Posted by b_mc2 1 day ago
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c... | https://archive.today/7JX9A - June 27th, 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (citations)
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
HN Search: h1b - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
They already do though. Do you own any items made in other countries? If so, you’re competing with other workers already. It seems weird to focus on immigrants workers in America versus citizens in America while importation is allowed at all. I find all of this also very much in conflict with HN’s anti tariff attitude.
not geopolitical, but economical. US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits (you can lookup S&P 500 chart)
USA got S&P500 chart going up
China got industrialization
You have to consider two things in addendum to that:
- Those $0.20/hr jobs come with major financial burdens. Firstly, you now have to organize your supply chain around it as a labor base. That means your logistics are now many orders of magnitude more complex, and more expensive. On top of that, you have additional overhead because you're doing business across international lines, which raises organizational headcount and the kind of bright minds it takes to do that don't come cheap. Quite a lot of money is dumped into making maritime shipping cheap. It's not just subsidies and tax incentives applied to the maintenance and operation of container ships where even the fuel is a tax write-off and heavily subsidized. You need to also consider how much do those ports cost to operate? How much does it cost to maintain shipping lanes? Government attention, influence and dollars are spent at every single step of the way to ensure that foreign labor forces are affordable. A very, very large amount. It becomes apparent when you realize the end to end cost of building a cargo ship, loading it to the brim, and sailing it across the pacific is less than a nice house in Manhattan.
- The disparity in labor cost is also primarily driven by policy which exploits the 'decoupled' nature of local economies driving different costs of living. While this is traditionally framed as only working within the context of underindustrialized people being exploited, you can compare the cost of living in Taiwan with the US, as well as the relative prosperity of the two nations. Large picture, broad spectrum economic comparison is a bad joke because it's simply too lossy to support logical inference, but it's not a mistake that the dollar goes quite far in other places. The inflation of the US dollar was intentionally positioned as the oscillating circuit of the global economy, this way the US would be able to deflate it's currency to prevent bad exchange favorability when needed without suffering long-term economic damage like what happened to Britain in the 1920s.
It's a system of pulleys and levers which were carefully put together to make means to an end. It's not actually cheaper, think about it in a thermodynamic sense. It just looks cheaper because it was structured that way. Costs are hidden by opaque mechanisms that exist in plain sight, all at such a grand scale you can hardly conceive its orchestration. It works because men with a lot of power want it to.
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...
(if you're a company with no US nexus or presence, and no access to the market, your hiring practices are up to your local jurisdiction; if you want access to the US market, you can hire in the US, I find this to be very reasonable)
I find this very reasonable.
It doesn’t walk anywhere. It’s another handout to finance and law. The B2B carve-out and lack of border adjustments makes this a regressive tax on consumers and manufacturers to fund tech, law and finance. (The only jobs this would materially cover are those in call centres for consumers. Which in practice, means voice LLMs.)
Like, I made money from tariffs. I will do well from the OBBA. I will do well from this bill. But American consumers and workers will keep getting screwed, and I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
Just toss 170 billion to one of your various police forces so you’ve got the manpower to tamp down any tantrums from the people. It’s a pretty well worn tactic
I am missing your argument.
Moreno’s bill pumps money out of the poor into the pockets of the wealthy. I am wealthy. I would benefit from his bill. My point is the exercise is a red herring. (I am not sure what yours is.)
My point was that I think the powers at be agree with you that this playbook is unstable and are preparing for that eventuality
Why not?
Also friendly reminder 99.999% of US population is made of immigrants.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percent-of-jobs-in-the-us-...
Immigrants are defined as foreign-born residents, including those who became US citizens
That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.
What percentage are they of the top (preferable) quintile of jobs? Are they just 0.5% of those, or are they more like 4% of those? Is it higher still?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...
https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U...
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
That's more than I thought!
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.
The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
In Savannah, the local unions got the Koreans deported from the Hyundai factory.
But it's the height of stupidity to employ ICE "thugs" to hunt down and round up poor laborers doing jobs that most Americans don't want to do, while letting big companies hire lots of foreigners on H1Bs for SWE jobs, while at the same time you have Americans graduating from college and unable to find jobs.
The US should get rid of ICE and drop the H1B program altogether -- (maybe with some narrow exceptions and not even sure about that). For exceptionally talented people wanting to work in the US there's the EB1 and EB2 programs. That would both largely solve the "illegals are taking our jobs!" problem and stop us acting like some 3rd world police state with masked police acting like the Stasi.