Vance said “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants”
My understanding is that this is pretty much how everyone does it, no? Not to say that I'm surprised that they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes, of course, nor to say that I necessarily agree / disagree with this tactic.
Yes, that is an accurate statement by him. As with many things, corruption and fraud in the visa process have grown over time and are mostly unremarked upon.
Wages are absolutely lower and they can do that because you cannot switch employers.
For example, the high street bank in my case sponsored H1B/L1B holders for Green Card strategically. I, as a Polish national, was not sponsored, because I would receive Green Card within 6-12 months. Meanwhile Indian colleagues were all sponsored, but they wouldn't receive Green Card for years, so they had all of us pretty much "enslaved" by taking advantage of cut-off dates. My wages (~110k) were about 50% of what I could realistically earn with my skillset at the time (2015-2020).
Indian staff had it worse, thanks to how the system works, they could work on their H1B while "waiting" for GC for a decade and still not be able to move employers. In my case, at least, my H1B would run course and I'd have to leave the country. I knew I wouldn't get mine withing first couple months, after my director literally came to my desk at one point after my GC request and asked if I would indeed receive it within 6-12 months. I never heard back on the subject since, despite my repeated requests.
I am a liberal and absolutely hate what Trump admin does to the world, but they're also absolutely right on how companies exploit the system and it definitely affects actual wages and employment opportunities for US citizens.
It's not very accurate, they need to be newspapers where the person is employed. It's the government that is behind the times with respect to how people find jobs. And it's not really "fraud," it's simply companies working in their own interest within the existing outdated rules.
Besides newspapers, they have to be posted with the relevant state workforce agency and 3 other methods. It would not be hard to require that one of those needs to be the company career site or wherever the majority of recruiting comes from.
Another way to look at it is that they are going after particularly notable fraudsters that have very high visibility and perhaps perpetrate it at a higher rate.
Based on its track record, I don't think the administration is "going after" anyone in good faith. This is just a way to compel Microsoft to do something beneficial to the guy in charge.
It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.
100% happens. Microsoft is for sure an offender, but the biggest offenders are companies like Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, and IBM (among others).
There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.
IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.
If you are ever at a tech company and oddly see a piece of paper taped to the wall near the ceiling with microscopic font, that is a job posting. Its representing the tech company making their 'best effort' to hire an american. You can't make this stuff up.
I saw a similar notice on a random wall at the office of a late-stage startup I occasionally visited (since acquired) -- although it was in regular sized font. I actually informed one of my friends who was looking for a job to sponsor his visa about the position, and he was hired.
> They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks.
I really wish this was quantifiable in some way -- I have no way to tell if this statement is accurate.
I've worked with some very skilled H1B that definitely deserved to be here. If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem. Companies like these are not doing "highly skilled" work.
Edit: I kinda wonder if the "highly skilled" value judgement is a holdover from the era where people thought you were a genius if you touched a computer.
The people that deserve the jobs are Americans. It doesnt matter if a foreigner is more skilled--the American people don't want to complete for jobs in a global labor market.
Remember that H1B is a lottery. If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery. But most of the jobs aren’t going to those people. The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
Fair. I think there's a discussion to be had on whether it should be a lottery, but I don't think that discussion is feasible in the current political zeitgeist.
> If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery.
But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?
Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.
Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.
If H1b were about getting the most talented, it wouldn't be 75-80% from just one country and another 10% from a second country. I'd expect it to be very evenly distributed.
I would expect tons of H1Bs from former soviet bloc countries that have incredible math and science education. The fact that the H1B program isn’t clogged with Russians and Ukrainians is evidence something is amiss.
You'll notice it follows a population distribution of the world, with higher weighting from less developed countries. Soviet bloc people are not a high %age of world population and also tend to be captured more by europe since it's closer. People from developed countries tend to have less incentive to move on top of that. Indians have a further advantage of already knowing english on top of that and you get our current distribution of mostly people from india, china, canada (proximity, easy TN visa and english), europe with significant slavic representation and then everywhere else in the tech industry.
The relevant metric isn’t population, but educated population. India has 70% of H1bs while most other countries have under 1%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-h-1b-visa-approv.... India doesn’t have 70% of the world’s college graduates in developing countries.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
I mean that each employer petition on behalf of a worker is selected randomly. But, prior to the petition, the workers are hired by the companies in a non-random fashion. That’s important to keep in mind because I think a lot of people are like “oh the H1Bs I met working on AI at Google are super smart, so the program must bring over the best of the best.” But the system treats an H1B petition from WiPro the same as one from Google. Because the system is a lottery, it can be true that there are super smart H1bs working at Google and also that most of them are doing jobs many Americans could be doing. The lottery system makes the bar quite low and the spread very wide.
> The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
This actually changed this year. Applicant gets 1-4 tickets depending on their pay relative to job/area. So $500k Google engineer has quite a bit higher chance than $100k WiPro one.
Of course it still has issues (Google probably has 1-2 possible applicants for that position and would prefer all of them, Wipro has 100 and cares more about what % of them pass).
> "If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem."
It's hard to get data, but this is precisely what appears to me to be happening.
There's a limited number of slots by country. These companies specifically target those slots. I've worked with these folks (who are wonderful people, to be clear), and also had multiple friends with very niche, in-demand skills need to leave the country.
I don't have the data, but at a micro level, the system does appear to simply be set up backwards.
Yes, exactly. I don't think Microsoft's hiring 6K foreign workers is really the problem. It's companies like Accenture and their shady practices. I've seen entire departments of American workers laid off only to be replaced by Accenture through H1Bs. This is just a publicity stunt from the administration. If they really cared about this issue, they would work with congress and update their antiquated immigration laws regarding foreign workers.
It’s because the companies are following a flawed process, not that they’re committing fraud.
The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.
In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.
I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.
This model assumes that the number of positions is fixed at any given time, but that is not true. Instead, it will fluctuate based on what must be paid. So, to extend your example, without H1B or a similiar program or de-facto state that does the same thing, then we'd get roughly the 900 jobs that are willing to pay the most to be filled, while the rest are not worth the cost of employing someone in this hypothetical market. The result, then, is a higher wage for those 900 citizens.
This is not to say that such programs are bad. To consider that, we must ask questions like:
- Is citizens being able to make much more than non-citizens a desirable outcome? (it's electorally incentivized, since citizens can vote in the relevant elections but non-citizens can not but that is not the same as being desirable in a more broad sense)
- How big is this effect?
- How badly do we (meaning society at large) want these final 100 jobs done?
- How will this affect competition with other countries?
- What about outsourcing?
A labor shortage has a temporary effect of creating an upward pressure on the 900 jobs, but there’s a ceiling and the long term effects are complex. I may have to pay 900 jobs 1.5x to attract and retain the talent as a business, but that cost will be eaten by other functions where there’s a surplus. Or long term, the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away.
Additionally there will be a loss in productivity for business and the 900 jobs will have more work on their plates, so in a way they could be underpaid for the job they do. This is just scratching the surface, but I assume there’d be a lot of second order effects.
> the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away
Both are acceptable terms for me compared to importing cheap labor. If they automate, then at least it creates new high end jobs, and if they ship jobs away then they now have to deal with foreign cultures, foreign courts and legal system, etc that will hamper their business.
That’s because you’re automatically assigning “cheap labor” tag to all workers on visa. Which in itself is not accurate. But these same workers after following the above process become permanent residents and citizens. (Which implies these are the people companies want to retain and move them off a visa by sinking 10s of thousands of dollars) The reality is much more nuanced.
> This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
Especially because when such processes are broken they usually got that way not on accident, but because of sustained lobbying by the same forces that then take advantage of the broken system they helped to shape.
(I'm speaking generally, not necessarily claiming it applies to the particular policy being discussed here, which I'm not super familiar with the history of one way or the other).
Nope. Companies are just taking advantage of the system. Just look at who the biggest importers are. Tata Consulting? I mean that's clearly just cheap tech labor. I once was contracting and had to train my replacement from Infosys who was there on an H1b visa.
It's only kind of accurate. It has to be 2 newspapers in the area the person is employed in. Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.
> Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
Well if that's how one want to proceed. Fine. In that case these companies are not really prosecuted. Government is just doing fraud prevention out of abundance of caution.
The "replacement of an American" is where the narrative breaks down. Traditionally we haven't had large numbers of unemployed developers. One of the consequences of the the Dot Com bubble bursting is we lost an entire generation of native-born engineers. People weren't going in to CS. At the same time there was an explosion of software positions. This is part of what fed the increasing use of H1B talent. This was also one of the sources of the bootcamp phenomenon. Things are bit more dynamic these days. This is just a nativist, anti-immigrant move.
One should not have to disclose one's politics to make such a comment. IMO. That means that we should not think "smells like a Republican, so ignore them!".
One shouldn't pay heed to any comments one way or another that are prefaced with "I am X". They are thinly veiled attempts at appealing to people's base emotions.
Or -more likely- they reflect fear of being judged for their political views as inferred by others. But yeah, it could be manipulation! "I'm not an X but <opinion voiced by people who are X>" could be a purposeful way to push views held by people who are <X>.
This happens. It’s the SOP, but it’s because they already have someone doing the job on a work visa and they don’t want to have to fire them and hire/train someone else.
It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.
I get it. Like 90% of the Republicans platform is the dumbest policies imaginable. It’s like saying you agree with a bunch of drunk, belligerent, clowns. You’d want people to know that you don’t paint your face and piss your pants too.
You really think that the democrats are much better? It seems like they are more concerned with their image than actually doing anything. Or if they do, it seems like they are more interested in the symbolic aspect of it and to perpetually keep the problem, such as how they deal with homelessness.
"Hours after the [Microsoft H-1B] announcement, President Trump awarded Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a summit in Washington where Mr. Musk and other tech executives also were honored.
Mr. Nadella came to the United States for graduate school and joined Microsoft in 1992. Two years later, he wrote in his memoir, he turned in his permanent residency for an H-1B visa so that his wife could immediately join him in the United States."
If anyone needs an example of this happening, here is one from yesterday. Netflix is advertising a fully remote $750K software engineering job in the Seattle Times classifieds but the same job isn't listed on their career website: https://x.com/JobsNowPR/status/2107816460634784094
Exposing the corporate fraud is political?
Or is it just political because it uses US symbolism to expose US jobs at US companies being kept from US citizens?
That might be true if you are the one exposing fraud and you are trying to reach the largest audience. That might also not work at all because when something is trying to appeal to everyone, it appeals to no one.
On the other hand, there is an equal amount of close-mindedness, and sometimes malice, from the side that demands "a better source" because they don't like where the information comes from, regardless of its veracity.
The ads on Netflix' own website look quite different. No salary range but much more information about the job. And there is an application form to be filled out. The job ID has a different format.
AFAICT, the email address usresumes@netflix.com only appears online in conjunction with these very brief job ads on small job sites. It seems quite obvious that these ads are not really meant for serious candidates.
If one sends an email to usresumes@netflix.com, one receives the following automated reply. That does not necessarily mean that Netflix posted the above ads.
----------------------------------------
Thank you for your interest in Netflix!
So what happens now? Our hiring team is currently reviewing your application and should we find your background to be a fit for this role, we will be in touch.
We are always looking for stunning colleagues to join our team and do amazing work. So remember to check out our job site regularly as we are growing and adding openings often!
Not sure what to make of this.
Either Netflix is very brazen here - posting minimalistic job adverts where they don't want anyone to apply - or someone else is posting these to further their own agenda.
Let’s put our pitchforks down and think for a moment.
Do you really think that Netflix has a preference for non-Americans?
On one hand we say they chose Americans to pay less money on the other hand we see this absurd amount of money for a remote job
Why? Because this is not them looking to fill a position but rather trying to get a PERM for an employee that they are already happy with. We don’t even know if it’s H1B or L1
Not saying that the H1B program doesn’t have its problems, but this is not the case of let’s fill this job with non-Americans for less pay
Cognizant was found liable for engaging in ethnic nepotism and benching non-Indian labor disproportionately, so a preference for non-Americans is indeed plausible and dependent on the hiring team.
only place in earth that pays labor to these prices btw. Any other random western country pays max %25 of that maybe if they are really expensive city like Zurich.
I don't follow. If US citizens are routinely willing to live there then it must be an okay place provided you have the money. Thus locals would presumably be happy with an international remote position if it payed enough. So the question remains, why would a fully remote netflix position have need of the H1B program? There must be some compelling financial reason for what they're doing.
Yes, these are literally the guidelines provided by the DOL. And the government seems to want to punish companies for following the exact published guidelines.
Oh come on, if a company is placing job ads to comply with the letter of this law in 2026 they're 100% exploiting the process Vance outlines and would undoubtedly try to exploit whatever the replacement process was as well.
Are we referring to the same administration that is met with immediate resistance from an activist judiciary whenever it tries to do literally anything?
No, just selective enforcement and maybe sending a message that if you don't behave, the administration may look a bit harder into you than it normally would.
I don't have evidence, I am operating under the assumption that e.g. folks behind jobs.now [1] did their homework. This is also what the OP of this whole thread claimed. [2]
[1] https://www.jobs.now/blog/unveiling-the-truth-about-h-1b-vis... "The Jobs.Now team has reviewed job postings from dozens of top companies like Meta, Block, Doordash, and Netflix which require unusual application processes like emailing or paper-mailing the application to specialized addresses, or using unbranded separate websites for collecting applications for jobs." + search for occurrence of "Apple"
[2] "My understanding is that this is pretty much how everyone does it, no?"
No, it is meeting resistance from judges that follow the law. It is also meeting support from judges who dont care, including majority of supreme court.
Correction: SCOTUS is not owned by any political party. Activists can claim whatever they want about the voting record of the justices, but SCOTUS is above petty politics.
The purpose of the system is what it does. At the very least 2 votes on the bench are default admin votes. It's not the activists who are claiming things. You can look up overall SCOTUS approval trendlines.
(B) Advertisements in newspaper or professional journals.
(1) Placing an advertisement on two different Sundays in the newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment most appropriate to the occupation and the workers likely to apply for the job opportunity and most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers.
(2) If the job opportunity is located in a rural area of intended employment that does not have a newspaper with a Sunday edition, the employer may use the edition with the widest circulation in the area of intended employment.
(3) The advertisements must satisfy the requirements of paragraph (f) of this section. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by furnishing copies of the newspaper pages in which the advertisements appeared or proof of publication furnished by the newspaper.
(4) If the job involved in the application requires experience and an advanced degree, and a professional journal normally would be used to advertise the job opportunity, the employer may, in lieu of one of the Sunday advertisements, place an advertisement in the professional journal most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by providing a copy of the page in which the advertisement appeared.
I'm more speaking to the point that the options are "newspaper or professional journals" in the-year-of-our-lord 2026. Job sites are under a section that gives a pool of other options of which the employer must pick three. Those requirements should be flipped (job sites are the requirement, newspaper and journals are one of the extra options) if the DoL wasn't asleep at the wheel.
Edit: And thats not a R vs D thing. The requirements have been this way under multiple administrations, and newspapers have not been a primary way of sourcing candidates for two decades.
Oh I completely get the point that it's an out of date practice. However, it is the current rule. You can't say that it's only these specific companies that do that. Every company that files for employment-based green cards does this. Yes, if the government wants to change that then they should change the actual rules, not just try to guilt companies into doing something different.
Going back in time it's likely because the Sunday paper was traditionally the largest edition of the week. It would normally have a lot more sections to it. You'd have special features like the Sunday comics and they would be in color, not black & white like the rest of the week. The paper would usually be a bit more expensive as well ie. $2 instead of $1. I'm guessing it likely reached a larger audience.
lol, I feel old now talking about this :)
This made me look up when the rules about posting in the newspaper went into effect. I was surprised to find that it was 2005. This is much later than I thought. I would have guessed the 90s. By 2005, it was clear that the newspaper industry was dying due to the internet. I guess this is one example of how out of touch government can be.
Someone else mentioned in the thread elsewhere about whether the rules would need Congressional approval. Gemini says that these are purely an agency regulation and the Department of Labor can update them at anytime. It's kind of mind-boggling that no administration has updated them in 20+ years.
Like many things in US law, they have been deliberately ignored as time moves past them to ensure the laws no longer constrain them.
