself provides no immigration benefits but it’s explicitly designed to then allow for a permanent residency and then citizenship application.
> what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed.
I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing.
There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.
“Top tier programmer”
Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple.
These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
Not disputing this, but working thru this, lets say H-1Bs suddenly become really hard for companies to get. I dont think it follows that a ton of IT jobs suddenly open up for Americans. Isnt it more likely that all those H-1B jobs are replaced by workers in offshore locations?
Or, that those jobs disappear and are not replaced at all. Or, that the jobs go and the work is expected to happen (somehow) with AI tools operated by whoever is left.
My point is, whatever you or I might think about H-1B misuse, both the people who want to keep it, and the people who want to eliminate it are not really friends of the American worker.
Many of these roles, such as the ones where people just push buttons and send emails, could be done by Americans with just a little bit of training. But there is no incentive for Apple to train Americans or invest in their existing employees when they can just claim “labor shortage” and hire someone from India instead.
We know this works already because this is how the country worked until 1990, when they created the H1B and massively increased all other types of immigration. By 1990 the US was the undisputed powerhouse of the world, and it was built completely with native born labor.
There was plenty of offshoring that happened during the 90’s but the companies that rely on it heavily do not end up winning. In the end nothing beats Americans working in America and that’s obvious just by looking at the stock market.
The people who want to eliminate the H1B are absolutely pro-worker in my opinion. It’s a tool that’s used almost exclusively to suppress wages, the quality of the workers is almost always significantly worse than the American equivalent and serves only to boost profits for the company owners at the expense of their own workers.
My point is that even if H-1B were eliminated and all the people that hold them today returned to their home countries, employers' response is less likely to be "we need to hire and train more Americans, asap" but more like "let's expand our overseas operations, so we can get work done without paying Americans".
In other words eliminating immigration like this is only half the solution of you don't also have a way to stop offshoring.
Why _should_ Apple employ only Americans (whether in America or elsewhere)?
They generate revenue all over the world. Seems only right that their costs should be distributed around the world too.
Because they are an American company which benefits from all of the advantages of this country, and indeed would not exist at all without this country's people. They rely on the tax incentives, stable society, culture, cities, infrastructure, and PEOPLE of this country. It's a company founded by Americans in the USA, they have reaped the benefits of everything that comes from this country.
Do you think that Apple could or would have been founded in India? or China? Or Brazil? Obviously not. It's obviously the product of this country.
Is your argument that since Apple makes money in other countries that they should transcend nations and become their own super-national entity? That they should not have to follow the rules or even try to benefit their home country?
At the end of the day that is what's happening. These mega corps have basically usurped the power of nations and made their own rules. They have changed the immigration system to give themselves the power to import cheap labor at the expense of the country that allowed them to exist in the first place. We as workers are saying that we should use the power of government to push back against this practice.
I think Apple benefits from the tax incentives, "stable" society, and freedoms in my country too. And it employs many people here and elsewhere around the world and there is no chance it could sell as many units as it does without those people
https://share.google/aimode/k9blzn3HX1PvqOTFO
Maybe Apple wouldn't be founded anywhere else but it wouldnt be what it is without immigrants.
Even Steve Jobs was an immigrant.
> These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
H1Bs are not getting approved for these for years now.
Infosys and TechM exploited the crap out of it to do shit like this which caused the rules to be tightened massively.
These days you are only getting H1B for folks atleast earning 200k+ base.
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I mean you could read the linked website where it points out we aren’t talking about top tier talent. It’s just shit IT jobs we used to pay Americans to do so they could be furries. Now we pay Indians to do it so they can act like they are better than Mexicans.
Many of the top tier companies (meta, Amazon, google, microsoft etc) have had massive layoffs in the 10's of thousands range. Those workers were top tier programmers. So you need to be quite delusional or uninformed to have your view point on the work force.
Bar was lowered massively during the COVID employment boom (with the exception of Apple really).
Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly.
All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.
You should try to communicate to managers (that are US citizens or greencard holders) that decide on H1B/outsourcing.
They are rewarded for cutting the budget, and undercutting domestic workers. Until that changes, this problem will continue. Or workers could unionize.
If the same work can be done abroad with less money, then it's time to place sanctions on govts that allows their workers to be underpaid.
