Posted by b_mc2 18 hours ago
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers.
† Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/upshot/the-real-reason-th...
> In 1942, with so many eligible workers diverted to military service, the nation was facing a severe labor shortage. Economists feared that businesses would keep raising salaries to compete for workers, and that inflation would spiral out of control as the country came out of the Depression. To prevent this, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9250, establishing the Office of Economic Stabilization.
> This froze wages. Businesses were not allowed to raise pay to attract workers.
> Businesses were smart, though, and instead they began to use benefits to compete. Specifically, to offer more, and more generous, health care insurance.
> Then, in 1943, the Internal Revenue Service decided that employer-based health insurance should be exempt from taxation. This made it cheaper to get health insurance through a job than by other means.
----
Hysterical raisins strikes again.
If H1-Bs are being abused (by hiding job openings to US citizens), or seen as unfair competition for American labor, then the government has the authority to modify or terminate the program. This thread has been primarily about exploring other paradigms for enabling immigration.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.
> hedge fund quants
If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)?
And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?
Option 2: you give a visa to a PhD to work for 150k/year in a small biopharma startup that thinks it has the solution to cancer.
This salary stacked ranking optimizes for today’s worth of work. Not its potential.
This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs.
Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero.
Amazon.Com Services
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Ernst & Young
Tata Consultancy Services
Microsoft
Infosys
Meta Platforms
Intel
Hcl America
Amazon Web Services
IBM
Jpmorgan Chase
Walmart
Apple
Accenture
Capgemini
Ltimindtree
Deloitte Consulting
Salesforce
Qualcomm
Tesla
Amazon Development Center
Wipro
Fidelity Technology Group
Tech Mahindra
Compunnel Software Group
Deloitte Touche
Mphasis
Nvidia
Adobe
Bytedance
Goldman, Sachs
Cisco
Pricewaterhousecoopers Advisory Services
Paypal
Ebay
Servicenow
Visa USA
For non-slop jobs, give them a green card and fast track to citizenship. For an IT consultant, no thanks.
A lot of H1Bs are not working on anything you described though.
A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.
Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.
If these other professions don’t pay as much as swe, then doesn’t that indicate that domestic supply is meeting those industries needs better than it is swe?
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.
There's no long answer.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely.
I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.
Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
Why should we work to lower salaries in professions where we agree the salary is already depressed enough to lose new entrants to an easier and higher paying profession? (I think I can say this since I'm a lazy STEM drop out developer who makes more than twice what I estimated for my preferred path that I also found more challenging.)
The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
Could be filled by an American, sure. Is the American willing to do the work? Probably not...
This is not a uniquely American problem.
In tech, I've always felt it was hard to hire Americans because it seems there's such a push for degrees in business/law etcetera as opposed to engineering.
From a purely economic perspective, the ideal is no borders, and total freedom of movement – but, of course, there are reasons that people don't want that: the real world doesn't run on economics. Pretty much all of these measures are compromises of some description, with non-obvious (and sometimes delayed) consequences if you start messing about with them. Most arguments involving "$CountryName jobs for $Demonym!" ignore all that, and if that leads to policy decisions, bad things happen. (That's not to say there's no way to enact protectionist employment policies, but you'd need to tweak more than just the one dial if you wanted that to work.)
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work.
This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
It exists for internal candidates - often companies are encouraged to fill vacancies by first allowing internal candidates to apply. Obviously this creates a cascading effect where a new role opens up in the candidates old position once they fill up the new one. At some point they just need to hire externally or we will be perpetually filling up vacancies.
I wonder how every company managed to understand the cascading effect and just hire externally instead.
Why? If you know as much as you claim about immigration you should know that any EB1 application will dwarf any EB2 application in amount of work and documentation needed. Also, having rare skillset is not enough to get EB1, as you also might know. You need to meet a set of requirements, none of if which has anything to do with rarity of the skillset.
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
> You may be eligible for an employment-based, second preference visa if you are a member of the professions holding an advanced degree or its equivalent, or a person who has exceptional ability.
And you’re concerned about gaming the system? And you’re also claiming that EB system was designed to work for exactly the scenario that you fit?
>> You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
Yep, and I am none of this.