Most governments actually have no difficulty doing "Keeping the lights on" work like updating laws to reflect the times changing. Even here in the US, Republican state governments will have no difficulty keeping the lights on and running day to day tasks, and it usually moves at a reasonable clip.
Another good example of this is any time something comes up that a government body is very very for, it takes almost no time to actually get done. In principle, the turnaround time for a government to react to something can be a single day if necessary. Or less.
But the US Federal congress, explicitly Republicans, has purposely and explicitly and publicly made it a part of their platform to prevent the government from doing anything, including day to day tasks. The modern federal congress does so much less than it used to. On purpose.
Somehow the things that were trivial to do back with ink and quill are suddenly impossible to do in a timely manner. Because it's entirely by choice. Democrats aren't innocent, and are perfectly willing to not do their job when they can get away with it.
But if the job is located in Redmond, does that mean widely distributed in Redmond itself, or the Eastside, or all King County, or the whole Puget Sound area?
Anyway, I went checking and I wasn't able to find any opening in Microsoft in the Seattle times online version. Which is definitely not a nice optics and would play unfortunately well with the current allegations
I got a PERM at MSFT once - they publish the PERM ads with a lower salary than the regular ads for openings at the same level (IIRC the minimum needed by the DoL for certification), so you'd have to be a bit mad to apply for them. But I also bet they pick the most obscure local newspapers...
The concept is quite flawed for tech companies that hire everyone who passes their technical bar. There's not a finite number of positions that Americans and foreigners are competing for. There are many jobs where a) an American could do it if they want but b) no American feels like it or c) any American who does feel like it could easily get hired without needing the bureaucracy imposed on PERM applicants.
Is that supposed to be a downside? I honestly don't see why that would matter. If someone is working for a US company, then they're working for a US company. The flag sticking out of the ground where they sit shouldn't be relevant.
> The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.
Based on that I would expect that if you advertise in small town newspaper, the job needs to be located in that small town. Want them to work in your big office next to big city, then it must be a newspaper widely distributed in that city not a small town on the opposite side of continent.
I've seen these ads. Not the latest, some things might have changed, but circa 2015-2018, this is how they rolled:
1. You choose newspapers that are least likely to actually reach people looking for tech jobs.
2. You post an small ad specifying the role in the most vague and unappealing terms.
3. There is some weird and inconvenient way to apply (e.g., fax- or snail-mail-only) that goes to /dev/null.
You can argue that it follows the letter of the law, but as a practical matter, the outcome is always that there are no US-based applicants for any H-1B SWE role, so something is wonky, right?
I'm not American and I don't live in the US, and I pretty hate Trump and his allies but this ad is just...wow.
I think this is a loophole that should be closed.
Do note there are similar practices in many (all?) countries. Recently there was one case in Finland where job posting was extremely specific saying "We require, and by that we mean require, not recommend, experience in Leader and EU funding as well at least 14 years and 5 months of relevant experience". Their CEO admitted publicly that it was just done due to them being to public funding and that requires job postings to published. One of the articles (in Finnish): https://www.hs.fi/alueet/art-2000012282918.html
I recently saw the job posting in Finland (Suunto, I believe) that had diving experience as an imperative requirement for an embedded software engineer role. I've applied and never heard back. HR contact that they posted also never replied. The job was closed a couple weeks after. I never even got a rejection email.
So yeah, everyone do that, that's kind of the de facto way of hiring specific people when there is a requirement to post jobs. That doesn't make it ok though.
That’s a frustration. People project their hopes and dreams onto Donald Trump, but the president isn’t t a king. The same neoliberal order remains, another war crushing global trade, but still no action taken. Donald Trump did make a lot of crypto money though.
Yup someone started to aggregate those. Corp lawyers probably laughed at their cuteness and then proceeded to obscure the process even more. Say, only publish in newspapers without an online presence, so someone has to physically scan it. Or find a small town where few people in tech live. Also notify the HR department to ensure to flag out all US applications for some other "unrelated reason" that look plausible on paper.
What's the point of bringing in workers into US just to have them work remotely from home? At that point why not have them work remotely from other side of ocean.
Cultural and timezone alignment. We’ve been here before with the outsourcing wave 20 years ago. The answers are still the same, remote is just a job perk.
Before Covid-19, when you asked tech folks about outsourcing to central American countries (or even within the US to places with lower wages than the bay area), the answer would always be "nothing can replace in-person meetings around a real whiteboard"
I'm sure they'd still prefer that. However, a team on another continent can become a black box organizationally in a way even a remote individual probably can't. Or at least the size of the effect is much less.
It takes a lot of trust (on both sides) and complexity to establish a working relationship across two jurisdictions, if at all possible.
For instance, what labor laws apply? And who enforces them? And how, given parties in two different countries?
Does the company want to subject itself to some arbitrary country’s tax man or labor law enforcer prosecutions? Does the employee want to work under effectively zero labor protection? Possibly, but rarely.
It’s not even always possible, it’s very complicated to work remotely in France, for instance. The state cracks down on one person one client companies, and EoRs beyond being impractical (as they must adhere to drastic labor laws compared to the US) are in a legal gray zone.
The laws of the worker's locality is generally how it works. In the film industry, a production company based in LA might do a shoot in NYC- they have to follow NYC's labor laws since that's where the workers are and the work is being done.
The workers at the home base in LA have the LA laws applied to them.
Exactly, and those answers are why it’s a hurdle and a leap of faith.
The company has to adhere to labor laws in foreign countries (most likely plural if this is a general policy). That’s quite the overhead and opens you up to legal trouble.
The employee has to trust their government can prosecute or otherwise coerce a foreign company with no entity on their territory (otherwise they’d just get hired normally through the subsidiary).
LA and NJ remain two states of a common country and I'm sure that simplifies a lot of things.
Although none of this applies if the company is a multinational with offices in the employee’s country. But then that is offshoring rather than remote work.
I'm not sure there is any advantage in publishing this in a remote town rather than NYC and SF.
Any tech savvy person in NYC or SF would not be scouring newspapers for tech jobs and even if they are, they are most likely to be H1B or Greencard themselves.
A small town newspaper may actually make people apply to those roles.
But either way, people who likely to come through these ads can be easily disqualified just by adding a few technology stacks
For many companies the whole reason for this is to pay lower salary and prevailing wage in NYC and SF is higher. I knew a guy who got a small raise before his PERM was filled simply because his salary at the time was lower than salary in PERM. It was 10 years ago and in Florida, I imagine difference now and in HCOL locations is even bigger.
That's a systems question. We've had comments on HN before from people who post those ads because they're legally required to do so. The comment that I recall said (in my paraphrase):
- If you apply, you will not be hired, because we're only looking to hire the guy we already have in mind, who we're already working with under some other relationship.
- But, if you apply, that guy also won't be hired, because we proved to be able to fill the role locally.
- This annoys us and him and you.
From a systems perspective (and taking this description as accurate), if people make it their business to apply to those ads, it really will stop companies from using this method to get green cards for foreigners they'd like to employ. The downstream effects are open to question; maybe a given company will employ more domestic employees and maybe it will just keep using the same foreign contractors it's already using.
It also doesn't say that the paper needs to be widely read, just circulated, right? I mean, why pay for a job ad in the SF Chronicle when you can put a cheap ad in the (now defunct?) SF Weekly free paper? When it was still around, SF Weekly would have met the threshold for being widely distributed...
Why pay to reach many thousands of people with a widely read paper when you can pay pennies to reach dozens of people that you don't want to apply to the job anyway?
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
That is one of my fave quotes from that book, and I use it often in situations just like this one. It's a shame they didn't include it at all in the movie!
This is precisely what Metro Silicon Valley (Formerly San Jose Metro) is doing. If you look in the back you see many the ads that are being talked about. The same ads are not listed online.
>It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.
It does say in the law [1]: "there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the United States and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor".
The rules of DOL are just guidelines how they are going to determine this but they are not the law. I will argue that if you are planning to publish your job ads in a small town newspaper you do not believe yourself that there are no "able, willing, qualified and available" Americans for your job.
You, or the government in this case, should argue that in a court of law. So far, the government has not won any of these cases in a court of law. And I mean over the last 2-3 decades. The number of successful prosecutions will be in single digits. It's a bit like voter fraud when it comes to actual numbers.
Which cases? What prosecutions? Are you seriously saying that there are no qualified, willing and available workers for random PM or front end jobs and only this particular Indian person, who just graduated from an American college a few years ago is the only one who is able to do the job? I'd love to see a single case like this, got any links?
The cases where the government has proved in a court of law that a company is in violation of the statute or regulation. I am not aware of any successful prosecutions here other than maybe Cognizant which was in the news some time ago.
What prosecutions of the 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(5)(A)(i) do you mean? It's a clause that says that aliens looking for a job are inadmissible unless there are no qualified, willing and available workers as certified by DOL. It is not prosecuted, aliens are just not admitted. But if you have seen it being prosecuted somehow I am still waiting for a link.
PERM is approved at a rate in high 90s. The government - this government - has approved PERM for all these corporations that it is slandering now. Here's a deposition from a DOL employee [1]:
"Q Are any PERMs denied for fraud?
A Not to my knowledge."
There is a PERM process, the government overwhelmingly approves it, it does not take anything to court or win. I am not sure what you are trying to argue.
You claimed that government does not successfully prosecute this, implying it prosecutes and fails. If you wanted to say it does not prosecute then you should just said so when I asked what prosecution did you mean. Also what are you arguing here? We both agree that inadmissibility does not require prosecution, so what's your point again?
No, I never implied that they fail. They do not prosecute or deny any PERM certifications. PERM is anyway not tied to inadmissibility of an alien as PERM is an employer driven certification process. Recall that PERM is administered by the Dept. of Labor. Specifically for PERM, they need to prove in a court of law that the company is violating civil rights, labor laws, discriminating against a protected class, doing fraud, etc. They do not do that at the administrative level (by denying PERM) or at the judicial level (by winning a court case). All they do is make speeches on the campaign trail, and occasionally settle out of court as some other sibling comments' examples in Apple, META, etc. show.
Okay, then I read you reply wrong and have no idea what are you trying to say. The law I quoted is about inadmissibility, PERM is a process to create an exception for an inadmissible alien as described in the law. Recall that the exception is created via DOL certifying that there are no sufficient able, qualified, willing and available workers. PERM is a way to conduct this certification. Read my first message you have responded, it has the link to the law. I am also not sure what you mean by this "They do not do that at the administrative level (by denying PERM) " because the news item you are commenting under is exactly about the blanket PERM denial.
Yes, the present blanket ban is unlawful which will be overturned by the courts as arbitrary and capricious (similar to tariffs, 100k fee, and countless other things that this admin has done). I mean that historically PERM approval rates have been above 90%.
That's, like, your opinion, dude. For what it's worth, these bans are routine and had been issued many times before, none was declared "unlawful" by an actual court, nor it had been overturned. Usually what takes for the ban to be lifted is the company getting into compliance with the law and stopping the cute "nobody told us we should not ad in the Podunk Monthly Herald, we honestly thought this is the best place to source PMs!".
This is just textbook APA stuff. There is no such thing as a legal blanket ban. The executive does not have the authority to do any of this. And I will bet my money that MS has been following the law. Hopium and copium are free though, so I can't stop you from smoking it. The most likely outcome here is again a settlement after the midterms and some money thrown at Trump or Vance.
And the APA passed in 1946. What you are pointing to is regulation. And Chevron was overturned recently. There is no jurisdiction review bar for PERM. I am willing to bet actual money that MS will win at trial or it will be settled out of court like everything else.
Again, I am not following, are you now saying that the debarment list for PERM does not exist or it's unlawful and will be overturned by courts any moment now, 19 years later? Well, as you said, nobody is going to debar you from smoking hopium and copium.
The present unilateral action of banning MS from using PERM is unlawful as MS hasn't broken any laws. (PERM has its own cooldown mechanism of timeouts after layoffs. I'm not talking about those.) If the US government bars MS on any grounds of fraud, abuse, misrepresentation, etc., or if the US government tries to claim that they have the power to unilaterally ban PERM for MS, they will lose in court or settle. We can revisit this in a few months.
Good, now you went from the "There is no such thing as a legal blanket ban. The executive does not have the authority to do any of this." to "MS will settle". It sure will, as all other targets of this action.
> "Q Are any PERMs denied for fraud? A Not to my knowledge."
This is misleading. "Fraud" is a legal term, and it's difficult to prove. However, DoL can and will do an audit to verify that the PERM application is correct. If the audit fails (and they fail them often) they just deny the petition.
Well, yes. That's because the majority of PERMs are well-documented. It costs a lot to go through the process, so companies don't bother with weak applications.
I'm confused then. What are you trying to say? I am claiming that there is no meaningful fraud, misrepresentation, or abuse; everything is happening by the books with > 90% approval; things are working as designed and present theatre is political theatre for midterms.
> Specifically, the department’s investigation found that Apple did not advertise positions Apple sought to fill through the PERM program on its external job website, even though its standard practice was to post other job positions on this website. It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions.
Of course court itself could have arrived in different result.
Yes, they all settle out of court. Everybody makes money and headlines. Companies write it off as the cost of doing business, politician uses it on the campaign trail. Biden sued SpaceX because they weren't hiring asylees. Same shtick.
Once the Govt really starts looking into it, the whole thing of dozens of layers of fraud will unravel. US Govt has multiple catch all laws to cover any kind of fraud.
1) The magical 10 year experience resume for a person straight out of college who has never worked a day in his life. Does not know what ssh is, what excel is or anything that any literate individual can figure out on their own.
2) The tens of thousands of consultancies marketing these people on OPT with 10 year experience. Fraudulent interviews, some other person will do proxy interviews.
3) The FTE employees creating dozens to hundreds of contractor positions under them. Interestingly, all of those will be filled by a specific contracting firm.
4) The contracting firm is a Women-Minority-Business owner, usually the wife or sister or sister-in-law of the FTE employee.
5) The FTE employee works assiduously get his relatives more FTEs, together they control a few hundred to a thousand contracting positions. The billing rates will be $100 - $120 to the contracting company, but they pay $40K - $50K for these people straight out of college, pocketing a huge margin.
6) Then, after 3 years, they will file H-1 with a pay of $50K - $60K in a very remote location, because the prevailing wage determination in that location will be $22 - $25/hour for a Computer Analyst.
7) The H4 visa fraud, FTEs spouse gets employed at the same company or a relative/buddys company. These spouses know absolutely nothing, but are hired at a very high wage.
8) The COVID PPP loans fraud.
9) Fraudulent 'employees' because these people have zero skills, they employ another person in a third world country.
Almost ALL of the US consulting is fraudulent. Most of the positions are completely unnecessary. Big companies are just as corrupt and blind as any other govt orgs. And this is happening in state govts too where they are hiring a lot of people in 'tech'. If the US Govt starts pulling the threads, issue subpeonas, they can extract tens to hundreds billions in fines for so many different kinds of fraud.
This is nothing new, has been going on since late 90s. These 'consulting' companies started with Y2K and since then grew exponentially. For a while, there wasn't enough supply of 'degree' holders, but now there are millions of degree holders with zero skills. That leads to other frauds:
1) The fraudulent degree certificates (lots of people can't even clear the 4 year degree in India) used to apply to US universities.
2) Students going to garbage universities and working in malls, doordash, etc. These degree mills and university<->consultancies nexus that guarantee I-20s is another thread.
“Must be widely distributed in the area the job is located” kinda limits the small towns that can be used. Not to mention the increasing difficulty of finding a small town with a newspaper.
FWIW this is rarely checked during PERM, e.g. in the DOJ statement posted in a sibling comment tree[1] they ran an investigation to find that Apple did not post their PERM jobs on their website. DOL happily approved those PERMS despite such an obvious conduct to limit the number of applicants for a job. And, when found, only Apple was slapped with a 25M settlement (which is profit Apple makes over couple of hours) - nobody in DOL who approved those PERMs had been punished.
The DOJ prevailing wage certifications are a joke. The same people who say advertising a web developer job in the sunday paper is sufficient notice also say if what you’re paying for that web developer is market rate.
> “Must be widely distributed in the area the job is located” kinda limits the small towns that can be used. Not to mention the increasing difficulty of finding a small town with a newspaper.
Will be even harder soon to find a small-town newspaper. Because I bet a number were kept afloat by this.