As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.
You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise companies its very bad.
The h1bs at Amazon were some of the most abysmal software developers I've seen in my life
As time goes on I'm finding AWS on a resume less and less impressive, regardless of citizenship status. Lots of resumes where they were at AWS for 1 or 2 years, I guess they got stack-ranked out. It makes sense. Everyone knows AWS is a revolving door.
If there is a correlation to company size or company popularity (e.g., FAANG) I would have actually thought it would be large companies/FAANG are hiring the low-quality H-1Bs. I usually work at medium sized companies (50-200 engineers company-wide is my definition) where maybe 2-4% of the engineers are H-1B or green card. They've all been great. Even the one at Allstate (Allstate was also hugely reliant on India-based Infosys "developers" who I will yell from the mountaintops were straight garbage and very much net-negative).
>poor throw it over the wall mentality
And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
I've heard anecdotally that Stryker is really bad about this (throw it over the wall mentality) and I remember thinking when I heard that, how the fuck are employees of a company getting away with being assigned work and just reassigning it to someone else? But then I think about my Allstate days and I can see it. I think you're being downvoted because people reading your comment haven't witnessed that sort of dysfunction in a company, but to anyone reading this- it is how some companies operate. The execs at these companies will deadass hire garbage people (usually offshore) and then brag about how much money they saved the company vs hiring U.S. citizens. Either the bill comes due years down the road when prod goes down due to a bullshit bug from the offshore team and it ends up costing the company millions, or U.S. employees are picking up the slack.
At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.
> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.
H1B was created in the 90s. The industry had been around for nearly 50 years at that point.
how many people were in the industry/needed 50 years prior? compared to 40 years later? any growth?
I would challenge that by saying SO MANY "software engineers" are net-negative producers, be it offshore teams in Asia or Eastern Europe or U.S. citizens. Partially a result of coding bootcamps. The recent tech layoffs in ~2022 that we are still reeling from is further evidence that maybe we don't need H-1B for software engineering roles. Medical? Absolutely.
You are being downvoted but you are totally correct. The tech industry existed before the H1B and was growing rapidly. There’s no evidence at all that the industry would have stopped growing without the H1B or that any company started by an H1B wouldn’t have been started by an American.
44% of unicorns founders between 1997 and 2019 were foreign born. 20% of those were specifically from India.
It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest.
Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders.
https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unico...
With all the discourse around H1Bs recently, I ask what the alternative is? Offshoring and workers paying taxes in their own countries? The common argument of X number of CS grads unemployed fails to hold as CS has been a monkey degree over the past few years due to the rush for money. Some investigation will show many graduates are not able to perform software engineering duties up to par, and sub par graduates compared to pre 2015. Of course its nuanced between training that companies used to offer etc.
No the solution is hiring American workers and implementing strict on soil laws for pii just like other countries are doing (India for example).
I have learned a great deal and been enriched by my friendships with foreign born workers, but to act like h1b workers come “ready to perform software engineering duties” at any higher rate than new grad higher is funny.
>No the solution is hiring American workers
This, I don't understand how we have tons of un- and underemployed American workers and yet somehow businesses have convinced the government that they need to import workers.
The answer isn't one a lot of people are willing to talk about, but personally, I don't care.
The problem isn't "businesses", it's other Indians. They take entire tech orgs over, then only hire each other. They make up bizarre reasons why US workers won't fit while spamming H1B applications.
Before you grab your pitchforks, or try to dox me for racism one, please understand it's not all Indian people, obviously. There are so many in the US, and the majority are good people. But there's an extremely clear pattern that's emerged that you'd have to be blind not to see.
The pattern I’ve seen emerge is that the only successful candidates just happen to be of the same ethnolinguistic background as the hiring manager. Merely being Indian is not enough.
I suspect this has happened to me at least once. I was a shoe-in, checked all of the boxes, recruiter was saying they really wanted me, and then for the final interview they brought in a mid level guy who asked me questions unrelated to the role (purely a Data Engineer role but he was asking me about the intricacies of ML models). All interviewers were Indian. I would wager they ended up hiring another Indian guy for the role. I would imagine this happens to people of color all the time so I don't "mind" in that sense. The bigger issue to me is U.S. citizens unemployed because roles are filled by H-1B people (which is difficult to prove, but the evidence seems to indicate).