>Yet you went for EB2, which is designed for a different set of immigrants where the proof of exceptional ability is a lot more lax
Yep, because EB2 does not require any exceptional ability, just the lack of a US worker available, willing, and able to do the job and a master's degree.
~
I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers.
Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a tax on hiring non-local labor.
That worker should also be either a guest worker OR on a pathway to citizenship at their own discretion.
What is also part of the process, is the requirement that you pay more than the median wages. Undercutting wages will get this petition denied and the process itself costs thousands of dollars on top of the thousands of dollars it takes to file for the underlying visa.
Again, the immigration system doesn’t work as you think it does. Yes there are abuses and those need to be addressed and I’m fully onboard with reforms that fix it. But the first step would be to understand the system and how it works.
It should be a notable cost, and the worker needs to be making a premium for it to be a rush on immigration.
Further note, this is to also encourage more _entry level_ jobs for local workers and train up citizens to become more highly skilled workers.
A: were the top end pay, so they pushed the pay scale up
B: were uncoupled from employment. A company could pay the cost to let someone enter, but that person should be able to jump jobs day 0.
I’m not suggesting the specific implementation but I feel like if those two guiding directives were kept, both society and the individual workers would benefit from brain draining the rest of the planet while simultaneously pushing worker comp higher.
Has anyone suggested a significant change to the h1b system like this beyond just a close it all/open it all binary?
Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
I would also expect this to result in massively less immigration for the same reasons companies are loathe to train entry level employees nowadays as they can jump ship as soon as they become valuable
I don't see how. As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed? It is already so. Of course, H-1Bs are not the only way foreign labor is imported, L-1s, for example, cannot change jobs and there is no limit on them and every big corp in the US has an office in Canada, where they hire foreigners from all over the world and move them on L-1s to the US, it's much easier and cheaper than H-1B.
However, the fraud here is: a) committed by a US business, not a foreigner and b) is not related to any non-immigrant visa such as H,L,or O are. It's a fraud in immigration process. And the immigration is the expected perk of working for a company on a temporary visa. If companies stopped filing for immigration then they would not be able to hire as many temporary visa employees.
No explicitly not that. I want whoever sponsors and h1b or the equivalent in my fantasy world here to pay for the cost to society up front and then for that h1b person to have the same freedom as a citizen.
My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real. If that argument is true then I want said immigrant to be in the workforce with the same rules that I have, instead of being a second class citizen which makes them more attractive to companies because they are cheaper/more controlled
I believe that allowing for the corporation hiring said h1b to have any say, direct or indirectly, in said h1bs ability to remain in the market will necessarily make them an employee that US companies prioritize.
The only way to stop that, from my current understanding, is to make it so that corporations have to pay the cost to add a person to society, but have no say in the decision making process after.
Upon review of my post and thinking through why I feel that way, I realized I just want the same deal applied to corporations for bringing in new entrants to society as is applied to people marrying foreigners.
I married someone outside the country and as part of their green card application I was required to commit myself to personally covering their social security checks if they divorced me before they made, iirc the exact number was 40, enough payments into social security.
Somehow companies aren’t required to have that level of skin in the game
That would be too much - an alien having all the privileges of a citizen but no obligations is above a mere citizen. If you want to become a citizen there is an employment-based immigration, if you don't - you are going to be restricted in any developed country because normal countries do not put foreigners above citizens.
>My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real.
Nothing like this happens with temporary visa workers. All that company claims in such a case is that they want to hire a foreigner and are going to pay no less than the minimum wage determined for the position. This system is based entirely on the temporary nature of the employment so there is not much scrutiny as the legal fiction here says that the foreigner is going to leave in 6 years tops.
My point is that issuing h1bs are a service for corporations in the us, ostensibly under the reason that no one in the country is capable of the job.
I am saying that assuming that is true, and assuming that we value brain draining other countries of talent, then we allow for corporations to import workers, but they need to both pay for the cost of the worker and have no control over them afterwards.
I don’t know whether the cost to society that would cover importing a worker is 10 dollars or 10 billion, but whatever is decided on as the amount I am suggesting is paid up front.
Assuming the corporation paying for the import is correct that the immigrant has a unique skill, then we would want them to be generally available to our labor market instead of tied to a single company.