Some of these requirements are so ridiculous that they create the need for everyone to do what Vance is accusing Microsoft of.
Many companies fulfill the intent of the law. They run a real hiring process — where they advertise online and interview people with work authorization/citizens and people who would require sponsorship.
But if someone requiring sponsorship was the best candidate for the job, then they have to run an additional “fake” process that fulfills these requirements, since no one actually hires tech workers from the newspaper.
> requirements are so ridiculous that they create the need
It's the other way around. The "need" creates the ridiculous requirements. Companies get the laws they want and the laws they want are those that give them an excuse to do what they want to do.
Considering how many of these adds have more than a hundred of local applicants, and still end up hiring people that are not from North America it is quite clear they do not intend to follow the intent of the law.
Let's be honest they want a captive workforce that depends upon them to stay in the USA and build a life.
There has to be a better way to does not make them captive, and allows Americans to be the first ones, and even after that the priority should be people in North America, even International students.
But the fact they keep hiring mostly and overwhelmingly people from the same five countries that are desperate to come to the USA is an indication these companies are profiting formt he desperation of people.
> Considering how many of these adds have more than a hundred of local applicants, and still end up hiring people that are not from North America it is quite clear they do not intend to follow the intent of the law.
You’re assuming without evidence that for any given job, that there will be qualified Americans willing to perform that job who aren’t already happily employed. You haven’t established that.
Hell, ask restaurateurs. They frequently have difficult hiring qualified local labor, too, even though the bar isn’t nearly as high as for a technologist, in major cities.
> You’re assuming without evidence that for any given job, that there will be qualified Americans willing to perform that job who aren’t already happily employed.
You can offer them more money, better work/life balance, a more fulfilling job, etc. When the government allows the hiring of foreign workers on visas, it's tilting the playing field in favor of employers. Why offer a better wage when you can just cry to the government and get an indentured servant at a discount?
Exceptional talent is a different argument - most H1bs are average at best. Claiming to be unable to hire for an entry or mid-level software engineer job is absurd.
> You can offer them more money, better work/life balance, a more fulfilling job, etc.
If the qualified workers are already fully employed, how will this result in more of them in the short term?
> Why offer a better wage when you can just cry to the government and get an indentured servant at a discount?
The law requires H1B workers be paid the prevailing wage (20 CFR 655.731), and studies indicate that they're paid pretty close to the average wage (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34793/w347...) -- well within the statistical band. If we keep in mind that half of all citizens holding a particular job are paid below the average wage, too, then perhaps the hue and cry over pay is overblown.
If employers can't pay the market wage, they can't afford a worker. This is what drives productivity gains for the economy. Inefficient business models die off and are replaced by businesses that can use labor more effectively.
Don't you see the clear contradiction between the claim that the employer is paying the market wage, and the fact that they can't hire an American worker at that price? Clearly the claimed "market wage band" is wrong if they can't actually hire a qualified American employee at that price.
Note that there are also plenty of other factors besides wage, eg. 24/7 on-call, working in a remote location, mandatory overtime, etc. Even if an employer actually is paying the market wage for the general job category, there is likely a reason why American candidates are not interested.
> Don't you see the clear contradiction between the claim that the employer is paying the market wage, and the fact that they can't hire an American worker at that price?
No, there's no contradiction. Again, you and others seem to be assuming--without evidence--that for any given job opening, there is an additional qualified local resource available in the prevailing wage band. But that's not necessarily the case. You don't have to take large tech companies' word for it; just ask small business owners around you.
You're arguing in poor faith. Microsoft has laid off thousands of workers this year alone. As has nearly every large tech company.
There's no shortage of qualified US tech workers. Microsoft and many other tech companies (cough Accenture cough) abuse this system. They want workers who cannot easily get jobs with another company due to the visa system and will take the lowest of wages.
> Microsoft has laid off thousands of workers this year alone.
If I lay off experienced buggy whip makers because the market for horse-drawn buggies is shrinking, and I need to hire experienced aluminum workers instead to meet my customers' demands, it doesn't necessarily mean I can hire the buggy whip makers back for that job. Labor is not necessarily substitutable like that. Not even software developers.
It's also worth noting that companies often use layoffs as a way to efficiently trim the worst-performing labor cohort. They don't do it because they want to hire cheaper labor; it's because they want to let these workers go without the overhead of going through the formal termination process for each one individually.
> There's no shortage of qualified US tech workers.
This statement is so broad it's difficult to evaluate. There might be plenty of US tech workers, and there might be a surplus of US tech workers qualified for some job, but it doesn't necessarily mean they are qualified for the specific job openings.
Speaking from my own experience, my team is hiring several senior SREs, and we're not seeing a flood of qualified candidates. We get a flood of resumes, but the signal to noise ratio is low. The candidates' CVs claim the requisite qualifications, but when we actually evaluate the candidates for role fit, we are finding that their actual skills aren't those we need for success in these roles.
We're discussing this in the context of Microsoft and other organizations large enough to employ double digit percentages of all H1B visa immigrants to the USA.
The quirks of individual managers don't matter in this context.
> want a captive workforce that depends upon them to stay in the USA and build a life.
This is a common argument, but for some reason nobody follows up on that to say: let's not make H1Bs depend on the company. Say, let's give them a 1-year grace period to find jobs if they decide to switch jobs. It's actually the opposite. The 60-day grace period is being challenged. Maybe some people want this reason to exist, compared to other reasons for hiring a foreign workforce.
Is that really the intent of the law? From here it looks like the intent is to favor citizens to people who would require sponsorship, but a hiring process that selects the best candidate from a single set of citizen and foreign candidates doesn't do that.
> But if someone requiring sponsorship was the best candidate for the job, then they have to run an additional “fake” process that fulfills these requirements.
Without running a process how do you know someone requiring sponsorship is, and a correction to language, an adequate candidate for the job.
Yeah, the rules are designed to facilitate fraud. They let you put job ads for web developers in a newspaper instead of, you know, on the Internet.
If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud, they would have required the company to advertise the position in the same places they advertise their other jobs.
> If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud
I wouldn't default to assuming malice. These laws were written by extremely old people who are still living in the 1950s, where they think the paper boy still rides up on his bicycle on Sunday to deliver the news paper to them, and that's the only way to read about jobs.
Imagine if they changed the law to reflect what they wanted instead of randomly punishing companies that most likely are doing the same thing everyone else is, but they angered the admin by telling them "no" on some topic.
Just vote bank politics. Microsoft is not a cheap sweatshop. If it is a sweatshop and still producing what it produces then that defies logic. We can only expect more of these as mid terms approaches.
Please use more than one brain cell in order to consider the intent behind those guidelines, and whether what Microsoft (and similar companies) is doing is actually within the bounds of what voters and the representatives who wrote the relevant laws wanted. Do you really think the purpose of making companies advertise the job opening in a newspaper was just to give companies a bunch of busywork? or might there have actually been an intent behind it? Are you capable of ascertaining what that intent is? (note: this question has a right answer that all people arguing in good faith are capable of stating)
> Listing the wage is optional, but if included, it cannot be below the official prevailing wage.
What an absurd carve out seemingly designed to facilitate exactly the sort of fraud being alleged. If you want to argue that you couldn't find qualified local workers one of the basic prerequisites ought to be documenting what the prevailing wage is and openly advertising the position at some small percentage _above_ that rate in order to attract local talent. In all cases the accuracy of that value should absolutely be audited by the government before granting the application.
"We couldn't find any qualified local applicants willing to accept substandard pay and we don't feel up to competing properly" is absolutely not the stated purpose of the program yet the rules apparently cater to that. A complete farce on the part of the federal government.
A place I used to work advertised a job by posting the listing in the break room, where only people with badges could get in to see the advert. Maybe there were ads elsewhere, but if that was the only posting, it felt against the spirit of the law.
Yes, you are of course correct, lots of large businesses do this, and hopefully they extend this scrutiny to all businesses.
I'm not sure what about this made you question your intuition. Is there something about this story that made you think it might only be Microsoft doing this?
This has honestly been one of if not the only thing I have agreed with the Trump administration on. It also seems like something that has had bipartisan support (at least among the general public), but nobody wanted to rock the boat on these companies that provide so much funding in the form of "donations" and lobbying.
Abuse of the H1B system is pretty widespread if you look at the types of roles that these companies submit applications for. I'm convinced that if you aren't looking for someone who is literally a PhD candidate, lead of their field you can probably find someone somewhere who can write a damn REST API.
Trump was defending H-1B a year ago even as his immigration crackdown was shifting into high gear. This is simply a pre-election move that will likely be reversed by the administration or the courts.
But to be real, does this really matter? Do any software engineers or other positions Microsoft is looking for in these examples look for jobs in the paper these days? Would they get more responses if they advertised in a larger paper?
Microsoft is banking on the fact that nobody looks for jobs in the paper. The point is to use the lack of response be able to write on paperwork that they've proven that no qualified jobseekers exist in the US. They are aware that advertising in the newspaper is not an effective way to fill a position; the goal is to lie about how much they tried.
This is one of those horrible moments that happen once every decade or two for me:
Somebody I believe is spiritually hideous, morally corrupt, and plain old incompetent, saying something I am in atomically perfect alignment with, using almost the exact same words I would.
This is why i voted for him and will keep doing so. The left is too weak to push through things like this with their “morally superior” voters. So, your welcome.
Trump 2028 amirite ? I couldn't care less how MAGA voters vote and want to ignore their constitution, but why can't your GEOTUS restrict US business to US soil - why screw the whole world ? Just remove your pirate, oil-tanker sinking navy from the middle-east.
Really a bizarre workaround. It's not even restricted to these massive entities.
I flew into a co-working space for a team onsite this summer. While walking the halls, I saw a job posting printed out and taped onto a glass door facing out from one of the single-occupant offices, surely to claim a similar approach.
Very on-topic, reminds me of some analysis of why Putin and Xi generally tolerate corruption among their subordinates: it allows them to purge anyone they want with plausible deniability, since everyone is on the take.
For nearly every job title that an H1B is brought in on, they are paid more than the prevailing average wage. The idea that they are coming in as underpaid foreign scabs is mostly a myth.
Burying job listings is part of the kabuki theater, but it's being misrepresented here. Usually companies already have a candidate in mind when they do this. It makes no sense to run a complete hiring process in the US, and then turn around and run a second one for international candidates. You may as well do a complete candidate search and then post the canned jobs again if you need to get Visa sponsorship.
I have not met a single one who was not over qualified for the job they were doing.
I have only met a couple who were (to some extent) getting screwed because of an agency in the middle. However I would not have found the wage unreasonable and the markup was well within the industry standard.
H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here... We need to fix the portion of the process where it is onerous to go from H1B to green card and citizenship.
> H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here...
There is truth to this, certainly. In software engineering or related positions? I don’t think so, generally. If this was the case we wouldn’t also outsource positions.
I've worked with some outstandingly talented folks on H1-B, and then I've worked with WITCH body shop H1-B workers, and the latter have approximately the skill of a semiliterate high school dropout. We need to do something about the abuses in the system while maintaining pathways for the genuinely talented candidates.
> For nearly every job title that an H1B is brought in on, they are paid more than the prevailing average wage. The idea that they are coming in as underpaid foreign scabs is mostly a myth.
Source? But also what difference does that make? Just pay American workers more.
It is literally a requirement for that kind of Visa.
> Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater.
If we set aside software engineering - 40% of rural doctors in the US are here on H1B visas. There's not a "pay them more" button we can hit that generates more domestic doctors, especially not in under 10 years. All you'd do is compete amongst a limited supply.
And stop degree inflation. A doctor with 4 years of med school and a year internship from 60 years ago can diagnose your sniffles or refer you to a specialist just as well as a doctor with an unrelated 4-5 year BS degree then 4 years in med school, then a year of internship followed by 3-4 more years of residency.
At the same time, the doctor with just 4-5 years of school and hundreds of thousands less debt can not only treat patients more cheaply, but will have more years of practice too.
The first 4 years are basicaly worthless. I remember reading that the best doctors got their initial BS in engineering which has nothing to do with medicine. It simply shows they have a higher IQ than average and would have made superior doctors whether they got that engineering degree or not.
That leaves the only real difference (other than degree inflation) as being 3 years of residency, but most of the older generation of doctors effectively did the same thing entering into an existing practice or working in a hospital under an experienced physician.
If you climbed the ladder (like a lot of nurse practitioners do), the ADN+BSN took 5 years with 3-4 more years for the MSN or 4-5 years for the DNP.
Put another way, that nurse practitioner has MORE applicable years of schooling than a doctor who got some random degree with the handful of med prereqs then went to med school, internship, and residency. Lots of nurse practitioners also work in the field all the while they are in school which further increases their actual experience.
The real takeaway is that all these extra years, loans, and interest combined with fewer years to practice medicine translate into more expensive care without improving outcome.
> There's not a "pay them more" button we can hit that generates more domestic doctors, especially not in under 10 years.
That's literally how the button works. An undersupply in the market, increases prices.. kids and students deciding what they want to do with their life, see the wages and decide 10 years of school is worth it... and after 10 years you get more doctors.
If there's an undersupply, that's a clear indication that young people are looking at the field and deciding the wages don't justify the investment.
By short-circuiting the process of the free market, you're guaranteeing the shortage will continue.
The problem is that the relationship is non-linear. The data shows that at a certain amount of comfort and income, most people really aren't willing to make drastically uncomfortable lifestyle choices for any amount of money. I'm not suddenly going to become a lineman even if it pays double what I make now.
How many kids in our culture are actually looking at earning potential as the #1 factor when they choose a career?
As an American who grew up in one of these underserved markets, you couldn't pay me enough to work there. My mom works at a rural hospital and loathes every minute of it. The reality is, American workers value more than just dollars. Especially professionals with options.
Immigrant doctors may also hate working at these facilities, but the prospect of raising their family somewhere in the USA is a huge value add for them.
> As an American who grew up in one of these underserved markets, you couldn't pay me enough to work there.
Eh I think this is sort of BS. First yes literally you could be paid enough. Everyone has a price, including you, and you’re not fooling anyone. Second you can find arrangements that perhaps enable you to spend a few years doing what amounts to public service in exchange for maybe no debt or higher pay and then move on - this is a very common thing in the labor market.
Also, what does that say about you that you hate being around your fellow countrymen more than someone from outside of your country?
There actually is a pay them more button that the federal and state government controls, but I doubt they'd hit it. Many of those rural docs are compensated heavily by Medicaid (EDIT: have a high % of Medicaid patients - compensation is a separate story), but the reimbursement structure often penalizes those rural docs vs. those that take positions in suburban and urban environments. Some states permit a flat reimbursement structure where patient volume is the only difference, but other states further penalize the rural docs by "shaping" reimbursement rates such that more funding goes to the urban and suburban areas.
This administration could address that, but if anything, they seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
Rural medical specialists are compensated very well. In my experience the bigger obstacle to getting those roles filled is more social, for example, unless you are already married the dating pool in a rural area is a consideration for new doctors, or if you are married and your spouse has a career moving to a rural area may require them to give up that career which they may not be willing to do. Cities better support dual-career households b/c they have a density of industries. Also - after 10+ years of school a lot of new doctors want to live it up a bit in a place with things to do and see.
There are also tertiary effects in that bringing in young working families into the US is overwhelmingly good for the economy.
If bringing in workers shrinks an economy, then how does one go from a country of 40 million to 400 million without 360 million people being unemployed? Because wage earners actually contribute more to the economy than they crowd out.
No one in their right mind would argue that having kids is going to put downward pressure on the job market, and yet we have the idea that grown, educated adults will. (Not to mention these grown, educated adults cost us nothing in taxes in education or retirement, so overwhelmingly less of a burden on our economy)
Indeed. I had a friend who worked in freight forwarding - Japanese company, him a Japanese citizen, but based in US.
Once he got his green card via lottery, his pay went up and his mandatory overtime went down. His Japanese coworkers without green cards still had to work late.
Is there any evidence of that claim by Vance?
I am not trying to be confrontational but this claim is so outstanding that it pulled my attention.
How did his people got it to a level that they prove it is systematically abused.
I am not saying it is being abused or not. I am literally curious on how anyone in the face of earth could do that to a point that you can prove it is not an isolated event.
Anyone, best of luck for people.