So just looking at your story, you’re saying all your interviewers were Indian, and all of them but 1 mid level guy really wanted you.
And that to you is evidence that they only wanted to hire Indians?
Despite the fact that everyone but this 1 mid level guy clearly wanted to hire a non Indian?
We'll never know what actually happened, but I suspect they had to choose between me and an Indian guy and by throwing me ridiculous questions in the final interview, they had evidence to whoever (their boss, HR, me, the recruiter representing me) that they passed on me because I didn't know enough about a subject area and therefore I wasn't a good fit for the role. I can't capture the full interview experience in a Hacker News comment but I realize the information presented isn't a dead-giveaway case of racism.
I am well aware that it could've just been that A) their requirements for the role changed mid-interview process, B) they didn't like my personality or I came off as an asshole, C) the mid level guy didn't want me as their "superior" for a non-racial reason or D) Other. But I think it's dangerous to just write off any suspected racism and blame something like personality or soft-skills. Racism is disproportionately detrimental to people of color, but it's still wrong when it's directed towards a white person.
That’s still discrimination.
I’m not sure how my post could be taken to suggest otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5fXrPMGM5E From a former senior employee at American Express.
> They take entire tech orgs over, then only hire each other.
No. It is stupid politics to blame Indians or other Asians for this when they are just following company policy to hire cheaper labour. Like it or not, H1B Asians (in IT) are hired because they can be exploited - they work cheaper and longer hours than their American counterpart ( US companies save nearly $100,000 per H-1B hire as workers earn 16% less: Here’s why demand stays high - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/us-compan... ). Blaming immigrant Asians for this kind of exploitative politics that exists because American businesses lobby for it is irrational. (Also, do not forget that America is a country of immigrants. The H1Bs also act as a "vetted" immigrant pool from which American citizenship can be given). By demanding $100,000 to hire an H1B, the Trump administration has now tweaked this policy to make it costlier for businesses to hire them (and force them to seriously consider AI). But immigrant workers are still cheaper and can be made to work longer hours.
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In other less racially charged terms, we can see the West also as having a serious addiction to dignity culture. Take Australia, for example. You will easily get into fisticuffs with your average Australian whose dignity you affront, through any means.
You’re right.
The only reason you see Indians is because Indians knly hire Indians. It can’t be anything else.
Completely unrelated, have you walked into a non nuclear/biomedical engineering engineering department in any IS college in the past 2 decades? I’m guessing those are also filled with Indians because their managers are insisting that only Indians can study engineering.
Actually it can and almost certainly is multiple things - not just that Indians prefer to work with other Indians (by the way this phenomenon isn't exclusive to Indians).
Its the same in Australia.
Australian universities make billions and lobby the government to import students from developing countries, the agents of these universities tell the students that getting jobs and a permanent resident visa is easy, just pay the huge fees and you will get the chance to live your dreams in a developed country.
Why were those underemployed and unemployed people getting hired as tech workers for the past 2 decades when it’s one of the highest paying jobs in the country already?
Is our discipline so trivially easy that the only barrier to being hired is choosing to do so?
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You missed the obvious - foreign workers can be exploited by paying them less. Are there Americans with an engineering degrees that are also willing to work for 10+ hours daily, at $150,000 annually, for a job that usually pays $200,000 to $300,000? That is all the H1B (in IT at least) is about - cheap labour, and a potential immigrant pool. Blaming Indians or other Asians for this (like some others do here) is just stupid politics. "Indians hire Indians" is just Indians following company policy to hire cheaper labour.
This is so much bubble thinking. The average senior developer in America barely make $150K. Most will never see $200K inflation adjusted in their entire career. Hell the way comp has stagnated for software engineers in tier 2 cities - where most work at banks, insurance companies, “the enterprise” - may never see $200K nominally. You can even look and see what most YC companies pay their “founding engineers”.
Yes I know what BigTech an adjacent makes. Been there done that.