That is my reasoning at least. Again poke holes in this but I do want a system that prioritizes improvements to my society or people in my society. If the benefits for whatever we end up in are centralized primarily in any single private actor, single human or organization, then I am probably against that plan
> Nothing like this happens with temporary visa workers. All that company claims in such a case is that they want to hire a foreigner and are going to pay no less than the minimum wage determined for the position. This system is based entirely on the temporary nature of the employment so there is not much scrutiny as the legal fiction here says that the foreigner is going to leave in 6 years tops.
I don’t know how to respond to this section. I am either missing some part of the h1b visa rules or we are talking about different things. What you described to me sounds like an agricultural visa or an au pair like J2 visa
As a de facto description of the current situation in the United States I agree with you.
The de jure description for why h1bs would be allowed is due to them, again _ostensibly_, having skills or a specific skillset that could not be found in a reasonable time frame and are worth importing.
I am trying to game theory out ways to make the h1b system achieve the ostensible goals. I am not trying to defend the current system as it stands
edit: I realized this might be our point of contention right now
> There are no such requirements so you whole reasoning is based on a fantasy.
I was under the impression that h1bs positions were supposed to pay a “higher than prevailing wage” but there has been a surge of activity around these terms the past few months on the internet and I can’t find definitive proof of that. If that fact isn’t true it would modify my view on the system
There is no such description in law (this is what de jure means) so I have no clue why you think so.
>I was under the impression that h1bs positions were supposed to pay a “higher than prevailing wage”
They are. It does not mean they are for jobs, which cannot be done by an American worker, ostensibly or otherwise.
I was under the impression that was the case and do not need you to prove to me otherwise. But I agreed with that de jure description and would like a system that achieves that
We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
> Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Herein lies the problem. This gives employers absolutely massive leverage over the employees, which lets them coerce things like ridiculous unpaid overtime and downright abuse.
Even if you pay the same nominal salary, the H-1B is "cheaper" if you can force them to work 60-80h whereas a top-class American is just going to demand 40h weeks. (Though in practice, those extra hours rarely see increased productivity, so whether it's actually cheaper for outputs obtained is up for debate.)
Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
Europe actually has had more direct export of the jobs. No need of specialist visas when the jobs were already exported away to EE. The EU allowed for companies to arbitrage away tech jobs to relatively poorer countries in the EU. And there's very little need for native top talent as there's very little native innovation happening within the EU in software - it's only a fraction of the amount happening in the US. And that's why those who can often tend to work for American companies in the EU, or migrate if they can.
Then why did my wife's friends that lost their H-1B jobs have to leave America?
American citizens don't face deportation with job loss.
Also, as a US citizen, I'm free to quit my job anytime I want. If I don't like putting up with my job because of some bullshit my employer pulls, I can easily leave. That is absolutely not the case for sponsored workers.
H-1B workers are stressed out and paranoid about their employment. They'll put up with far more, for far longer, with less compensation.
Anecdotal statistic, in my department all the people in US and Canada hired in the past 10-15 years are from Africa or India. The only Americans or Canadians are the managers, they joined 20-30 years ago and slowly retiring, now being replaced mostly by Indians.
It is happening the same in Western Europe, just with a different demographic.
It’s real phenomena too - US developer wages are so high in part due to the business ecosystem which depends on part on recent graduates and a flexible labor pool.
That is, your analysis is only true in the static case. Starve US startups of talented junior developers and you might kill the next Facebook in the process.
I have been in the valley for 25+ years, and worked with a ton of visa holders.
The majority of them were better educated and all well compensated for the work they did. The fact that many of them stayed for green cards and citizenship says a LOT. There is a reason that the boss of both google, and MS came through these programs.
There are two instances on this website where supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs. Specific carve outs are always made to make the conclusion that, for some reason, this positive supply (workers) and demand (housing) shock has no or marginal impact on wages and housing respectively. It’s very odd since most here work in roles where supply and demand of course apply so it’s not like people are unfamiliar with the math here.
Show me the American born doctors on the street going hungry while foreigners take their jobs. Show me the reduction in wages or costs.
> supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs.