(Imo, anti immigration is the easiest way to cut ties with other nations if you plan to send your boys in there to get a trauma)
This is a very well known tactic in H1B factory like Tata and Cognizant, people has been complaining about this for years. Not sure about Microsoft though.
I'm sorry. I am not saying you are lying. Please don't take like this.
But if someone wants to audit this to prove it, how would they do?
Because if they are just exploiting a hole, why not fix the hole?
Why aren’t they trying to change the laws of h1b, etc. while they have control of the all branches of the government and instead just target certain companies? Why not just close the loopholes, assuming there is systematic abuse, so no one can abuse the system anymore?
I've seen it done in not even a small-town newspaper. A company I worked for put it into a print newspaper I cannot even find anywhere and I suspect the lawyers who we used to help in the process owned it themselves (but I can't prove this). I am not sure if there is a set definition of what a small-town newspaper is or "widely distributed". Like what if lawyers print it once a month/year and just distribute it around public parks or something? Is that widely distributed?
This isn't even a good basis. The question is what the purpose of visa to residence work programs achieves. No one ever questions the underlying assumptions. Like for example, could filling skilled roles actually cause a self fulfilling prophecy? If Americans assume immigrants will fill a role, they don't acquire the skill which actually creates a dependence on immigration to fill it.
That reminds me of the Richards Tip episode from Nathan for You, in which, in order to fulfill a legal requirement for a name change, they started printing a newspaper called The Diarrhea Times.
The article is lying by omission, it's not just Microsoft, which got suspended from PERM, FT has a list of few other companies (it's paywalled by searching for the article title and clicking the result link works [1]). Also, this is not something extraordinary: big companies get suspended from PERM all the time.
This would actually probably be acceptable to me if they multilaterally applied it across all tech companies, not just the ones who don't kiss Trump's butt.
Those are literally the rules of what you need to do. Well, except the small-town newspaper part. Pick up the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle and you'll see pages of these ads.
I remember years back, I was maybe 5 years into being a sysadmin and saw that Microsoft was hiring, at the time they said that they expected high proficiency in the following.... And listed every piece of software they produced. It was ridiculous then and probably the same thing is the case now.
The point is that only someone already working there would have proficiency with all the software they use internally, so by listing those as requirements they can ensure no external candidate is eligible for the job the green card applicant is doing.
I've seen job ads for the DC/Langley area smeared over local "classifieds" sites for states in the Midwest. I almost applied once, but realized that'd just encourage the practice, and most of them seemed like they hadn't been updated in months.
> they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants
Wait but PERM process is precisely for getting that foreign person outside of the temporary "effective indentured servant" phase. It's to get a green card... Once you have it you can leave the company and work anywhere.
Where it gets maybe abused is only India/China pipelines, where they're stuck in that GC backlog for years. so it makes them in this limbo of renewable H1B until the GC is granted, which might be decades out.
And this announcement changes nothing. Why only mention microsoft when they aren't even the worst of them? Tesla put out a tesla semi factory video a few days ago and most of the people in it were foreigners on visas.
This looks to be a shakedown for cash. Companies are retaining existing h1bs and not hiring new, so this "change" is coming at a meaningless time.
I think people should be asking why JD has eye shadow on as if he just came from a drag party. The guy looks like a clown and is making a meaningless announcement to fake out the maga base for the election. The h1b announcement from last year still hasn't changed anything. The lottery is still maxed out.
The entire H1B visa system should be scrapped until every American engineer has a well-paying appointment.
And companies need to advertise outstanding positions on their own website to prove they can't find any candidates. Seems to me that would be impossible and you could scrap the entire H1B Circus right away.
And employees with an H1B visa should leave the country after 4 years for at least 3 months to prevent them from applying for citizenship.
Tangential but may be of interest, in Eastern Europe I was informed of a common practice, that an organization will advertise a role in a paper and then reject every applicant for bullshit reasons, because they already decided who they want to hire internally (usually some nepotism) but have to "go through the motions" for legal reasons.
I went through that and hated the charade despite being the one to benefit from it. A similar process also exists with public tenders: you can either list your requirements such that only your friendly company may win the bidding, or split your contracts into parts which go below the threshold at which you must hold a tender.
I worked at an engineering company that employed immigrants to assemble metal cabinets. The attorney for one of the workers said that if we listed him as a "machinist" he could get his green card quicker. Problem was, we listed a machinist position in the small local paper, and, because a nearby Ford auto plant has shut down a few years earlier, many unemployed machinists saw the ad. We ended up having to replace the worker that was making $10/hr with a machinist making $40/hr, and the worker ended up going back to his home country in eastern Europe.
The US will do anything but have a sane worker visa program, with clear path to citizenship.
The lottery system is built to be gamed and so is the performative local "hiring" attempts.
On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers. I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it, but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots. Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back. Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
> with clear path to citizenship.
Or no path at all. Tying the citizenship carrot to the visa and letting the employers hold the stick is the worst of all possible outcomes.
> Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back
So I think what some in this thread are saying is it quite literally 'will' bring American workers the literal jobs that the H1Bs aren't doing anymore.
> but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots
So two things can definitely be true here. They can be hardworking and well-intentioned, and they can still be used as a wedge between American workers and slightly better jobs
There is no guarantee that any American will be hired to fill any job vacated by a former H-1(b) holder. The firm could contract or fail against foreign competitors.
None of this is how this happens though. The reason why companies spend thousands of dollars to pay lawyers is that local talent to do this work simply does not exist. They would much rather prefer hiring Citizens.
I experienced it at my first role after college. I got a job at a hospital as an analyst. Many of my graduating peers applied. Only a few got in. It was odd because the first day the room was divided into two. Literally one side locals and the other side H1B. It’s a group that has less than 1% ethnicity in my area. It was really weird. It felt like there was a quota to hit 50% locals. There were a few experienced people with the software we were using. Most were not and the people that were had a citizenship. That analyst role didn’t even need a CS degree.
I agree that the cruelty is disgusting and unnecessary, but you're going to have a very, very hard time convincing people that removing foreigners will not free up jobs for Americans.
pretty easy. over 50% of silicon valleys unicorns have an immigrant founder. if you cut off their ability to stay, you wouldn't have those companies, and there wouldn't be nearly as many high paying tech jobs.
Oh, I was aiming at the people in this comment section that need convincing. On a site populated by people paid by SV companies you’d think it wouldn’t need explaining. And yet
I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down. There was very definitely a shortage of qualified SWEs pre-AI, during the boom times from 2010-2022 or so. Sure some American SWEs exist but big companies were desperate for talent and there definitely weren't enough SWEs that were
(a) competent enough to pass the hiring bar
(b) willing to move to places like Seattle / SF / NYC where these companies were hiring.
You only need to scroll back to a couple of years ago where people were turning their noses up at all forms of recruiter outreach and complaining about how aggressive the recruiters were. What privileged times we lived in.
Since 2022 / post COVID interest rate hikes / AI, the hiring dropped and college kids can't get jobs. The first bump in the economic road you hit, you want to scale down H1B capacity, cancel green cards, banish people. What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program? Or be resigned to getting high tax paying / high spending jobs shipped off shore? Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
IMO this is all very short term thinking / political theater to score brownie points with the republican base for the elections.
Nothing here is good policy. Sure there's fraud, fix the fraud. You don't like the ad process, make it better.
But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.
As far as I know there isn't any wage discrimination at these big companies like Adobe or Microsoft. Everyone gets paid basically in-line with what levels.fyi says as a band for their level.
> I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down
Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.
Perhaps you could attempt to steel-man why point-based immigration allocate and de-allocate points for certain professions over time? Or why temporary visas exist in the first place.
> If it does, then it won't be appealing to the class of person you're seeking to attract.
Such is the nature, complexity and self-contradicting character of any large-scale public policy; and it's "classes" (plural) because immigration cuts across social strata, not just your software and service industry "rockstar" geeks.
> What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program?
Yes, why not? Or more practically: keep the program but adjust the quotas annually or even quarterly based on needs. When you see tech companies laying off workers by the thousands, as happened over the past few years, that's the sign that there is plenty of local talent to be hired.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
The solution to that is to separate visa renewals from new hires: allow companies to keep existing workers, while forcing them to hire new ones locally. This actually makes America _more_ attractive for immigrants because they know they cannot be replaced with a new generation of cheap workers from their home country when economic conditions worsen.
> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false.
In what sense is it false? Microsoft claims that of its 6,800 H1b filings 80% were “related to employees already working at Microsoft” (note no mention _which country_ those employees were working in) which translates to 20% to or 1720 new employees they hired.
And for pay, they only state that “international workers that Microsoft does hire through the H1b visa program are paid the same level of compensation that a worker from the US would receive”, but of course the point is that the average level of compensation for new hires today is significantly lower than it was 10 years ago, when there was a tech worker shortage.
So it can be simultaneously true that the current-year H1b hires are hired at the same rate Americans are, but that those rates are substantially lower than the negotiated compensation of the people Microsoft laid off. The fact that Microsoft declines to comment on this,
So the following are almost certainly all true:
- Microsoft fired (or laid off) over 1000 American citizens last year
- Microsoft applied for H1b visa for at least 1000 _new_ employees
- Those new employees will almost certainly receive lower compensation than the citizens that were laid off
Please, if you think this narrative is false, which of these facts are you specifically disputing?
> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.
I don't think this really holds up. They could offer the American engineers the opportunity to move divisions, but they don't because what they really want to do is what they did do: Fire Americans and hire foreigners.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
Then make H1B what it is supposed to be for: elite specialists, not infinite low cost non-American laborers. Then you won't even need to have this discussion.
> I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it...
The contention is pretty clear to me: the law currently says hiring companies should look for Americans who can do the jobs first (not best), and only sponsor visas if they can't find them - but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.
Sure, immigration is hard, stressful and gruelling fight against an an uncaring system. But the damaging aspects of widespread illegal corporate[1] conduct shouldn't be ignored.
I'm saying this as someone who believes American should increase its immigration and end widespread gray-area tolerance that harms the immigrants - who have the least power of all parties involved, which employers love to exploit. Sadly, partisanship makes otherwise smart voters really dumb, with one party lying to its base and the other going along with it and avoiding hard discussions about why America needs immigration.
> ... but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.
> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.
> ...
> National origin-related disparate treatment in hiring related to job advertisement also can include an employer making it more difficult for applicants from one national origin to apply for positions (for example, subjecting U.S. workers to more laborious application methods than H-1B visa holders during the PERM labor certification process).
Part of the challenge here is that the EEOC tends to not be funded well and is limited to acting on tips rather than being able to investigate or audit.
> The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to investigate and litigate against businesses and other private sector employers for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.
> Congressional negotiators have reached a bipartisan deal to fund the EEOC at $435.4 million for fiscal year 2026. The funding level is the same as that requested by the White House, but nearly $20 million (4.3%) less than last year’s budget.
The real rationale for the change isn't fraud at all. Does it make sense that the administration is specifically concerned about fraud regarding hiring in tech sector while at the same time pardoning convicted fraudsters where the victims lose out on billions of dollars?
Does it make sense to declare the "America is full" and deporting people who have been granted asylum while welcoming white South Africans with open arms?
> On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers
HN had its mask off moment some time around the 2024 election.
This is not caring about their country, this is caring about their paycheck. They want higher salaries, damned' be what it does to competitiveness. It's nearsighted protectionism, that's what it is.
It's local maxima vs global maxima. Or 10% of small pie vs 1% of big pie, etc. More to the parent's point though, HN demographics have changed just like all other social media. It's not the SF Bay area tech scene anymore; it's a global townsquare like x.com. So it's hard to separate the signal from the noise.
People should demand lower salaries, god damnit! What happened to the good old-fashioned Mission of the company? In fact that we ask for anything at all to get ahead on our housing and healthcare payments is morally abominable. When did HN get so... germaine. We must serve our corporate missions at any costs, and bring forth the future our Founders promise.
HN's shift from a group of plucky Wozniak-like technological enthusiasts to a group of unicorn focused wealth seekers tracked the broader change from engineers being primary staffed with hobbyists to wealth seekers across society.
That change FAR predates the most recent election.
> HN's shift from a group of plucky Wozniak-like technological enthusiasts to a group of unicorn focused wealth seekers tracked the broader change from engineers being primary staffed with hobbyists to wealth seekers across society.
This is just what happens when communities get bigger, they become more reflective of the societies which the people are drawn from.
I do remember HN getting much nastier around 2015-16, and again around Covid, but this is just a reflection of society again and unlikely to be a purely HN thing.
If anything, in the 15 (fuck) years I've been hanging out here, it's amazing how well the community has held up.
People are too afraid to challenge their billionaire bosses, so they go after immigrants, because immigrants seem like easy targets. It's basic human cowardice underneath.
Why would there need to be a clear path to citizenship? If I go work in Amazon UAE for 2 year contract, why would I expect citizenship? The whole reason I'm there is for money. When the job is done, I go home.
Clear path or no-path to citizenship I guess. The fact that H1B is a dual-intent visa muddies the water and allows employers to string along people for decades.
There’s not much point in coming to these threads and expecting anything. They’re only useful as low quality commenter honeypots. My auto filters have taken out 3/4th of the comments as habitual whiner parrots. I suggest you apply similar input data hygiene.
I have a Chrome extension there but I also have an iOS app that I use for myself alone (it’s really not production grade). The Chrome extension is pretty rudimentary so if you want to replicate it you can just tell your agent to do so and if it helps the source is on GitHub. The iOS app is vibe-coded entirely so perhaps you’re better off starting from scratch there.
It’s a pretty basic requirement to interact with social media these days, I think because the information feed is full of noise.
I use a combination of Hacker Smacker (seems roughly the same idea), and TrustSpark for HN, which I also vibed (pre-Opus, probably could be improved at this point).
Hacker Smacker in particular would be awesome if more users picked it up (since it's a web of trust, albeit 1 hop only).
Terrific. When I have a free moment I’ll go see if I can push into your network or whatever. Mine is just a pretty dumb list of loginless ban/highlight.
> Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
How about sparing a moment for the anguish of American citizens and graduates that either lost their jobs, or cant find work, because they were replaced by foreign scab labor willing to work longer hours, for less pay, with no mobility?
Why should temporary workers have a path to citizenship? Come to the US, work in a high tech job, send your remittances back to your family, and then retire to your home country at a young age. Win-win.
over 50% of silicon valleys unicorns have an immigrant founder. if you cut off their ability to stay, you wouldn't have those companies, and there wouldn't be nearly as many high paying tech jobs.
Switzerland: 10 million people, around 600'000 with permit B (limited to 5 years), over a million with permit C (persistent living permit, but no citizen, available after 5 years of B).
> Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back.
When Microsoft lays off 6.000 American workers and then refills those positions with H1Bs, I would argue that cancelling visas will definitely bring those jobs back.
>On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers. I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it, but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots. Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back. Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
I think you missed the arguments. It's not they're not 'deserving' - although you should probably say qualified as it sounds less moral in the context of job competition. No, it's that as indentured servants, they effectively allow corporations to hire cheaper, more pliant workers. H1 workers from India might be very qualified, but they keep their heads down and work long hours to avoid risking getting sent back.
We don't like that. Would you want co-workers who say yes to everything and accept long hours, all due to immigration? It's a form of labor power dilution and it hurts us all.
A company that I worked for would hire foreign grads out of school on F-1 visas with zero experience; they’d come on board using the OPT extensions (good for up to 3 years) and then file for H1Bs immediately. If they didn’t get it they’d file again the next year and so on. If they get to year 3 of the OPT without getting an H1B they would be sent to an office in Europe where they work for a year and then get transferred back on an L1.
FWIW H1B recipients immediately get started on the PERM/GC process (if they wish), with only whatever new-grad level plus 0..2 years experience they have accumulated thus far.
Meanwhile job ads are posted in the kitchens as required by law (and I’m sure the local newspapers) with ~$80K salaries even though I that way way below what they paid even for new (US) grads [in the Boston area]. So no surprise no one ever applies for them (if they even see it).
Every H1B I know is both underpaid and unable to change jobs. The companies that use them the most are those that squeeze their employees the hardest. They work hard and are incredibly smart and capable, but they have no power to push back on the boss asks them to come in on nights and weekends.
It’s a fiction, like the idea that contractors would prefer contracts over full time employment. Its a less-privileged workforce with fewer protections to benefit the companies.
