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Posted by b_mc2 1 day ago

Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens(thehill.com)
603 points | 461 commentspage 5
temptemptemp111 17 hours ago|
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qozpen-6pirre 17 hours ago||
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486sx33 20 hours ago||
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Der_Einzige 1 day ago||
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toomuchtodo 1 day ago||
Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.

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...

https://h1bdata.info/

https://www.h1bsalaries.fyi/

SilverElfin 21 hours ago|||
> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs.

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.

ThrowawayR2 1 day ago||||
The US has been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The result of trying to wall out competition is not going to be jobs for Americans. The result will be what happened to the American automotive industry, the American electronics industry, etc. They could not deliver competitive products at competitive prices and the various "Buy American" advertising campaigns were ignored by American consumers. Your Nintendo Switch, your Samsung SSDs and smartphones, your Hynix RAM, your Toyota cars, etc. are all proof of that. And it's much, much easier to for a competitor to create a new developer job opening overseas than construct a physical factory.
ux266478 23 hours ago|||
This doesn't holds water as an argument against labor protectionism, since we can point to China as a contemporary example with the opposite result. Much of the US's industrial base wasn't destroyed by consumer choice, but was intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons. It wasn't even simply about implementing an economic power structure the US could use to extend its influence. The Asian Tigers were built up to facilitate more powerful "strategic partners", a South Korea poorer than Gambia wouldn't be a very useful friend. That Samsung SSD is the product of a need for strategic power balancing in East Asia. The consumer doesn't matter nearly as much as you think they do when policy is the primary agent that shapes cost, often intentionally through second order effects like infrastructural design.
slt2021 21 hours ago||
>>intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons

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

ux266478 16 hours ago||
> US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits

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.

_DeadFred_ 23 hours ago|||
If either way I'm homeless, I'd at least rather have a chance at having the job rather than have my own government work against me.
sagarm 1 day ago||||
The best jobs are with large corporations with offices all over the world. Workers from all over the world are competing with each other, regardless of the Kafkaesque state of American immigrant policy.
toomuchtodo 1 day ago|||
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025

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)

epolanski 20 hours ago|||
If you're a US company that wants access to the Italian market you can hire in Italy.

I find this very reasonable.

JumpCrisscross 1 day ago|||
This bill is a hunk of Swiss cheese. Great for lawyers and bankers and possibly global tech companies, depending on how it parses out in court.
toomuchtodo 1 day ago||
I'm willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere.
JumpCrisscross 1 day ago||
> willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere

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.

lovich 22 hours ago||
>… 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

JumpCrisscross 18 hours ago||
> toss 170 billion to one of your various police forces so you’ve got the manpower to tamp down any tantrums from the people

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.)

lovich 17 hours ago||
Sorry, I was making an oblique reference to the part of the OBBB that increased ICE’s budget to 170 billion.

My point was that I think the powers at be agree with you that this playbook is unstable and are preparing for that eventuality

epolanski 20 hours ago|||
> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs

Why not?

Also friendly reminder 99.999% of US population is made of immigrants.

toomuchtodo 18 hours ago|||
As of January 2025, the U.S. has an immigrant population of 53.3 million people, making up 15.8% of the total population.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

https://usafacts.org/immigration/

epolanski 10 hours ago||
And of the remaining 300+M virtually none are native americans ;)
confidantlake 17 hours ago|||
Wrong.
narrator 1 day ago|||
The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.
derf_ 1 day ago||
I assume they would try to venue-shop for somewhere Anti-SLAPP protections are much weaker. Maryland and Virginia look particularly bad, for example (but IANAL).
NoMoreNicksLeft 1 day ago|||
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.

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.

happytoexplain 1 day ago||
This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).
BobbyJo 1 day ago||
Yeah, I think people mistake country and geographic area. The US is the 300+ million people that build and apply systems and institutions within an area, not the area itself. Coming to the conclusion that people here are interchangeable with people anywhere else and should constantly have to earn their place is fundamentally divorced from reality.
sciencesama 1 day ago||
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bitshiftfaced 1 day ago||
That's not the only way you can work in the US. "In 2023 17.9% of employed workers were immigrants"

https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percent-of-jobs-in-the-us-...

nova22033 21 hours ago||
From your link

Immigrants are defined as foreign-born residents, including those who became US citizens

bitshiftfaced 7 hours ago||
The real number is probably somewhere between 1% and 17.9%, since you need to include all other ways to work in the US, including the various visas.
bottlepalm 18 hours ago|||
Posted more info in a separate thread, but our latest req had 500 applicants. 95% from India with their grad degree in America. I spent 10 hours his week trying to do technical interviews with people I could barely understand. F me.
viridian 1 day ago|||
1% of all jobs is still a huge number of jobs in total terms. Spitball math put's h1b's much lower than that actually, .4 to .5% of all FTE positions.

That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.

NoMoreNicksLeft 23 hours ago||
If we were to separate all jobs into categories like most-preferable, least-preferable, and a few other buckets in the middle of those, would the H1Bs be evenly distributed among them?

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?

franktankbank 1 day ago|||
Ranges from 20%-80% in tech roles from my experience.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 day ago||
What percent of tech jobs?
toomuchtodo 1 day ago||
Don't have a percentage handy, but these resources are likely useful for your inquiry.

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)

2OEH8eoCRo0 1 day ago||
> About 400,000 H-1B applications for high-skilled foreign workers were approved in 2024

That's more than I thought!

toomuchtodo 1 day ago||
Compare to https://layoffs.fyi/
woah 1 day ago||
I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.

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.

pavel_lishin 1 day ago||
> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.

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.

woah 1 day ago||
Yea that's exactly the point I'm making. If they came and paid a high visa payment, then they would not be significantly cheaper.
dotnet00 1 day ago|||
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).

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.

cryo28 18 hours ago|||
This is the bigest misconception that H-1B is meant to hire the best. It is NOT. Foreign H-1Bs are typically rank-and-file employees to take mid-level jobs en masses. The best and brightest cannot go through H-1B due to oversubscription and resulting lottery. Thus the best and brightest are using different visa types like O-1 and self-apply for green cards using EB1/EB2 National Interest Waivers.
downrightmike 1 day ago|||
"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."

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.

kevin_thibedeau 1 day ago|||
This will incentivize foreign intelligence services to fund their own market of conveniently cash flush moles.
woah 1 day ago||
Ah yes, any foreigner must be a secret agent
franktankbank 1 day ago||
I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).
catigula 20 hours ago||
This crime has yet to be addressed.
renewiltord 20 hours ago||
The crucial thing if you’re a foreigner is to look at the comments here and be very careful as to whether you’d empower a software engineer union full of these people to deport you.

In Savannah, the local unions got the Koreans deported from the Hyundai factory.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1 day ago||
This is hilarious.
insane_dreamer 6 hours ago|
I understand and sympathize with the interest in keeping American jobs for Americans first, if there aren't enough to go around. Generally makes sense. I feel the same way about my kids chances of getting into a good state college (increasingly difficult when you're competing against kids from the whole world).

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.

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