Were drowing in data on both of these things and if you want to understand either of these markets from an economic standpoint then your going to need more than a surface level "supply and demand" argument when they look much more like "I, Pencil" levels of complexity.
Im going to say this bluntly, every terrible engineer I have worked with, who has been fired for being bad at their job has been American born and raised. We're not importing dead wood and dummies to fill in roles as cogs on the h1b program. These are smart people who end up in high level roles who end up staying and becoming Americans (agin raising the bar).
larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.
The real answer is that immigrants create enough economic demand to be net positive even for Americans, for much the same reason as Americans are generally more prosperous when there's more of us.
Seriously, you live in some dumpy parts of the country and you can have the exclusive rights on being the town cloud guru locked down and in principle get higher wages in a smaller labor pool, but for some strange reason few of us want to do that.
At least if these other Americans are from a different "tribe" than your own, this does not sound like a dumb strategy if people from your own "tribe" are deeply ingrained in programming jobs. :-D
At the expense of the citizenry?
> the rest are impacting negatively the economy
In group preferences at least in tech is not a hypothetical.
I'm not denying that immigrants haven't employed millions of Americans, but that the investment for creating such companies is limited. If some product space is going to be a duopoly why not have the duopoly have American founders if possible?
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
Why?
Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
You can't be serious. On every job application I've ever filled out the last question is always a variation of: "Do you now or will you in the future require employer sponsorship to work in this country?"
This might be the most amusing thing I’ve read all day.
Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.
Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.
There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..
Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
The USA currently potentially hasn't enough programmers. If the market tide changes, one of course wants to be able to send these superfluous work migrants back to their home countries.
How do you reconcile that with all of the SWE layoffs in the past few years?
This solves many, many problems, including where should laborers live, fairness in interviews, etc.
What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from?
To assumption that there is a finite amount of work in the economy is called "lump of labour fallacy" in economics. It's not useful to ask "What if X were infinite and we held everything else constant?"
The two philosophies are not only not incompatible but are necessary to maintain our standard of living. Closed borders, protectionism, and relying on individual bargaining power is another path to a similar end so long as you can keep the US on top.
You ever consider that it's because those people are pro-workers everywhere and not just workers nearby? So yes enabling foreign workers to improve their lives by coming here makes perfect sense.
> What do you think is going to happen to your bargaining power as an employee when your employer has an infinite workforce to draw from?
I mean that's like saying "what do you think is gonna happen to your rights once all the slaves are free". The answer hinges on whether we continue to operate under the government that's comfortable with exploiting its citizens.
Sounds like fraud to me. Or a crime of some sort.
If they do it, and it clearly doesn’t work, it even sounds like something they could take to court.
In fact, something that is perhaps their duty to take to court.
With H1B fired means deported.
The people following the guide are just making it impossible to review all of the applications.
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To be brutally honesty, why is it acceptable to bash H1B abuse but not B1/2 or VWP abuse on HN. In both cases, it is employers mislabeling and potentially breaking immigration and labor laws, yet it is acceptable to talk derogatorily about those on H1Bs and not on other visas, even though rates of visa misuse are consistent across most large nationalities.
I am of South Asian origin, but I have lived in North America for almost my entire life (aside from 6 months in the old country), but the persistent utilization of "H1B" as a code word for South Asian (primarily Indian) origin tech employees is tiring.
I understand that a lot of ICs are dealing with a significant amount of stress due to the downturn in the tech industry, but there is a nativist current on HN that is starting to morph into anti-South Asian sentiment.
This style of thread comes up almost daily on HN, and is something I have previously brought up to @Dang as well.
It is tiring and demeaning to those of us who are immigrants or the children of immigrants - a number of us who make up a major portion of the tech industry, and have leadership positions in YC as well.
South Asian Americans make up around 2-3% of the US, but almost every post on HN about the job market turns into "H1B"-bashing, which often devolves into bashing people on the visa instead of the companies themselves.
Almost never do I see conversations extending sympathy to those on work visas and also stuck with abusive employers - only nativist bashing that "they took our jobs".
I hope you can moderate these kinds of conversations or update the engagement rules of HN, because HN and the tech industry of 2025 is not HN or the tech industry of 2008.