Yes, these are probably inflated. I should have clarified these are example figures. Note though the $150k I quoted is a factual figure - there are other jobs in IT besides developer for which H1Bs are hired too. For example, I had system administration or database administration in mind and the $150k I cited is what some H1Bs I know in this field earn in NY today, in telecom or finance. Interestingly, when one of my friend on H1B in Texas became a US citizen, he immediately got an offer with a $50k pay hike from another firm. Another thing to keep in mind is that most H1Bs in IT are contract workers. The outsourcing firm may charge $150K for their work, but the actual salary to the worker will be way less. So there is indeed often a big pay gap when you go through the actual convoluted way this system works.
People always make the huge salary argument. But youre totally right. Your average senior engineer in US is making $130k. These $300k salaries are relatively rare. But people hire H1B to pay them $90k and save on benefits and salary.
The monetary saving is almost never the reason - the inability to push back on whatever crazy half-assed, maybe illegal horse shit that an incompetent manager wants to be done without blowing up their entire lives is the reason they are hired.
True. But the common man on the street wants things to be cheap. This is not sustainable unless on imports cheap h1b (or other overworked foreigners).
Edit: This is not meant to support h1b.
Ideal case - people that are not on H1B and work in these companies - contact your CEO/managers. People don't do that. Instead are happy to argue (or downvote) here.
How are you going to make a law telling companies with offices and that do business internationally that they must hire Americans?
As far as PII, any reasonable company only lets a select few developers see production data anyway. You just don’t let non Americans go near production if you work in an industry where that is necessary
And American software shouldn't be bought by foreign entities/customers anymore. Because why would we? Just make it only by Americans and sell it only to Americans and see how that goes.
Why can India make on soil law but not the US?
Should we boycott anything from India because of the on soil laws?
I’ve been chewing on this for fifteen years, now. There is no pretty or simple or even palatable answer, just a bunch of proposals with tradeoffs.
1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to…
2) Data Sovereignty Schemes. American’s data can only be processed inside American borders by American (or Green Card) workers. It’s absolute protectionism, which means you just shift the negative trends (“credential” mills in particular) onto domestic shores. Rural states and colonies become the new Indias and Philippines for outsourcing companies, depressing labor costs.
3) Unionize the technical trades. This lets the professionals set skill and comp floors, potentially offload benefits burdens to the Union itself rather than the fickleness of the employer, and even undermines the “contractor class” of companies deflating labor through precarious contracts by setting floors industry-wide. The downside is that Unions, like any power structure, can and will corrupt with time and incentive, leading to jams in the marketplace - less an issue in the age of AI, but still one worth noting.
4) Taxation. Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American? No tax breaks for you, pay up. This is a very bad idea on its face, because companies will just shift the transaction offshore to dodge that rule and gum up everything else in the process, but some form of punitive tax scheme for exploiting social safety nets in lieu of fairly compensating workers is sorely needed to stop, if not begin reversing, the current wealth pumps. For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program as a means of depressing their pay has robbed taxpayers of billions, increased the national debt, and robbed workers of the fruits of their labor. It must be fixed, somehow.
There’s a number of other policies to get into, but that’s the “highlight reel” as it were. The important thing to keep in mind is that the status quo only works for the monied interests, and neither the H-1B workers coming in nor the Americans being shoved onto welfare programs for corporate greed. If a program or system enriches the rich while harming everyone else, it’s a bad system, and needs to be replaced rather than overhauled. Will it be painful? Yes. Will it piss people off? Of course. Will it feel like nobody really won? Ideally, because that means it’s balanced compromise rather than a gift package.
After Tiananmen Square we let Chinese students in the USA stay. I gained a ton of great colleagues during that time. No one freaked out, no one cared. We need to bump up immigration and remove the artificial power H1B/sponsorship gives companies. Perhaps the difference was that those new Americans weren't able to bring their families in due to Chinese policy so racists didn't SEE a huge visible difference?
2. Rural states were what you state already historically. Hence the existence of the rust belt. The existence of lots of towns who's manufacturing was outsourced from Clinton on. They were already this model, just with small/midsize factories and/or call centers.
> Rural states and colonies become the new Indias and Philippines for outsourcing companies, depressing labor costs.
Depressing labor costs, but only to a point, no? They would be subject to American minimum wages; and, presumably, American labor, even at its cheapest, is more expensive than the offshore alternative.