I’m pro immigration, and that means actually paying people for their expertise rather than semi-indentured workers. Too often companies get all the benefits of the workers without having to pay them. The fact of all the staffing agencies put in alongside Microsoft. Of course, the current admin couldn’t care less about any employee, citizen or migrant, they’re just using it to try to show their base they care. The dems have done absolutely nothing when they are in power either.
There are exceptions, but in 20 years in both SF and Seattle you can basically set your clock to this being what’s happening.
As an American I notice this also more broadly affects the company culture. Most of my peers (who are mostly non-Americans) are afraid to speak up. It even causes the (few) Americans to typically not speak up. So it just creates a culture where management is surrounded my yes men. I actually don't think that's good for anyone. Not the American workers, not the foreign workers, and not the company. Your job as an engineer is to talk back to your boss. They aren't the engineer, you are. Even if the boss is an engineering manager. We all know that there's a huge difference in how someone understands code between having written it and just read it (LLMs are certainly blurring this line now...)
IDK, with a lot of things it seems like big companies are just incredibly myopic. When I got my PhD people interviewing me used to love to say "well in industry, we do things that actually matter" (a weird premise) and boast about how efficient they are. Yet IME I just see an incredibly suboptimal setting. They routinely waste tons of money to save pennies and the attitude of "I just care that it works" really just ends up with "it looks like it worked but it's actually broken". But that's the obvious result if you surround yourself with yes men and don't let people do their jobs
It is good for the company. You get foreign employees to threaten local employees and foreign employees have no say due to restrictions.
Whats the cost of setting up new offices in developing countries like India and China vs sponsering here. It seems setting up office offshore is much cheaper, the only issue seems to be the upfront cost and know how which is an issue for starups but not for a reasonably established software business
>> IDK, with a lot of things it seems like big companies are just incredibly myopic.
It may be good for the company in the short term, but that does not mean it is good for the company in the long term. I don't buy the argument that it is good for the company in the long term
> It’s a fiction, like the idea that contractors would prefer contracts over full time employment
That may be uncommon but it is not a fiction. I worked as a contract for one of the telco companies for a couple years by choice. My boas would regularly ask about making me full time, I was getting paid a bit more as a contractor, didn't need the benefits, and my work was otherwise identical to what it would be full-time. Why bother?
The problem with H1B and some of the other employment visas is its really difficult or impossible for the worker to change jobs. JD Vance calls them indentured servants. I suspect the situation for actual indentured servants is a bit worse but in any case the workers dont have a lot of options at their disposal. They cant just leave without losing their visa. So their “choice” to work for less money isn’t really a choice at all.
Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?
Well it does impact h1b because h1b has a maximum time of 6 years unless the visaholder has an approved green card application. So, by blocking new green card applications (at least the most common path) this effectively puts a ceiling on the number of H1B visaholders.
If it were me, I would make companies "bid" on the visas, where their bid is the salary (including all benefits, minus ALL expenses) they will pay the employee.
Employers who really need employees for high-skilled work would thus get visas. Employers who want to underpay their foreign labor will not.
Auctions are great because it's harder to game than a lottery. If a company truly believes there is a shortage of rocket surgeons and they need to access to the global market of these specialists, they can bid high. No hand wringing about not being able to find American rocket surgeons (willing to work for low income country pay scales). No stuffing a lottery with tons of entries - bids incentivize applicants to not waste slots. No worrying that a Federal department made the wrong decision on total supply, price, or who the recipients are - auctions self-adjust and update.
Auctions are bad because need is not entirely measured in money. Highest bidders win is not egalitarian. Sometimes we do want to subsidize rocket surgeons visas for disadvantaged parts of the country.
My concern with such approaches is around the "all skilled labor is lumped into the H-1B visa", be it needing fluency in French and a teaching certificate or a PhD in data science with a focus on economics - its the same pool of visas.
Within the H-1D which is for tech jobs (just like H-1A and H-1C were for healthcare while they were active), it can have a different pool size and requirements and for that one could require a certain base pay and have an auction on top of that.
This could allow for regulating tech job immigration differently while minimizing the impact to French teachers or medical professionals in rural America that have no way to compete with Big Tech salaries.
The reason I think this is more likely doable is that it works the same way that the H-1A and H-1C visas did before to address one section of the skilled labor visa applications.
is it because you personally would benefit from having tech jobs visas regulated so that your own wages don't get pushed down?
I think skilled labour import is, on the whole, beneficial. The bigger issue isn't this, but that they're legally bound only to that single company (and would need to reapply for the visa when they would change jobs).
If this condition could be changed, then it fix the issue.
Because jobs with the BLS classification of 15-0000 are the ones that have the current H-1B dependent employers and make up the majority of the applications in the lottery.
Most employers that submitted petitions to Homeland Security were
approved, and most were approved for one H-1B worker, but a small
percent of employers garnered over one-quarter of all H-1B approvals
between fiscal year 2000 and fiscal year 2009. Over the 10-year
period, about 94 percent of all submitted petitions (initial and
extensions) were approved, with a high of 97 percent in fiscal year
2006 and a low of 84 percent in fiscal year 2009.[Footnote 33] With
respect to the number of approved workers per employer, 68 percent of
employers were approved for 1 H-1B worker and about 99 percent of all
employers with approved petitions (627,922) were approved for 100 or
fewer workers. However, over the decade, less than 1 percent of all
employers with approved petitions were approved to hire almost 30
percent of all H-1B workers.
During FY2022-FY2024, approximately 13% of employers
indicated on their LCA filings that they were either H-1B
dependent or were willful violators. However, most of these
employers planned to hire only exempt H-1B workers. Less
than 1% of employers filing LCAs indicated that they were
required to comply with the additional attestation
requirements.
The system that works for most other employers is being abused. Changing the system that helps staff rural schools and hospitals to one that benefits Big Tech because of body shops hurts everyone else.
Again from the GAO:
Restricted agency oversight and statutory changes weaken protections
for U.S. workers: Elements of the H-1B program that could serve as
worker protections-—such as the requirement to pay prevailing wages,
the visa’s temporary status, and the cap itself—-are weakened by
several factors. First, program oversight is fragmented and
restricted. For example, the Department of Labor’s review of H-1B
applications from employers is cursory and limited by law to only
looking for missing information and obvious inaccuracies. Yet a recent
Department of Homeland Security study reported that 21 percent of the
H-1B petitions they examined involved fraud or technical violations.
This is where the changes should be addressed. Making sure that the DoL has the funding, staffing, ability to audit.
Strengthening those abilities for BLS classification 15-0000 jobs rather than trying to rewrite H-1B for everyone is likely easier to accomplish.
That's a fair argument for it being akin to indentured servitude but it's worth remembering that there are people of any number of races both in- and outside the US, and this surely applies equally to all of them.
Paying people less because they came from somewhere else and can get away with it, sounds a bit exploitative to me.
The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).
I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.
One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.
Unrelated to immigration but not for stupid managers. Friend of mine was promised a raise which was basically an adjustment of compensation.
He was fed up and he went to a meeting and he had to hear "what are you going to do about it?"
Manager knew his wife was pregnant and wanted to use it, or I suppose it was it.
He told he would pack his stuff and leave.
So he did. He packed his stuff, shared the news and another senior manager rushed after him to bring him back to his team with the raise.
I left the company few years ago but now and then I think about it. How someone can be so opportunistic with to the point of trying to abuse someone about to be a father for few thousands of dollars that do not even belong to him. And EVEN if he got a bonus or something it would have been much much less than that to the point that, if it was me, I would be so ashamed to admit that.
Possibly he would have done that with anyone in a special situation.
And I am sure this is more common than not, but how f'up it is to hide behind "it is just business" cover to act like this.
H1B visa's are a modern form of indentured servitude. The employer knows you can't quit, and if they fire you, you have 6 weeks to somehow find a new job (which is already hard if you are a US citizen or green card holder) or you have to leave the country.
Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.
The most racist part of the program is the per country quotas. Right now they are granting EB3 for Indians who applied in 2014 while EB3 visa for the French from 2024. So that's an extra 10 years Indians are stuck in limbo. And, no, this is not just because there's more Indian's immigrating.
Country of birth is a protected characteristic. You cannot discriminate against people on the basis of country of birth, but the government has a sanctioned policy to do exactly that.
So, yeah, it is not about race, but is very much discrimination that should be illegal.
It is not based on race, but nationality. If you are an Indian but are a citizen of Singapore your quota will be based on Singapore quotas, not based on you being ethnically an Indian.
It's actually based on country of birth. If your parents were French but were living in India when you where born, you will be in the India quota, even if your nationality is French.
Half my days are spent on calls with people trying to understand accents, phrases, and metaphors between people who speak different first languages and have different cultural backgrounds. The cost isn't measured, but the extra time, effort, and re-work (due to misunderstandings) is huge.
> it just sounds like the goal is to keep Indians out
Bingo.
This is a pre-midterm messaging move aimed at shoring up support with young men who voted for Trump in ‘24. The chances that the policy even lasts more than a few months is slim.
Oh please, US citizens have been getting a raw deal for decades, I lived and worked in the Bay for years and years, my Indian colleagues were no more talented than the US citizens coming out of US schools. You clearly weren't part of that world if you can make claim to the contrary.
When I was working at a large tech company, most of our teams were foreign-born. And we were specifically scouting for the US citizens for ITAR projects.
And this only got _worse_ as more and more advanced STEM degrees in the US go to foreigners.
I fail to understand how it is racism to support offshore hiring. Does that not help the local economies of remote workers? I am not sure what the admin is thinking and why they are making such decisions but for people who want to stay where they are it is king great.
Also why are you singling out Indians? Are you racist against other nations?
I hate the Trump administration and I don't know that I agree with this latest thing, but at least if they're outsourced to India then at least the company has a bit less leverage over you. I think in the current system employers can hold your H1B visa over you like a Sword of Damocles.
I've never had to worry about visas, so this is just stuff I'm getting from visa-holding friends, but that always seemed a bit scary.
and how much pressure do they feel to raise the band over time when theres a constant stream of people coming in form another country who accept anything presented because its still higher than back home
Employers benefit from regulations that exist to benefit employers. We should have completely open borders or actually do what's best for citizen workers.
Employers would have to pay more competitive wages if the candidate pool was smaller. Then there is the free legal services given to some workers and not others, that leaves less budget overall for compensation.
this is just not true. the market for new grads is extremely bad. Microsoft could easily invest in more early career people, instead they're hiring more senior H1-Bs.
Bad market for new grads is overdetermined. AI, interest rates, etc.
But a contributing fact is flooding the tech market with H-1B visas spikes labor supply, kills workers' leverage and lets companies cheap out on salaries instead of bidding them up.
Yeah but those new grads are too uppity. We tried throwing money at them, but they're more interested in productivity destroying quality of life improvements.
The imported worker, on the other hand, is a more efficient and compliant machine. Maybe if we make those youths as poor as the workers we import, they'll eventually learn some gratitude.
> sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more
There's another option: without a sufficient workforce, the projects just happen somewhere else. Then the local market stagnates, and you end up with very little competition between employers. And the salaries go down to match.
This is not a conjecture. The European tech sector is experiencing exactly this phenomenon. Even in large tech companies, the salaries for the same positions are about 50-100% higher in the US.
They would be employed by another company, and contracted to Microsoft. This is the arrangement for the majority of H1-B employees in general, but I do not know if Microsoft does this.
Tech companies do not generally do this for their product teams, but may do it for their internal IT and reporting systems.
Microsoft does this. my friend an electrical engineer on an h1b worked for them this way. Microsoft contracted a 3rd party where my friend was employed.
I’ve not worked at Microsoft so I can’t speak for them, but I’ve been in tech for the last 15 years with the last 5 being in manager/director roles at at least 1 company that is a household name.
What you’re saying gets repeated a lot, but I’ve never seen it to be true. Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level. I just don’t believe that it’s happening on the scale that people make it out to be.
Also, I don’t want to get too into it unless people are interested, but at least at the companies I’ve been at, the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty wrong with these programs and I’m glad to see reform, but I don’t believe the underpaying thing is happening nearly as much as people claim it does.
I think the H1B process gets abused by body shops. Salaries are pretty demonstrably lower there than at many other tech companies.
At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).
People are positing a thing known as a market. If there is a labor “market” then we know that supply/demand set prices, ie wages. For many, the notion of “markets” seems non intuitive but the math actually does check out.
> You’ll take these low wages and be happy about it or I’ll import a foreign worker who will be happy about it. And if they complain, I’ll have them deported.
Exactly . This is even when they have setup shop outside US they bring in foreign employees on restricted visa to softly threaten local employees this keeping wages low. Mean while locals can hate foreign employees and foreign employees can feel unsafe.
Quite honestly I am in amazed at this ingenuity. Art vs artist type of awe
I've been a tech manager for 21 years, much of that at a large Fortune 100 that had tens of thousands of employees from Infosys and TCS. The hourly rates we were charged for local workers on H1-B visas were $15-$30 less than we'd pay American contractors from body shops like Teksystems, and that is just what we were paying Infosys. The employee didn't see anywhere near that.
Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.
The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.
Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.
Presumably Infosys also pays citizen workers shitty too. The issue here is Infosys, not h1b.
I will also add a data point for big tech. I have managed people on h1b, on o1, with green cards, and citizens. I have never even sniffed any sort of disparate treatment across these groups once hired. During hiring the bias was against h1b since it was a huge pain in the ass to arrange everything and their start date could be delayed.
Infosys has virtually no citizen workers, and the ones they have are managing entire programs - they aren't doing client work. The only reason they have any workers at all is they can't realistically change H1-B sponsors.
HR wasn't involved in sourcing strategy. Either I contacted HR to open a req for a full-time employee, or I contacted Infosys. For body shops there was a specific system that sent it to multiple firms, but I was usually already talking to my account managers. When doing budgets we'd submit headcount asks by type and there were some soft ratios we were expected to stay within but this was mostly the division exec and their finance partner related to keeping our ratios aligned with our charge-back rates. I never saw a number that had anything to do with diversity across contractors.
Time gap is not a reason. The real reason is to keep the local market wages low. With free moving employees it's not possible to control. Companies bring foreign workers with restricted visa and then threaten local employees indirectly.
It's much cheaper to setup shop outside US, which almost all companies do, but still they bring in foreign employees on visa just to keep the entire local market salaries to the minimum
I don't know why you think this is a decision that Infosys can make. The hiring manager determines the sourcing strategy. We hired onsite resources so they would work with the rest of the team and know what is going on, like every other employee. Then after they work a full day, they get on a call with offshore for an hour or two every night at 10:00 PM. Otherwise we'd get nothing of value from offshore (which sometimes happened anyway).
The problem isn't just whether they're hiring below market. It's that market rates themselves are impacted by there being a whole underclass of workers who can't just freely move between jobs, and has to speedrun getting a new one if they ever lose their existing ones. The precarious nature of it makes an H1-B worker less likely to speak up about most things related to working conditions due to the precarious nature of the job. And that impacts everyone else -- because the fastest way to get a big raise is by getting a new job, so there's less incentive to pay people better if fewer workers can actually move around and you can threaten the ones that can purely through the existence of ones that can't.
I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.
Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.
If your "household name" company is more susceptible to scrutiny, they may not have as much of a pay gap and strictly rely on a the possibility of getting the employee sent back home if they don't contribute enough being the motivating factor. But odds are there are many sub-contractors that are through agencies that are significantly underpaying and you may have not been privy to the contracts through these parasite vendors.
> Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level.
This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.
Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.
Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.
Working at other places. There used to be a thing called competition - where you'd pay more to attract people to leave elsewhere. Now companies stifle this and collaborate to artificially to keep wages down.
Instead they just throw their hands up and call it quits, hiring elsewhere instead.
I sponsored an employee and that's not how pay works, in fact you have to tell them how much they are making and you have to pay them your average. The example given by the US government is a level one software developer makes on average 110k but your company pays on average 115k then you have to pay 115K and it has to be submitted to the government. So the answer to whether H-1B workers are paid less is: they are legally required not to be, but the system relies on employer attestation first and enforcement second. Companies get caught abusing this when the get audited but H-1B laws require they be paid the same.
There are so many senior leaders that rose through the ranks at MS from India and the rest of Asia that the claim is simply laughable. They wouldn't tolerate being paid any less than American natives themselves nor would they tolerate their immigrant subordinates being paid less than natives.