It is legitimately demoralizing. I worked on the Hill for several years, have advised administrations on how to bring back manufacturing and "American dynamism" (to use the A16Z term), and have built, launched, and funded software products and companies that are used by backbone infra in the US, and even advised a number of YC startups that have exited.
I have done my part for the country, yet to a large portion of HN and the tech industry I and other South Asian Americans will continue to be termed as "H1Bs" until they hear our accent, or if we can pass as some other race or ethnicity.
I would love to have a good faith discussion with you about this, because I do heavily leverage HN and have found it to be a great resource to find technical discussions and have my portfolio companies show share their features, so the toxicity around H1B and work visas in the tech industry is heavily demoralizing.
On your comment of nativism, what do you expect? It's a normal expectation for people who are "native" to a region to expect to be able to access the jobs in their region without needing to compete internationally. The lower-tier H1B workers do suppress wages, it's undeniable.
On your comment of "moderation", I think what you really mean is that you want censorship because you're conflating people's distaste of the latter "lower-tier" H1B immigrants as somehow being directed at you. It's really not about you if you're as capable as you've claimed. Can you not see how frustrating it would be if there were available jobs in your area but you could not get those jobs because someone with commensurate skills as you (not better skills, the same) is willing to work for half what you need to survive, because they're from abroad, is getting the job instead of you?
Our role is not to moderate for or against any "side" in a debate. Our role is to uphold the guidelines, so that anyone with a reasonable position on any topic has fair opportunity to express it.
My perception from moderating HN for years is that there is generally much more criticism toward companies (including/especially Silicon Valley companies) for exploiting H1Bs than there has been towards holders of those visas.
But if you see evidence that contradicts that (i.e., comments that are unkind towards visa-holders or that discuss them in any way that breaks the guidelines), you can certainly flag them and email us so we can take a look. We can only moderate what we see and there's a lot of stuff that we don't see.
If there are patterns or trends of these kinds of comments, then the more you can show us, the better, so we can develop approaches to identifying and dealing with them.
> Our role is not to moderate for or against any "side" in a debate. Our role is to uphold the guidelines, so that anyone with a reasonable position on any topic has fair opportunity to express it.
Absolutely and no argument there
> But if you see evidence that contradicts that (i.e., comments that are unkind towards visa-holders or that discuss them in any way that breaks the guidelines), you can certainly flag them and email us so we can take a look. We can only moderate what we see and there's a lot of stuff that we don't see.
I have done so on multiple occasions, but have seen a number of those comments remain up.
For example, this comment [0].
Additionally, in this very thread, we have an unsourced comment [1] parroting a common trope, which is legimately false in most cases (and as a member of the YC community, I'm sure you can get this validated), and with significant controversial discussion about this
I also see constant mentions of Infosys and TCS, but never mentions of massive European firms like EPAM which do similar shenanigans and advertise it to new hires across the CEE [2] or Globant and LATAM [3]. While the Indian firms are large, and it is acceptable to have not heard about Globant, EPAM is absolutely massive and every F100 uses them.
I can provide more robust data on the general trend, but it is something that would take some time, but I would really really appreciate if the YC employees affiliated with HN do a deep dive into this.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228366
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45224087
[2] - https://www.epam.com/careers/epam-without-borders/usa
[3] - https://stayrelevant.globant.com/en/culture/globant-experien...
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
For some reason those stupid racist citizens don't want to compete with the whole world in a borderless economic zone. Thankfully we have wise corporations to subvert democracy for the better.
I agree. There's 8 billion people in the world and we should let them into the US if they really want to be here.
> Tesla prefers to hire these candidates [H-1B workers] over U.S. citizens, as it can pay visa-dependent employees less than American employees performing the same work, a practice in the industry known as “wage theft.”
> At the same time Tesla applied for these visa applications, it laid off more than 6,000 workers across the United States. On information and belief, Tesla laid off these workers, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens, so that it could replace them with non-citizen visa workers.
> The email also bluntly stated that the Tesla position was for “H1B only” and that “Travel history/i94 are a must” (i.e., proof of legal entry into the U.S.).
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71325887/taub-v-tesla-i...
[2] https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/lawsuit-say...