And, assume there is no price differential... Would Americans not be better off if companies outsourced to other American (i.e., not foreign) companies? Thereby keeping currency within the U.S.? I've been hearing that remittances represent a substantial outward cash flow nationally.
I've never heard of such "Data Sovereignty Schemes," but they seem like far and away the best option. And thanks for writing this up, btw.
> 2) Data Sovereignty Schemes. American’s data can only be processed inside American borders by American (or Green Card) workers.
How would this work with basically any foreign service?
Isn't the _point_ that it doesn't?
But to throw out one idea: a "safe harbour" style scheme that allows exporting this kind of work to places with equivalent policies could work.
> 1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to…
Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.
> Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American?
I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.
> For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program
H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.
You're deliberately conflating different arguments to suit your preconceived opinions rather than read them as the individual arguments they are. Even so, I'll respond in earnest to each counter-point you're attempting to make:
> Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.
I do, actually. I've navigated the immigration system as a sponsor, and it's hell. It's deliberately engineered to make it as difficult and expensive as possible to navigate successfully, and it's needed an overhaul for half a century. Using that as a wedge issue to deny reform, however, also hasn't worked for half a century, and has only resulted in a fatigued populace embracing fringe populism and naked fascism in an effort to see any movement at all on the issue.
Seriously, this was a big topic leading up to the 2008 election. Congress has dropped the ball dozens of times.
As for self-sponsoring, I'm not ready to open that can of worms given the immense exploitation it allows (essentially indentured servitude - which, to be fair, so is H1B, so let's not shift that exploitation further down the ladder either).
> I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.
Yes, I do. If an employee decides not to Naturalize, then they're free to seek other employment on the job market with employers not phased by such penalties. Employers will naturally shift to only hiring Citizens or permanent residents pending Naturalization, not Green Card workers. This shifts the exploitation further down the chain rather than up front via temporary visas with no direct pathways to Citizenship, but to be clear, it does not eliminate exploitation of immigrant labor.
Immigration to another country is a serious decision to make. It comes with tradeoffs. We should want people willing to integrate - not assimilate, necessarily - into the country's fabric, put down roots, raise kids, contribute back to communities, and be good citizens. We don't want or need more rich tourists stopping by for a decade or two as permanent residents before fucking off back to their home country where the cost of living is cheaper, not when so many of our problems require long-term thinking and strategizing to solve - something citizens are best equipped to see through.
> H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.
I'm aware. You're conflating every single proposal after the H1B point in bullet 1 with all of them targeting H1B specifically. In this case I'm referring to the fast food industry, the retail industry, the service sector, the multitude of American enterprises who refuse to pay livable wages by design, so that taxpayers have to spend more on SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8, and other welfare programs for the working poor just so Walmart, or Amazon, or McDonalds can pay their shareholders and leadership panels even more money. This isn't even an "open secret" anymore, it's literally the business playbook for some of America's largest employers.
You're making decent enough arguments, but you're not doing the barest minimum research before making them. C'mon, you can be better than this, I know it.
Most people want to stay in their own country with their own culture and close to their friends and family.
In my own country we are actually seeing people GO BACK to Asia because places like Vietnam now have a viable middle class lifestyle.
> Most people want to stay in their own country with their own culture and close to their friends and family.
But not all people otherwise we would all live in one giant city. Some are willing to greave the frontier in search of better outcomes: the early American Colonists, those that expanded west-ward into California, even the early Silicon Valley workers were all willing to move
H1Bs and international workers are not most people
Clearly the real problem in America is the industry with the fastest growing number of jobs, along with the fastest growing salaries coming off a base where it was already one of the highest paid jobs, all numbers which don’t even include equity payments, despite this being an industry which pays far more in equity relative to any other industry.
Maybe AI changes everything, but there is no evidence that immigration has hurt Americans working in software over the past few decades given that software salaries have been growing faster than any other job in the U.S., but also (and this is critical), it’s been rising faster than salaries in any other comparable country as well, including countries with strong tech industries but limited immigration in the industry such as France (the other country with almost as high growth as the U.S. in software dev salary is the UK, which also has high immigration).
it's an own goal end of day - led by myopic thinking about foreigners stealing the jobs
a foreigner worker pays taxes, rent & other bills thereby contributing and circulating money in the economy
now if that foreign worker stays in their home country - yes - they might get paid less - but who losses overall ? the country that would've imported labor or the worker ? - it's always the country - hence why brain drain is devastating.
remember the foreign worker only gets a better life - but losses social connections, culture etc
the countries & companies wouldn't be sponsoring these things if ultimately it didn't benefit them & them only
Sending CIA assassins to ceos that have offshoring plans?