It's definitely not the correct thing to do. I don't see why you would start by making an example of a company like Microsoft where starting salary is six figures than a company like Infosys which employs a similar number (median salary at Microsoft for H1B workers is $177k vs. $93k for Infosys)
There's some real ways in which it's unfair. As a software engineer in Seattle I've quite possibly lost $100-300K to the H1B program over the past 10 years. It's not a problem though, I don't need anyone's protection from Microsoft.
I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
> I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
Picking your least favorite companies and applying it to them only is not the right thing to do. Laws and regulations, when not applied equally, are weapons.
Huh, there are other Indian IT vendors in list like Tata, Wipro, Cognizant and Infosys. MS is not alone in this. It'd be payback if it was about Microsoft's business/contracting with government.
The article explains why Microsoft is being singled out. It couldn't be more clear that this is a personal vendetta, and nothing related to US government policy.
There's not a single reason to assume this administration is acting in good faith in any scenario. The correct way to look at all actions by this administration is to ask yourself, "how does this help trump?" Most of the time it is money (or staying in power => more money), as it almost certainly is here. He's looking for a payout for selectively targeting microsoft. That's it.
And when trump does something which clearly hurts himself, you have to remember that he is fantastically stupid, undisciplined, and insane.
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? It is not true. Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Meta etc. do not do this and they have no need to. They just need the top employees, and lots of them.
You want to know who does this? Companies like Disney and other IT type jobs who hire H-1B workers then lay off citizens and have those citizens train the immigrant workers. There is no reason for H-1B workers in IT departments. But there absolutely is a need for immigrant workers in high tech companies. How else do you ensure your employees are the best in the world?
I don't think it's correct to call the economics basics racism. It's not like they are paying differently based on race, they do it based on the demand and availability of supply.
Where is the proof of this? I constantly see comments like this with no proof. The h1b process requires the foreign worker to receive the prevailing wage.
> The biggest one is the program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job.
Connect some dots for me here, where is the racism you claim?
Even if they are paying foreign workers less, which isn't substantiated here by data, that is someone willing to do the same job for less money and doesn't clearly have anything to do with race. The job market is a market, markets aren't equal for all participants or its racism.
I picked two examples to show the disparity. I do like where this is going, but as it frequently happens, it feels like a weapon than can be wielded selectively.
This is base salary not total compensation, which for a company like Microsoft matters quite a bit. I’ve never made less than 2-4x in a year what was on my perm application 10 years ago, that data is garbage
I see a lot of people who could probably work at any of these companies on LinkedIn unable to find work.
It seems to me the newspaper requirement needs to be nerfed and moving forward companies should require jobs be listed at the top most popular job advertising platforms (whether it be a website or what have you) as fully remote, US citizen only. Every application and interview needs to be submitted before applying for a VISA for a clear paper trail.
Theres no shortage of talent in the US, companies just need to hire remote more. Not everyone wants to live in one state for tech jobs.
I don't disagree. All regulatory issues. But, "not everyone wants to live in one state for tech jobs" - the trend is going the other way where hybrid/office is becoming the norm again. In any case, not too long ago, we were all working from office, which was the norm.
It's always seemed odd to me that your employer somehow sponsors your Green Card. It always felt like it should simply be a measure of
A) How long you have been working as an H1B in the united states (say 10 years).
B) How much you have paid in taxes (say 1 million).
Whenever either of the above has occured, you take some citizenship test, and then you have a green card. Nothing to do with your employer dangling something for you, literally a measure of your employment history and/or taxable income.
Surly the “corruption” is big corporations pushing for the H1B program in the first place, at a time (early 1990s) when decreasing immigration was overwhelmingly more popular than increasing it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx. Surely the “corruption” is the government looking the other way for years while Indian body shops imported massive numbers of foreign workers while ignoring the requirement in the law to advertise to americans?
And this is hardly new. Ross Perot was opposing H1B when he was running for President in the 1990s.
The vast majority of immigration to the US is based on luck (family, diversity etc.) or misery (asylum, refugee, etc.). That's about 90% immigration. The remaining 10% is employment. Where did you pull the $1M figure out of? Is the Mexican sibling paying $1M in taxes to immigrate here? Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
He's speaking specifically about the green card process, at which point you've already been in the country for a long time and paid into U.S. taxes. Not people who might want to pay money to immigrate here (although for them, the EB-5 visa program exists).
I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.
Any changes to immigration require the legislature. Congress hasn't changed anything in over 30 years, so all this is moot. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It's a bit silly to reason backwards about what the anti-immigrant types want. There is no grounding principle there.
This line of reasoning will shut down practically any interesting conversation that has to do with wanting to change the system. Extremely unproductive.
Cato did a study in 2017 that asked people if they supported immigration. Most people did. Then they asked people what they thought the level of immigration should be. The median answer was around 500,000 a year. The real level is 2-5 times higher than that. That’s why nobody will push for a real skilled immigration system. Once you open up the issue to public debate, a likely outcome will be a demand to drastically cut the level of legal immigration.
For example, right now, nobody is thinking of how many immigrants come to the U.S. through family unification for each H1B worker that eventually gets permanent residency. If you open up the issue now it’s going to become a firestorm when people realize that “65,000 skilled workers a year” actually results in millions of people every year, most of whom aren’t skilled workers.
Indeed. That translates to 14 relatives brought in by every skilled worker. You really wonder about the IQ of the people who believe this propaganda.
Also case in point, both me and my wife went from F1 to green card. We never worked illegally and had fully funded gradute programs. Our parents refuse to settle in the US, they have assets and families in home countries and rather live there. We haven't tried to bring in any other relatives. 3 of our siblings have also went through the F1 route, all of them fully funded gradutes, one of them left the US after graduation, other two settled and got green card.
That's not that far out of line. Spouse, children, two sets of parents and two sets of siblings. You're right that it's probably not 14 on average but 5-10 easily
Go to Little Bangladesh in Queens and tell me how all those people came here. It’s mathematically impossible unless they’re all illegal (which I don’t think is true) or it’s family reunification.
Each legal immigrant who becomes a citizen is the root of a tree that can continue indefinitely. If you come from anywhere other than India or China, it takes about 10 years to get citizenship from when you get your H1B. It took us less than 10. After that you can sponsor family for green cards directly. That person only needs about 6 years before they can get citizenship and start sponsoring their own family members. So it’s easy to see how we went from 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S. in 1990 to 300,000+ in just 35 years.
How am I responsible for what's happening in little Bangladesh in Queens? Did you go through my history to dig up where I'm from, so that you could tailor your racist reasonse?
I used it as an example because I’m from Bangladesh and have family in Queens. There’s 65,000 Bangladeshis in Queens, about half of them on welfare. That number can’t be explained by the paltry number of H1 or EB visas granted to Bangladeshis.
Family sponsored immigration is also severely backlogged. Look at the dates for family categories in https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v.... I don't know how many Bangladeshis are in Queens and how they ended up there, but it's a combination of illegal, asylum, and family/employment ones.
Okay, but in other cases it's not like that. They bring spouses, siblings, and parents who can turn bring their own spouses, siblings, and parents. That is severely curtailed these days by country restrictions so I agree that it's not 14 but it's higher than 1.
The wait time is long from the perspective of an individual immigrant (about 17 years for sibling preference for India, for example), but not that long from the perspective of population dynamics. A single skilled immigrant can bring over a dozen family members within 25 years. That's how you end up with these huge ethnic enclaves popping up all over the country in places that had very few immigrants when Al Gore was running for President.
> That translates to 14 relatives brought in by every skilled worker
That’s very easy within a few decades when you consider that the people who are sponsored will get citizenship and can then sponsor their own parents, siblings, etc. My dad sponsored six people, and he just has one brother. My mom has 12 siblings, but them and their families went to Australia following my uncle.
There are 300,000-600,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S., up from under 10,000 in 1990. Based on H1B petitions and natural growth, the population should be more like 15,000. People are bringing their entire extended families over.
I can't find the study in question, but I'd be interested in the polling process. The average person has zero understanding of what 500,000 immigrants per year means. For context, the average American is off by at least a factor of 2 about the population of the United States. If the questioning wasn't something along the lines of "of the people you personally know, what fraction should be immigrants" or something, I have no idea how you'd get anything resembling useful responses.
For those who aren't doing the math, there are now about 340M Americans, so 500K immigrants per year would be about 0.128% or roughly 1/780 of the population arriving as immigrants per year. If you figure the average immigrant stays for about 5 years (there's likely a long tail, where many people on temporary H1Bs go back to their home countries in 3-5 years while green card holders stay forever), you'd expect < 1% of the U.S. population to be immigrants under this system, and the average person would know maybe 1 or 2 immigrants.
FWIW, my community is 30% foreign-born and we don't really have any social cohesion problems. I think that length of time in the country actually matters more than the absolute number of immigrants; people who have been here since they were teens are very well acculturated. But if I were to put numbers on how many new people a group can absorb per year without radically changing its culture, I'd put it at about 10% (that's like having one new person on a 10 person team hired within the last year). If we extrapolated to the whole U.S. population and assumed they were all evenly distributed, this'd be 34M people/year.
Honestly, I think the bigger problem is that they're not evenly distributed. Some places in America never change, over generations, and remain very suspicious of outsiders. Other places become 80% immigrant over a span of 10-15 years, and then they never talk to anyone outside their ethnic background. In not very long, you end up with multiple different Americas that can't relate to each other. The parable of the polygons is very relevant here:
> But if I were to put numbers on how many new people a group can absorb per year without radically changing its culture, I'd put it at about 10% … If we extrapolated to the whole U.S. population and assumed they were all evenly distributed, this'd be 34M people/year
You think you can absorb 10% of the population every year without radically changing the country’s culture? My parents are still 80% Bangladeshi even after 40 years in the U.S.
I did go in details in another comment so I won't repeat myself because that comment is LONG.
But a nation couldn't ask more than a working age adult where you invested zero in education and health for 20 years and suddenly pay taxes with none of almost no benefits.
In the UK, which I raised numbers due to the discussion going on in there, visa workers generated yearly 12 to 20 Billions in direct taxes and fees and they use 4B in health (which technically they paid in fees a combined value of 6B upfront If my numbers are right)
But the real numbers lies on what other revenue they generate. It is estimated in my calculations that +50B-70B pounds are from immigrants on UK with a working visa.
That's no amount to shy considering about it is 8M people in that specific situation.
And remember that none of them had to have their education covered by the government.
Someone in the other comment said that 8M British people would generate more taxes than that, but I did not find evidence of that.
According to the public consultation documents UK gov released about immigration a couple of years ago, about 10% of the immigrants are responsible for more than 35% of the taxes collected. Hence the suggestion on curb immigration considering the salary range which might make sense or not depending on where you stand on the topic.
I have no horses on this race and my impression as an outsider who just likes analysing data is that it seems as much of a claim as saying that EU took more money from UK than what it put in which turned out to be mostly incorrect.
> Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
I think the "chud" immigration logic is rather, take whatever win you can get in the general direction of restriction, because you've been losing every single battle for 5+ decades.
you can already get a greencard by paying less than $1mm in taxes. in general, your requirements are way higher than what's even required for citizenship. and green cards don't need a civics test either.
but I agree that it would be nice to have a less fraught/complicated path to permanent residency.
> you can already get a greencard by paying less than $1mm in taxes.
Not really.
Your only generic option is EB-5, with $750k in direct investments. However, right now it takes 3 _years_ to process the initial application (https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times - look at the I-526 form). And after the initial form is approved, you need to apply for the actual green card, adding another 1-3 years.
The reason why is the drafters of immigration law care a lot about US employers (as they are voters, donors and have a big lobby). US employers want to control the green card process so that they have leverage over their employees. If employees can get green cards without the company, they can leave or threaten to leave. If employees need their employer, they can't start the processes until the company assents, and can't leave while its in process. Depending on exact details that can give employers 5 or so more years where the employee is at their mercy.
This is also why I as a US citizen strongly support green cards for everybody in the industry who's fractionally eligible for them - my working conditions are shaped by what they can get the labor force as a whole to put up with, and that's shaped by visa indenture.
To my knowledge economists do not believe this one is black-and-white, but that's much more of a question about the issuance of H1B visas they begin with anyway.
As if your (very American) bosses wouldn't find another to put you down and wrong everything they could from you. Today ICE is going after immigrants, tomorrow Pinkerton is going after you.
Right, even if one starts from an aggrieved position of "They took our jerbs!" after it's happened you do not want to let those workers be underpaid or abused, because it will (A) only increase the incentives of employers to import pliant immigrant labor and (B) it'll ripple out to harm the bargaining position of all "locals" still in the same line of work.
P.S.: Conversely (inversely?) there's often a vague idea of "if we somehow make the positions suck ass, then immigrants will stop coming, and somehow locals will be hired to a no-longer-sucky position", which is, er.... Wishful thinking. It'll get one a sense of vengeance, but it wont help pay the bills.
Well, from the Gov's POV, they don't want to import wards of the state. If you arrive in a country, someone has to fund you. Tying it to an employeer guarentees that you're funded. Without that you're just filling up ERs and hostels, etc.
H1B's are temporary visas and they make it very clear in the application process; there shouldn't be a path to citizenship through an H1B. I like the tax idea though
When they were first created they were very explicitly temporary. It's dual-intent in the sense that in the 90's they updated it so you could pursue citizenship while on an H1B, but the visa is really designed for temporary work. When you apply for an H1B they ask questions making sure you have ties to your home country, and there are time limits to send people back if you're on one for too long.
If they had wage parity there is zero disadvantage to a US citizen. The problem is not H1B's as a concept, it's making foreign workers indentured servants paid a fraction of the wage, thus incentivizing their hiring over US citizens.
I don't follow? Why would a US citizen want to compete against 8B people for jobs instead of just 300M? Seems like the lower number is better for the citizens of the US.
Why not just decide that only white people or only men or only people born on Tuesdays can apply for the job you want?
The job should go to the most qualified person. That's how america works. If that most qualified person is actually a guy who was born in india, great. I have no problem with that. You don't get to bogart opportunity based one what zip code you were born in.
If the pool of potential workers is bigger, the wages should go down. That's still wage parity... but it's lower for everyone than it might otherwise be.
There are different grounds for being granted a green card. One of those is that your employer wants to hire you permanently, and can't find an American to take the job. Getting a green card doesn't require an employer's sponsorship, that's just the most common application for green cards.
The system we have is one that was politically feasible to implement. On paper, we have a system for “non-immigrant” temporary workers. Employers sponsor green cards for skilled workers because the theoretically temporary job is the only avenue for most of these workers to get to the U.S. in the first place.
I know you post this canon of "but acktually, Congress didn't want skilled immigration" in all threads, so it's useful to point to the actual legislative record, AC21 (American Competitiveness in the 21st Century), which is the most recent passed legislation that covers a lot this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Competitiveness_in_th...).
> summary, the provisions of AC21 did the following:
> They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers")
All of this is done under the pretense that these are temporary workers who will eventually go home. That’s the only way Congress could get away with it, and it seems like people are now wising up to it.
There is no pretense. You can read past the line that confirms your world view. "They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers") acquired by filing Form I-129, as well as the employment-based immigrant categories for immigration (EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3, acquired through Form I-140), thereby increasing the number of people who at a given time could be in that status." The bill acknowledges that there is a massive backlog in the H-1B->GC pipeline and while it's hard to get bipartisan consensus on supply side reform, it makes incremental progress in making lives of people in the backlog a little better.
I was talking about your claim that there is pretense or there is some ruse and that people are wising up now. If you read the entire bill, it covers all sorts of classes of non-immigrants and immigrants and the path from one to the other. If you think Congress was duped, I don't know what to tell you.
That’s just a weird modern view tainted by recent nativist and populist sentiments. If you go back 20 years, in 2006, it would be utterly not controversial for a republican politician to support issuing green cards to anyone who completed a PhD in America.
You should listen to the NYT podcast I linked! It describes decades of exactly what I’m talking about, and the NYT is neither nativist nor populist. Yes, the Bush-era GOP was shilling for cheap labor for big business. There is a reason a Bush can’t even get elected dog catcher in Texas anymore.