Americans are waaaay too corporation friendly.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
Is it HR, is it the leadership directing HR? No idea, but it feels like the company is shooting itself in the foot. Especially a growing company where these jobs are high responsibility and require a lot of initiative. I just don't see it happening with these candidates. Getting a simple point across takes long enough.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
I can't say if that's true or not, but it does suggest that the best path out for tech workers in the US might be to unionise. Because hateful though it is, and I remain a steadfast "remainer" .. brexit happened.
If you don't like H1B rules, organise. But bear in mind who you will be associating with promoting a closed labour market.
All of this could affect the USA. Sales of US sw and service, access to European CDN and DC markets could dry up, and startup culture see less interest in product in the wider market, as H1B displaced workers "back home" carry American models into their domestic VC market.
Tbh, I think that's less likely to work. People (not me I hasten to add, I'm past the age) want to move to an idea of America they grow up with, and VC friendly economics don't export well: people outside America hate failure.
I guess I'm saying current WH policy doesn't favour the "open market" side of this, regarding non US market access and there will be a consequent reaction in those non US markets to American labour and ideas.
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
Do immigrants earn less than locals?
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
Fundamentally how prices are set is someone sets a price, and if there are no takers they change the price. If a company offers a salary, and they bring in an H1-B to fill the role, they don't have to raise the salary. Over time it suppresses the wage.
Employee works for a company under an H1B, company likes their work, wants them to stay longer (H1B has a max of 6 years unless you sponsor the employee for permanent residence). Employee doesn't want to be in this weird temporary worker status forever (and again, after 6 years they'll need to), so the company has two choices: either hire a new employee, hope they've as good as the one you already have under the H1B, train them up to be as familiar with the job and its work as the H1B, and then forget about getting the existing employee permanent residence, OR, just sponsor them for the PERM process, put out a job ad with a really low likelihood of anyone applying, and move on with their lives.
The way the PERM process is set up, there's really no reason not to do the hidden job ad, it's not really regulated against, there's not much financial harm in doing it, and they already have an employee they like and who wants to stay, so for those two parties (and presumably anyone who likes working with this person, and any friends they have in America and so on), there's no reason not to just put out the hidden job ad.
The thing is that all these mega-corporations have offices across the world, but currently want to hire in the US. You and I want our personal jobs to be expensive, but we don't want the prospect of hiring us where we live to be too expensive. And even aside from cost, you also don't want them to say "there's not enough employees there, it's not worth hiring."[0]
[0] I'm technically no longer living in the US, but I was until recently.
Wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to do so, but it's not an automatic deported from the country kind of deal.
I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
H1B always sounded to me like a shitty deal for the immigrant, and it also does seem to be detrimental to native workers.
-second, what is wrong with free competition on the job market between US- and non-US citizens? Competition is good for the business, isn’t it?! It should be a competition on qualification and wage, not races, your skin color or some rubber stamp on a paper. Protecting domestic workers by artificially restricting competition risks creating complacency, higher costs, and slower growth.
- I hear you say: but it’s our country! We (or our parents) paid tax to build it. Yes, but if companies hire non-US employees, they will pay good tax, rent housing, spend in local economies, and contribute to Social Security and Medicare, too, while often receiving less in return.
- many foreign students already invest heavily in the U.S. by paying high tuition and living expenses, without subsidies. This is not charity; it’s a deliberate transfer of wealth into American universities and communities. Denying them a fair chance to compete for jobs means taking their money while closing the door to long-term participation, which is both unfair and economically wasteful.
- intentionally barring foreign talent to artificially inflate wages for domestic workers undermines U.S. competitiveness. High labor costs without corresponding productivity gains make companies sluggish and less adaptive to global competition. The U.S. became great by being open to talent and ideas from everywhere, reversing that openness risks slow growth and stagnation.
The real solution is domestic reform, not exclusion, for example by redistributing wealth more fairly through tax reforms that ensure the rich contribute proportionally.
America grew strong by opening its doors to talent and competition. Shutting out qualified foreign workers to protect wages may feel safe in the short run, but in the long run it weakens our economy, breeds complacency, and wastes the very investment we’ve already taken from those who studied and contributed here. If we want Americans to compete better, fix student debt and inequality at home, but don’t impede the nation by closing the market to global talents.