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The solution is simple, but unpalatable to us. With AI, SWE-1 becomes a minimum wage job, with SWE2 (1.5X), SWE3 (2X) and SWE4 (3x). With such a rationalization we will retain more of the work here, or this will move. Government policies cannot control this as it will mean losing tech hegemony.
Is it worth taking a hit on higher compensation for longer term peace of mind?
Then why companies aren't offering minimum-wage SWE-1 jobs already? Could it be that the output of an AI tool still needs a modicum of skill and craft to evaluate?
Internships are these, and are getting longer. I'm also thinking this is what will stop the transfer of roles to another part of the world.
Of course using AI is a skill. But the effort needed to get there is becoming lower and lower.
Well not exactly. An internship is a temporary position, which people mostly just take to improve a CV at an early career stage, or as a fallback after being laid off. A "minimum wage job" is... A job.
Internships at my employer pay 6 figures. I've never seen a minimum wage SWE internship.
Hell I had an internship in 1995 and they paid $10 an hour then and provided housing.
For context, my take home was $650 every two weeks - my total quarterly tuition at school and the next year the cost to rent a one bedroom in the northern burbs of Atlanta.
This site explain that H-1B is abused, which is rarely disputed and there are ways to make it less prone to abuse. It doesn't tell that there is no shortage of skilled workers.
$196k average at Capital One? Even with HCOL, that's a very good salary. I feel like they could certainly find competent citizens willing to work for that wage...
Or, Capital One could hire the exact same people they’re paying $196k to for a quarter of the cost once they’ve been sent back to their own countries.
There are huge advantages to co-location within the same time zone (plus or minus 2 hours). India is practically half a day away from the US, meaning you only get overlap for an hour or two at the end of their working day.
I should seriously look into getting in the outsourcing business.
The H-1B system is obviously flawed. For some reason, we've decided to tie the ability to live where you want and take advantage of your pursuit of happiness to having an employer. This creates massive power imbalances that are avoided by not engaging in national segregation policies. We don't demand that anyone born on this side of the border do anything like what people born somewhere else have to - how can a law applied differently based on how you were born be just?
See also "I Was a Director at Amex When They Started Replacing Us with $30K Workers [video]", posted twice:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028155
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038665
This is a cool website and it highlights just how little data is out there regarding H-1B visas. There's some data on a government website but it's usually several years out of date if memory serves. It's basically impossible to prove that companies are abusing the H-1B program without hacking into their servers or someone whistleblowing.
Here are a couple of common misconceptions about H-1B visas:
- "H-1B workers must be paid the same as U.S. citizens" - The issue is companies can hire, say, staff engineers from India as SWE IIs or whatever. As we all know, tech hiring is a mess and it's trivial to place a candidate higher or lower than they really are.
- "Companies cannot hire from the H-1B program if there are U.S. citizens able to fill the role." - There are some asterisks to this statement. Companies can favor H-1B workers over U.S. workers so long as H-1B workers make up less than 15% of their total headcount. And again, it's trivial to build an interview pipeline that tends to filter out U.S. candidates. Heck, leetcode style interviewing has done a phenomenal job of keeping U.S. citizens out of FAANG. It's actually quite clever - design an interview process so difficult and irrelevant to the actual job requirements that most qualified individuals wouldn't bother applying. Anyone who's left probably has special circumstances motivating them to push through and grind leetcode for months, et al. (like not having to go back to their home country).
I think the spirit of the H-1B program is great. Makes total sense. But as is tradition, there are loopholes that allow abuse... and frankly, companies like Meta and Amex and JP Morgan have an obligation to minimize expenses and maximize profits. It's the same with the tax code - loopholes out the ass, but can we really blame companies for exploiting them? It's legal.