The US likes to tie everything to employment - see also healthcare and retirement plans. Coming from Canada, anyone can open up an RRSP account (equivalent of 401k) and your employer isn't involved at all. You control the account. In the US you're stuck with the 401k account your employer signs up for. If they decide not to offer a 401k then you lose that benefit.
From the internet: In 2026, you can contribute up to $24,500 pre-tax or Roth to your 401(k). Some plans may allow after-tax contributions up to the combined employee and employer limit of $72,000. The annual contribution limit for IRAs, including Roth and traditional IRAs, is $7,500 for 2026.
During World War II the US Government controlled prices and pressured unions not to strike. The war ended and price controls were still in effect for a few years. Since employers could not increase wages, they offered increased non-wage compensation such as health insurance. The IRS agreed that employer sponsored health insurance is not taxable income. Thus tying affordable health benefits to your job. (And giving employer health plans a big tax advantage over buying it yourself).
The idea that international socialists have that domestic labor conditions are made worse by a lack of protections for foreign workers (rather than the presence of the workers themselves) doesn’t pan out if you look at Canada; it’s quite rare for status in the country to be tied to a particular employment agreement, so immigrants are free to leave undesirable employers, but wages are substantially lower there due to the country having accepted about 3 million immigrants and temporary workers in the span of the last ten years.
> wages are substantially lower there due to the country having accepted about 3 million immigrants and temporary workers in the span of the last ten years.
Do you have any evidence of that causal connection, or is that just an assumption? The US also accepts large numbers of immigrants and temporary workers.
this is how it works in other countries. if you have been a legal resident for a number of years you can apply for permanent residency or even citizenship.
Everyone should consider separating both tourism sector, and summer youth jobs from regular employment issues.
Those are special circumstances, but utterly different than regular low wage worker issues.
European kids are not going to pick tobacco; they are doing 'lifestyle' summer jobs in America.
These jobs are meant for students/youth, and necessarily going to pay a bit less but they obviously shouldn't be under duress.
It's an aspirational trade off - the business owners generally are not making bank for the most part. The system doesn't work without a lofty goodwill all around.
My cousins all worked as 'golf cart girls' at public courses, they liked being in the sun but the pay was sketchy.
All of this is very different from H1s, regular temporary workers.
It was a system that was created to serve a temporary need. However like any temporary system, it becomes permanent. Then companies or employers abuse it to the max, use it keep wages arbitrarily low. They use their influence to convince people from LCOL areas to uproot their lives for promises of higher wages/better living.
I was thinking about this the other day in the context of the boardwalk town that I vacation in sometimes. There are a lot of college student aged workers who come from Europe for the summer and work in every service industry job imaginable in town. There are agencies that find these European workers and help them find jobs and housing.
It makes me wonder why there aren't more American young adults taking these jobs. I think it would be great fun to live at the beach for the summer. Maybe the wages are too low, or American kids are focused on internships? Or maybe the European workers are better employees? I don't know.
If you're a non-US citizen, I don't believe it's easy to just switch to a different job, which makes it difficult to just exit out of the job you have. US citizens could leave at any point for another job (or no job) if they chose, putting the staffing at the service roles at risk. Just speculating.
you cant build career out of seasonal job in some random resort places across the country.
the idea is that foreigners will do the temp/seasonal low value work, while Americans were supposed to educate and upskill using federal student loans and get a high value jobs.
unfortunately American education system made it impossible, ue to stupidity.
Only China is able to do that: massively educate population and upskill and go up the value chain of manufacturing and industrialization.
It doesn't matter if someone can build a career out of seasonal jobs, which is entirely false btw. The market will dictate how much seasonal goods and services are worth, thus setting wages and property values.
Just like farm labor: without importing foreigners, legal or otherwise, wages would go up, food prices would go up, prices, wages, and property values would normalize to market rates.
your libertarian view of economy is too naiive. There is no "free market" in the US. Everything that impacts inflation/CPI is tightly controlled by the federal government with monetary tools like credit expansion, rates, federal incentives and such.
the reason why America wants to suppress low value jobs, is because they are input to the actual output of American economy: agriculture, high value industrial goods, tech services, financial services, real estate, financial asset s and services.
These are the actual components of US GDP and American government does everything possible to keep the input to these sectors stable/low, in order to protect the profits of these industries.
Do you see how wages seasonal workers are lower priority to the profits of Vail Corporation?
I think this up-skilling sentiment misses that as a worker who thought a seasonal service job on the waterfront was a good deal, up-skilling means taking on 6 figures in debt - after which they will only have a ~1/5 chance of getting a job which compensates for the opportunity cost and debt. For many, this is actually a bad deal and growing their own seasonal business would have been a stronger career path.
if you are opening your own seasonal business, then you WANT seasonal wages suppressed. You dont want wages to go up, as this will be your cost of doing business.
Any american bitchin about low wages and competition was supposed to set up own S-Corp/LLC and hire his "competitors" and take advantage of those "low wages"
You have unrestricted work authorization, you have SBA loans and everything possible to create your own American Dream(R)
I absolutely understand both sides, and the sentiment of some Americans who feel betrayed by their government when they see foreigners coming in, getting elite Ivy League degrees, and snatching six-seven figure jobs.
The resentment is absolutely understandable.
What I am trying to explain is that, if magically, all foreigners are expelled, H1B/OPT banned, all Indian visas canceled, this will NEVER result in Americans getting more jobs. Quite the opposite. Global Capability Centers already are offshoring everything possible outside the US, just because of trump rhetoric.
American capitalist is not stupid, the billionaires are not idiots. Why should they hire and overpay for unskilled Americans just because they happen to be born here, instead of hiring the most qualified person? Any anti-immigrant legislation will simply accelerate the offshoring, or even worse, will create competing tech giants outside the US.
It is this entitlement attitude is whats going to ruin the US tech sector and scare the talent away.
So hire Americans and train them. Pay them above market wages so they don't leave. Problem solved. I know at least a dozen people smart enough to write software that aren't in the tech field because the barrier to entry is high. It might not appear high to people in HCOL areas, but in the rest of the country, the barrier is quite high.
Tech people are the last ones to complain about the low pay
A lot of tech jobs are paying six to seven figures, you cant really demand employers to train and lower barriers. Why should employers lower their barrier and increase salaries even further?
Where do you get this feeling of entitelement for other people’s money ???
What else do you want at this point, maybe just plain UBI and a million to everyone just for being white american ?
What do you mean why should employers lower barriers and train people? Because they're abusing visa programs meant for 'highly skilled' labor and bring in low skill, wage suppressing labor.
Learn anything at very deep and competitive level, instead of paying some random bootcamp to sit throught the $10 Udemy course and $20 Coursera certificate on how to write hello world
The person you're replying to was presumably talking about a vacation town in the US. Double taxation, by the way, is only an issue if an American makes over $100,000 per year in their foreign job.
There is a "work and travel" program for students in Europe with valid visa and everything. I know lots of people who did that for a summer or two, it was an opportunity to see USA and also it was a great thing to list on their CV when getting a job back home.
There is a program that allows university students to come to the US, work for a bit, and then stay for a month or so longer. It’s called work & travel. Many entertainment companies like six flags and casinos hire them. I have many friends who have done this years ago. The pay was low but they had a fun summer, travelled a bit, and came come with a new laptop or a good SLR camera. It wasn’t glamorous but a generally positive experience.
some companies (Six Flags) have in the past abused the J-1 summer work travel program, and essentially trap young people in semi-remote dorms for the summer
companies do stuff like this because american young people won't tolerate it
Interesting framing. I thought that was part of the appeal. When I was in college I was actively looking for an opportunity to go to another country and do a temporary work thing where you stayed in a mountain resort and worked at the front desk all summer.
The problem is that you have to leave the country if you quit because you can't get someone to sponsor a different job, and you don't have your own transportation. The company charges you rent, for uniform, meals, and other costs... so you end up making very little and don't get treated well.
You don't get to experience much of the country because you're located in some dorm building that's not near much. So your summer ends up looking like 12 hour days standing around in the sun watching other people have fun.
A number of companies have been hit with slap-on-the-wrist fines for actually violating labor policies doing it.
Let these people make their choices about doing or not doing it. Don't try to defend them by taking the opportunity away.
I did this for a summer, worked my butt off, got back home, paid all my expenses with the paperwork and the plane tickets, bought a laptop and came back with about 500$. It was not much, but it was much more than I ever got the opportunity by that point to make.
The people I worked with treated me quite well. Everyone I met was welcoming and warm.
I did not manage to see a lot, but I did visit Yellowstone, had a couple of adventures, and overall was a positive experience for me.
A friend I was with did not manage too well and had a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to wash toilets.
But my point is, it can be a great experience and I don't buy for a second this feigned concern for "ooh, the poor kids are exploited". No, I think it's just job protectionism.
An additional complication is that people get stuck a month in realizing they've made a huge mistake and can't get out without penalty. Choices being limited is what makes it exploitable.
There's no feigned concern, this is actually a labor system that gets abused time and time again. Still happens today. These people have no advocates. A similar situation happens on cruise ships.
They are (quite obviously) saying that this could be changed to British people commenting on how all of the service jobs are Poles, or Canadians commenting how they are all Indian.
That American complaints of this form are not unique and therefore should be disregarded? That American complaints of this form are universal and therefore indicative of a global pattern that should be concerning?
I live in a touristy town that does this with J1 workers. I'll tell you why: The jobs pay $7.25/hour.
The J1s are then packed like sardines into houses where they pay rent by the week. Why by the week? To remind them they're expendable and can be deported at a moment's notice by the restaurant/hotel/amusement park/etc. they work at. The worst I've heard is 16 people living in a 3-bedroom, 1 bathroom house.
The J1s themselves are typically great people. A lot of them do everything they can to stay in the area via Green Cards or whatever. Business that treat their J1s like shit are usually blacklisted by locals, too. We'll actively tell tourists not to give those businesses any business and why.
I'm talking about the "the host offers a roof, pays next to nothing for a live-in nanny" arrangement, which locals don't do.
Interestingly the 26 refers to the USA. But a similar career would be legally possible inside the USA (not under the program) but not in EU, due to heavy labour regulations.
If this is like what I saw in Maine coastal tourist towns this summer I suspect its popular with Europeans because the $15.10/hour local wage is attractive. But more so it's because you get to spend time a few months in a beautiful location surrounded by other attractive young people. Party scene is probably great.
I suspect you're correct on that front, too. I have family in an area that has been bringing in European teens to work seasonal tourist-facing jobs for probably(?) decades now. I can't speak to how they are treated outside my view, but anecdotally, they seem to really enjoy the opportunity. They get their little euro-crew together and basically have a College experience.
Locals like them, too - they're charming, generally well-behaved, polite, and it doesn't hurt that they don't have to pay them very much. I like to think the cultural exchange between the Europeans and the otherwise isolated locals is fantastic for broadening horizons, also.
Oh, this was me 18 years ago. Worked a summer in Wyoming at a truck stop in the middle of the desert. It was kind of fun. Don't regret it a minute. My one and only trip to the US. People were warm and welcoming, if a bit wierd at times. The trip I did there with the Grayhound bus was _wild_. I think of my time there with fondness.
People are willing to take a discount on their wages and quality of life for the intangible benefit of ‘the experience of living and working abroad for a summer’.
For non-native English speakers it also has the advantage of providing a free total immersion language course as well. People pay for opportunities like that.
So yes, an Italian 19 year old is willing to work for less money for the chance to work in a water park for a summer, improving their English and boosting their resume, and if it gives them enough money to be able to fund a couple of weekend trips to New York or DC so much the better. It’s a life experience and a working vacation.
That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.
>That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.
Which should be pretty revolting for them if that's the case. Instead of American 19 year olds making some summer money at the waterpark to buy their first car, they get moved aside by disposable foreign workers, so then they need to stay supported by their parents for longer till they can get a "proper" job.
And I'm European not American, but I see the same issue here. Getting minimum wage jobs in the hospitality/service sector is super competitive now due to pressure from migrant workers who will accept anything. These are jobs that used to be done by teenagers in the past for summer money but not anymore.
Employers everywhere being able allowed to min/max wages against the most desperate labor on the planet should be banned.
And then governments have the audacity to complain about people not having kids anymore. Well no shit, my dad and his peers had summer jobs since he was 14 because there were no migrant workers to replace them, and after finishing high school he already had a job in the factory with housing benefits, he was already making enough money to have a family and 2 kids, not one.
The result for the local American 19 year olds is that ticket prices at their local water park are kept low enough that they can afford to go there to cool off and be handed towels by foreign teenagers.
If the government cut off the seasonal work visas, tourist destination hospitality businesses would have to increase prices, some would go out of business, and American tourists’ quality of life would be lower.
>The result for the local American 19 year olds is that ticket prices at their local water park are kept low enough that they can afford to go there to cool off and be handed towels by foreign teenagers.
And where are 19 year old Americans getting money for water parks if they don't have jobs? Still having hobbies funded by your parents at 19 isn't really a societal win.
You say 30-50 years ago they couldn't afford that because labor costs were too high? Maybe they had jobs to pay those higher costs?
By finding a ready source of people willing to staff the water park at a lower price, more ‘water park amenity’ is available at a lower price.
This frees up the labor of local teenagers who can now be employed in other roles, producing other useful things for society, like… I don’t know what teenagers do nowadays. Provide market-clearing services on Kalshi by placing bad bets? Upload short form video to TikTok to enable ad buyers to find customers?
The right policy response would be telling the firms running these programs to get fucked if they can't successfully operate while paying staff the prevailing wage that local Americans would accept.
A nearby amusement park touted that they pay $20/hr. However it's seasonal, not year around. They raised wages because COVID-19 and current Administration policies decreased the supply of foreign college students who somehow had work authorization.
I just went to Asbury Park, NJ about a month ago. It was all local highschool/college kids. I go to an ice cream shop in Brooklyn by a park - all highschoolers.
I think it just depends on the location? But also yes - if I'm worth my salt, why would I take these jobs over higher paying internships? At 19 I was able to land $25/h jobs in tech. Maybe we should rethink the pay scales in terms of sustainability. Unfortunately we live in the US where short term gains are the sole motivator for most companies.
In Maine there are lots of early 20s workers that mostly seem to come from Balkan countries. I think those little tourist towns just don't have large enough populations to support the demand. Tourists probably outnumber actual locals. Places like NJ and Brooklyn though have plenty of 16-22 year olds who will work beach jobs.
I think it depends on what countries the owners have connections to. Random ice cream shop I visited in Florida a few years back was staffed by young Turkish women, my wife asked they said there on J1's. Before that we were in the Florida Keys - the local mosque was full of young Uzbek men that worked in the hotels, all on J1s.
One summer in my teens I worked as a groundskeeper at a Martha's Vineyard inn, and it _was_ a fun summer. I had a free place to stay (with a friend), plenty of free time, and little adult supervision.
Virtually all the hospitality staff there were European university students. Midway through the summer, they realized that they weren't earning enough to afford their return airfare and they threatened to strike. I don't recall how they resolved the issue, but I believe that they were netting less than minimum wage. Maybe things have changed since then, and maybe not.
When you say “I was thinking bout this the other day”, you weren’t thinking about this, in the sense of thinking about skilled worker immigration pathways for technology companies. What you were thinking about appears to be something entirely different - seasonal nonimmigrant unskilled labor.
There’s actually virtually nothing those two things have in common, except some unarticulated sense of grievance that in some unspecified way it would be better if Americans were doing those things.
The staff at Harris Teeter in Corolla NC (the outer banks) has been nearly 100% young adults from eastern European countries the last few times that I was down there.
I don't know their living situation, but I did see them both walking and riding bikes to the grocery store. It's a somewhat unique situation as the grocery store probably does 90% of their yearly business between June and August each year. I couldn't tell if they all knew each other from home or just from working together.
Do you mean that you are surprised that young Americans aren't working at the boardwalk in the USA or that young Americans are not working at the beaches in Europe?
Can you explain what data I'm supposed to be witnessing the disparity on? Everything on the page looks pretty similar to me, definitely within pattern detection threshold. Is there some specific statistic, or possibly a wider data analysis to show how these things are being politically motivated?
Do you think you're some wise oracle speaking in riddles? You first vagueposted, and someone very nicely asked you to explain what the post is about, and you reply with some variation of a rickroll? You're an asshole.
I believe they are implying that the filing data is similar (I haven't checked myself) but the bottom two companies are not being targeted by the admin due to their links.