The problem is its not a free competition. I applied for one of these jobs 2 years ago, but a company was trying to sponsor a green card for an internal employee. The recruiter said I can't interview for that team, but I could interview for another similar, but different role. These companies aren't even offering interviews for these jobs!
> many foreign students
Schools limit how many people can attend. Foreign students take seats away from American students. These programs deny American students a chance to compete for American jobs before they even start college. An American student, rejected from Stanford, will not have as strong of a job application as the foreign Stanford graduate.
Maybe the foreign student was more qualified and wasn't an affirmative action case. Maybe the university doesn't select % of students to be foreign to help subsidize the costs of american students. I don't know.
The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
Business is much worse at the same scale.
Infact, you probably cant find any org at large scale that functions in rational, logic driven capacity.
So theres just a bogeyman, not a useful critique of government.
Thankfully the company recently nuked their contracts and brought everything back on shore because of how much of a shit show dealing with those companies is lol. Literally tens of millions of dollars wasted.
Im kinda convinced that's their entire business plan. They lure these mega companies with omg "skilled labor" and having to pay them less, sign XX-XXXM contracts, 2-3 years go by and these mega corpos finally see how shit it is and just cancel them. HCL and Cognizant make money still regardless.
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The US is the most powerful country does that mean if I go to india I can't experience racism because technically India is "weaker" ?
Isn't this example literally a group of stronger indians being racist to weaker individuals (job applicants)?
This also implies they are not hiring black, asian, or hispanic people either but because they're a minority that's ok?
Such a bad take.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please think a little bit harder before claiming something isn't racism because it might somewhat counteract the structural privilege enjoyed by white people. Yes, white privilege is a thing, and if the claim was that Indian hiring managers were giving preference to non-white people, your comment would at least be worth discussing in the context of a society which overall still privileges white people. But that wasn't even the claim.
If you genuinely believe that the "single axis" approach is valid, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality.
Two points.
First: a good, seasoned manager adapts their leadership style to their employees. So the premise is a bit backwards.
But second, let's suppose we use something more valid like "ability to follow instructions". And suppose there are real differences in groups. You still don't stereotype on groups, because lower-performing groups still have high-performing members. So you have your interview examine the actual skill you need on an individual basis. You don't make assumptions based on group membership.
Now, for practical reasons candidates need to be reduced to a reasonable number to interview. That should be done according to personal accomplishments and experience, not groups.
The college you went to is tricky. Only hiring from a select group is not very defensible mainly because it's a bad signal. It reflects mostly your high school test scores and grades, which was years ago. On the other hand, some colleges teach in certain departments better or worse, your grades might matter and depend on the college, etc. So you need to calibrate for a bunch of achievement-based signals where the college name can matter, rather than whitelist only certain colleges.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/us/california-caste-discrimin...
[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/23...
From that article:
In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.
(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)
It can win you a few friends but you lose more.
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
If yes, what leads you to believe that all first gen immigrants from India to the US magically stop doing it?
I'd guess this varies massively depending on whether the hiring manager and the people they're hiring are H1-Bs.
So yeah, you can discriminate against Dalits, and hire predominantly Brahmins.
Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
And I’m not the only one.
In fact, consent decrees with the DOL and at least one major fortune 50 (Google) explicitly required them to do so, to maintain ‘proportional representation with the population’ because of ‘over representation’. Meanwhile, Indian men got a free pass (for one example).
Trump is mostly bullshit, but he’s in power because of bullshit like this pissing people off. That is a threat to society.
Mostly because none of the things he’s doing are going to actually solve the problem but just get people angrier and angrier at each other. But the problem, at least at one point, was very real.
It's a really good litmus test for finding those with empathy and good intellect, AKA the best kind of co-workers.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
Hilariously, we had an executive who said that his goal was to have the demographics of his division more closely resemble that of America. Until someone realized that South Asians are approximately 2% of the US population and were 50% of his division.
It's been years since I checked, but for non-DC jobs, Amazon's demographics are significantly less white than America as a whole. That's mainly Asians being hired in place of ADOS African-Americans and hispanics.
Coarse grained attributes like race, gender, sex, religion, etc. are not useful predictors of individual behavior or background.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.