Migration for good technical jobs should be banned forever. Immigration = lower wages, and visa slavery. Impossible to compete.
(I'm not from USA)
greed blast
should be pretty obvious
our corporations have been systematically ruining things for the average American for quite a while now
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Exposed what ? It has brought some great talent to the country and helped with talent immigration for sure, everyone knows it. There is a phase when there is a sacrifice for the candidate but then people change jobs even when green card processing is throught the stages.
> then people change jobs even when green card processing is throught the stages.
Finding employers who will sponsor is not easy so the employees are essentially locked to the sponsoring company, dont complain too much.
No. The talent shortage is not a myth. The unemployed/underemployed American programmer that can actually keep up is a myth. Everyone good (without additional baggage) is either a) employed or b) could be employed whenever they feel like it.
If you aren't good enough then don't be surprised the companies prefer an immigrant. You don't get an automatic American free pass for having less skills, experience, interviewing poorly, etc.
i.e skill issue.
Ending immigration for tech would simply mean far more global workers/offshoring in order to access the top tier talent via different means as that is the real reason all along.
Wage suppression was the old (and now largely incorrect) story. The visa is still exploitive, it should be amended to be a 10 year visa that is independent of employment so immigrants aren't screwed by layoffs.
Work at faang/etc. I don’t see any notable difference between immigrant and non-immigrant. Arguably, one could say the Americans are better because they typically have less education and still manage to do the same job. Somehow managing to do the same job but with less training? That sounds like someone who is “better” to me.
You are proving my point - FAANG hires the top tier talent, and makes extensive use of both the global talent pool and sponsoring immigration in order to meet their needs.
The Americans you work with (along with your other co-workers) meet the bar.
If there were more Americans that met the bar they would employ them before taking on all the extra work and cost of immigration.
I'm not talking about Americans you work with. I'm talking about the mythical ones you don't work with that are somehow disadvantaged by H1B and thus unemployed/underemployed. You don't work with these people because they don't exist.
You’re not really responding to my point. I’ve told you that Americans are in faang and don’t have the same level of education as all the immigrants. This goes in the face of what you’re saying. Americans by your measure are more intelligent and require less education to achieve the same results. (Entry to faang and doing the same quality of work)
I interpreted this: > I don’t see any notable difference between immigrant and non-immigrant
As your main point.
More educated or not doesn't actually matter, whether they meet the bar or not is all that matters no?
My over-arching point is if there were more Americans to be hired that meet the bar they will usually be hired before immigrants because they are less paperwork and money (immigration lawyers fees).
Also I think comparing to immigrant education isn't necessarily a great idea, immigrants need more on-paper education to simply clear the immigration requirements because most governments around the world place a higher emphasis on that than work experience or their salary. US in particular values years of education at a roughly 2:5 ratio vs work experience with 10 years of work experience necessary to qualify vs a 4 year degree.
If you are somehow implying immigrants are fundamentally less intelligent then yeah I don't know what to tell you but that is probably not correct.
You may be correct about many US programmers not keeping up, but the H1Bs I've seen in action, other than being more compliant, didn't seem to be much better and often worse.
"Top Talent". Ya, no not generally. Not from H1B. May get OK talent from time to time.
> The unemployed/underemployed American programmer that can actually keep up is a myth.
Is your argument that the H1-B folks are better? That hasn't been my experience.
My argument is that the H1Bs meet the bar to be hired at their respective companies. Neither pool is inherently better but availability matters.
There are only so many American engineers that meet said bar, they are all either employed or choosing not to be employed.
The ones that don't meet the bar are either employed by smaller employers with lower bars that don't use H1B anyway or yes, maybe unemployed or transitioning to a new industry because they couldn't hack it.
The mythical group I am saying doesn't exist is engineers that are somehow perfectly capable of meeting FAANG bar but are somehow being displaced by H1B. That group doesn't exist.
When the incentives are so strong for a company to hire someone who will remain loyal for less pay, skills is definitely not the issue. The company can invest in the employee that is smart enough (and utterly unskilled), even if it costs them $100k up front.
I live on this principle: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Interesting lack of evidence for someone who calls themselves "Principal Software Engineer".
Joseph Glanville your name is in my notes in case I ever come across your application. Signed, a hiring manager.
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