I know this is a much popular opinion now. But I can't help and ask this again:
If a company hires an engineer in India, instead of Seattle, how does America (and workers) benefit? Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains, its just a hiring decision.
The question is whether these restrictions increase American employment or just accelerate the exodus of jobs while making the US a less attractive place for talented people.
Its Azure Hardware division that manages its first party silicon and its deployment has a huge hardware and electrical engineering presence. These fields don't have as many people in America in them, because Software has paid so much more for the last two decades, why would anyone go EE when they could go CS and make 2-3x more. In other countries, these degrees were paid similar so there is a larger pool to pull from then in America.
You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer
I agree. Specialized engineering is very different from software, you can't easily replace that expertise.
My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.
They may. I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases. The problem is, that is probably incredibly hard to define and pass as legislation or whatever has to be done.
H1B and offshore jobs can be beneficial to America though, and that was why the program started. Sufficient guardrails just never went up and now there is opportunity for some abuse. But that abuse isn't across the board, there is still beneficial H1B and offshoring going on mixed in with abuse.
"I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases"
How would that work if the remote people were employed by a different company that was given a contract by the home company to provide certain pieces of software or specific computing services?
Hey man I'm just a software engineer now, I can't speak on public policy.
My best effort, the contract is a red herring, we only care about the company that employs the abroad remote employees which is the contractual company in this case. If that contractual company is also abroad, we tax (tariff?) the contract.
What grounds would you have for putting a tariff a specific contract between two parties? Is it not the case that tariffs need to apply to categories of trade and to countries?
That's true. Problem is a lot of the time Middle America is comfortable and doesn't want to move out to the valley or Seattle.
Remote work makes that easier now, but with silicon / EE its not always the most optimal way to work.
Middle America EE is also not building data center class chips or infrastructure most of the time, would it be easier to get one of them up to speed, yes. But it's the equivalent of throwing a front-end engineer into C or embedded programming or vice versa.
At that salary, you're just proving the "why go EE when you can go CS and make 2X more" argument, at least if we're talking about a 20+ year senior dev/architect type.
It's mostly due to absurdly difficult to get permits.
A benefactor decided to solve the housing crisis, created a development company. Gave up 2 years later. Stating the legal burden to get permits was the biggest financial obstacle. We are ready to build from the start, 2 years later we still couldn't build and spend most of our capital in lawyers in hope to get any approval.
people don't buy "housing." They buy views, they buy location, they buy neighborhood character. There are perfectly good houses in Nebraska---yet people aren't swarming to Nebraska. It's not because there's anything wrong with the housing.
This is the point the "just build more supply" folks never mention. Close to markets, water, aesthetically pleading single family houses on land. Like there's a reason housing crisis only happens in popular cities, because well, they're popular for a reason. Also people shit on zoning laws (yes they could be better), but I'm sure they dont want to live in hong kong style back to back concrete mega apartments with no parks
But look at the other side. An engineer living in Seattle pays taxes and contributes to the economy. Seattle loses that benefits if that same job moves to India.
So, I am not sure if that housing argument alone makes that a better outcome for America (and workers).
> For one, the engineer in India doesn't drive the demand for housing in Seattle thus keeping it more reasonably (less insanely) priced.
I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.
If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).
Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.
Supply is rising from builders and also from lack of buying, iiuc the flattening and recent drops does line up with immigration and layoff changes, and its often quoted by the multiple local real estate agents weve talked to.
Obviously supply matters most but that doesnt mean demand isnt still a significant factor.
I think it’s pretty clear that Immigration has a direct strain on housing. It’s been a big problem in Canada too. Of course if you just keep building to increase the supply, that would be desirable.
The engineer in India also doesn’t drive demand for managers and product teams and ops people and HR and payroll staff and canteen workers and office space construction and highways and education spending in the US. All that happens in Chennai instead.
The engineer does marginally increase housing demand. They also increase local and federal tax revenue to support education, healthcare and other services. And the engineer will spend a large portion of their salary in the local economy, helping to support all the other business in Seattle. So there are also positive externalities.
What are some of the other "many negative externalities" you mention?
I feel like we could have the best of everything if you we just built more housing to keep up with demand.
It's just a never ending balance problem. Also the "just build more housing" is such a numbers only view. Anecdotally, everyone I've talked to hate budget cookie cutter apartment complexes; they're ugly, neighbor problems, noise, pets, etc. What people really mean is they want a single family house sitting on land, but you just can't have both.
I don't know what a "numbers only view" means. But I lived in Tokyo for a long time and I basically think it is an ideal city, and obviously there are lots of factors, but I think the single biggest factor is the abundance of housing. They have way more of it and it leads to so many wonderful things, like mass transit or an endless supply of little hole-in-the-wall restaurants, bars, and cafes in walking distance.
Look at how people vote with their wallets: there is an enormous demand for housing in places like Brooklyn. That doesn't mean we need to turn the whole nation into Brooklyn, but I think (given the massive demand) why shouldn't we have a few more places like Brooklyn, i.e. dense urban areas?
Most places in the US have a remarkably low population density; we can definitely greatly expand the housing supply with a little infill and still have lots of suburbs.
Well, you can only offshore jobs complex up to a certain degree, not frontier talent or higher management. The O1 visa will likely still be in effect for them; what's getting rejected are worker-level visas.
If they're physically here on US soil on a visa, they're paying the same taxes as any other US citizen. Sales tax, property tax, Social Security, Medicaid, etc..
Yup, this is much more likely to lead to more offshoring than companies hiring more American workers. Which also means that communities in the US with a large amount of workers on visas will also suffer.
Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.
For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common.
I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.
Of course it's not new. And of course it never really stopped. But there is a new incentive for execs to give it a much bigger push given all the recent remote work tooling and when they now think a programmer is just monitoring AI output. So why not pay the monitor SE Asian wages rather than US wages.
The trend is away from remote work though. So much more stuff is hybrid then it was a few years ago. SE Asian wages means a 12 hour time zone difference and that carries a real cost on efficiency (I personally experienced this at two companies). Future poorly thought offshoring attempts will go just as badly as they have in the past. If anything AI makes it worse, since each individual dev is responsible for a bigger slice of the output they need to be in the loop on business / customer needs and significant timezone differences make that harder.
Plenty of offshoring to both Central America and South America has occurred in recent years. It was a somewhat untapped offshoring location, but that no longer seems to be the case.
Real example: my company is US based, top and middle management is in US, some middle management and lower in Europe, managing workers in India and Manila. Same scheme with Costa Rica, but managed directly from US.
If managed correctly though it means you can have effectively a 24 hour work day. US workers/management goes to sleep as the Asian workers are starting up
A key difference is that at least one isn’t competing for limited housing with offshoring. That is the number 1 driver of the affordability crisis atm.
I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!
Offshoring (form the US) to Europe, especially eastern Europe is not new either. The newish offshoring location was Central America and South America, but those have been tapped as well.
Ok, let’s say it leads to 60% offshoring and 40% hiring more Americans.
That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.
The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.
No, that is the incorrect take. Offshoring isn't easy or cheap. Especially when Trump is basically trying to get companies to hire American workers by any means.
It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.
I'm old enough to remember when people gnashed their teeth about the U.S. taking talent from abroad being 'brain drain' that hurt those countries. Which is it? We want to take the rest of the world's best and brightest and screw those other countries in the process, or we feel bad about that and don't want to do that? EDIT: Cynically, it could be both!
Well it depends if you live in the US or you live in a country that is hemorrhaging your best workers to the US. No idea why you are trying to lump both groups together as if they should both have a single opinion.
People in the U.S. used to complain that we drain the rest of the world's brains. That has stopped. I was referring to that.
If you put yourself in the shoes of people in other nations, then... a) individuals might really like the option of emigrating to the U.S., but b) their nation might be better off with them staying at home. Interests conflict. The question is whether we should have selfish policies (such as putting a company's bottom-line ahead of a nation's, or one nation's development ahead of another) or not, and, of course, which is is which because one could argue that the only ones being selfish are the Americans who object to all these visas (I don't think they would be the _only_ ones being selfish, and arguably the 'nation' exists in part to protect its citizens, but yes, this is a case of selfishness).
I want to know: does the HN commentariat think that brain drain is a problem or not. Elsewhere in this thread we have people urging that we do drain the rest of the world's brains to "win the talent war" [0].
Now, I can totally see that maybe draining our adversaries' brains can be a good thing, unless it's a way of bringing in a fifth column, in which case... no. And it's definitely not good for countries we're on good terms with -- there that "win the talent war" comment shocks the conscience as a thoughtless, unnuanced, jingoist-but-dumb, and immoral/destructive as to our allies comment.
Consistency was not the issue. The question was: what has changed that so few seem to care about brain drain as a negative externality?
Probably not a simple question or answer on the face of it, but it's really not worth looking at this action in such a narrow lens, because this is not happening in a vacuum. Instead, we should look at it through the overall context of all of this admin's immigration policies, which have been bad for the US economy.
People need to stop asking what's better for the "economy" and start asking what's better for themselves. If the two don't align, it should be tough luck for the "economy", not the people.
"The economy" is often just another way of saying "everyone in aggregate."
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
This is an incredibly blinkered view. The economy is important, but there are many other factors as to whether a given policy is overall good for the citizenry or not.
Sure, but I don't think I claimed that economic factors are the only thing that can be considered when evaluating policy. Maybe it came off that way because my comment was focused on the jobs issue being discussed.
I guess I did not express it well, but I wanted to highlight that "the economy" and "the people" are not in opposition. "The economy" is a vague term that usually approximates something like "the material well being of everyone in aggregate." There are lots of other things one might value besides material well being, but "the people" and the "the economy" and not opposed forces.
This is why it's not productive to discuss issues using vague, undefined terms like "the economy."
Wealth inequality is a well defined economic measure and I see no reason why one couldn't use it as a yardstick when evaluating an economy, same as we use the unemployment, inflation, GDP, median household income, and so on. And indeed many economists do use it, and there are many well regarded books and papers that examine wealth distribution.
It leads to the intuition that an economy where 100 people consume 10000 (let's say of energy because it should be inflation-independent) per week and 1 person consumes 100000 is worse than an economy where 100 people consume 9000 per week and 1 person consumes 10000. That is, you can strongly reject or disapprove of changes that strictly increase everyone's wealth or consumption.
I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.
The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.
I think wealth distribution should be allowed to freely float within a large range, but at extremes it may have bad effects. You don't want a communist regime that tries to enforce complete equality, nor do you want a Russian style oligarchy where a few control almost all the wealth. US is heading towards the latter.
Hasn’t it been known for a while now that wages are decoupled from the Economic gains that have been happening since the 80s? That gap is just going to the billionaire class now. Source:
One might argue that it should, but as a remote worker in a low cost area I don't mind making 20% less than my NYC/Bay colleagues as I can still live like a king in my midwest city on regionally adjusted swe comp.
Sure, who doesn't want unlimited money? That's decidedly different from "needing" it (I could in no way manage to live on the West Coast on a Spanish salary, for example)
Sky-high cost of living (property prices, mostly). Shitty apartment with a commute in the bay costs $3,000/month. Starter home in Seattle costs a million plus.
It's also a vicious cycle: high tech salaries in those areas have driven up the cost of living.
Regulated industries often have business language mandating onshore, citizens-only employment. If it isn't required by immigration, the businesses buying the product are requiring assurances (likely due to their own compliance).
As for non-protected roles, global market participation has ups and downs.
Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food. If an American isn't getting the job anyway, then why bring them here in the first place to drive prices up for everyone else?
Sorry but there is no competition for health care in US. US basically has no health care. Unless of course you buy it (i.e. pay the fraudulent companies to give you false sense of security and leave you alone in the worst moment of your life)
Me buying food from restaurant would make the owner richer, but would also employ more people at the restaurant.
The scarcity issue is valid when the resource is limited. In case of US, I was not aware of food scarcity. Even housing is more due to policies than actual land scarcity.
Economic activity does have positive feeback. Yes, some people get unfairly rich - but the solution is not to stop the activity, instead try to get the rich pay their fair share of contribution to the country.
Why are we relegating locals to menial restaurant jobs? Why not have programs to get them trained and into higher earning jobs?
A local working a restaurant will often need to take advantage of welfare. If instead we funneled the locals to higher paying jobs, we would be better off. We're supposed to look after our own citizens, afterall --that's the whole point of electing a government.
FWIW the "international" folks I work with hardly spend any money in the US. Most of it is saved and spent or invested during 2-month annual visits to homeland.
That's probably just your company. In Silicon Valley, "international" folks spend a lot of money on buying houses (multiple of them sometimes), cars, home improvement, going out to restaurants, etc.
Absolutely anecdotal, but in the Silicon Valley I know, I rarely see coworkers participating in skiing/surfing/hiking/US travel. Hell, even dining out outside of free-food campus is a tough sell.
As for buying multiple houses, I'm sure the wider population is happy with foreigners buying rental properties.
Your logic is incorrect, you are thinking that a "international" folk buying a TV is what they mean. But that's not correct. Paying income taxes, paying tax on cars, paying tax on gas, paying rent, these matter a lot more to the government then you buying an iphone from the apple store in the mall versus one in "international country".
> Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food
You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.
As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.
The government exists for the general welfare and and economic system that subsidizes idleness because the disingenuous say "look over there, its a net positive" while ignoring the externalized cost borne by the taxpayer is just theft from the taxpayer.
I'd love to understand how people think the H1B program is going to survive the LLM era. Why in the world would I import a foreign worker to do something I can just as easily tell a clanker to do? The clanker is better at this stuff than I am!
Is it really just a matter of empire-building, at the end of the day? That can't last. Management realizes that, right?
This is an inane comment. Here are the two types of "remote" work:
1. Remote within the US. You still need valid work authorization;
2. Remote outside the US. This is just offshoring and if it really worked, every tech jobs would be offshored. Companies have been trying to do this for decades. Companies would love nothing more than to offshore every white collar job. They would if they could.
So the exact same person working within the US, even better if sitting in an office, is a good employee but if they're working from abroad all of a sudden they're not that good?
Can you explain more? This statement is already true before this policy change, so I don't understand why this is not a non sequitur. But I know this is a common rhetoric so I am trying to understand what the logic is.
Hiring remote workers also doesn’t require filling out H1B applications and dealing with USCIS. If using remote workers was just as good, companies would already do that.
Is it meant as a rhetorical reply to the officials as in "aha, but Microsoft will prevail and make it even worse for you, American workers" or as a reply to the workers: "don't fret, move back to your country and work the same job anyway". Or was it meant as a hint for the officials "don't forget to close that loophole as well"?
Like you I suspect the former. But if we really believe that economics is not a zero sum game then offshoring is better for everyone because it keeps talent in the countries they can help improve, and it is a rising tide that lifts all boats, serving to equalize wealth. Yes, for a while it should have the effect of reducing incomes in the U.S., but so does importing the rest of the world's talent into the U.S., so arguably offshoring is much better. But if [regardless of whether we believe economics is/is not zero sum] we want to keep the rest of the world down then we should absolutely take their talent.
They should clamp down on that next. Looking at the past 50 years, offshoring has only caused trouble for the citizens of the country and led things like the rust belt happening.
The rust belt was not caused by call centers in Pakistan, that was the Petrodollar and China deals. But it would be great to have both back (call centers and manufacturing).
Shouldn't the company still advertise the role for locals before offering remote? Also, for some roles it's mandatory to have on-site or at least hire within US due to compliance.
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My understanding is that this is pretty much how everyone does it, no? Not to say that I'm surprised that they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes, of course, nor to say that I necessarily agree / disagree with this tactic.
US needs a modern, merit-based immigration system. No lotteries of any kind, be it the de-facto lottery for H1B or actual Diversity lottery.
Someone else above also mentioned wages being lower, someone else mentioned working overtime.
For example, the high street bank in my case sponsored H1B/L1B holders for Green Card strategically. I, as a Polish national, was not sponsored, because I would receive Green Card within 6-12 months. Meanwhile Indian colleagues were all sponsored, but they wouldn't receive Green Card for years, so they had all of us pretty much "enslaved" by taking advantage of cut-off dates. My wages (~110k) were about 50% of what I could realistically earn with my skillset at the time (2015-2020).
Indian staff had it worse, thanks to how the system works, they could work on their H1B while "waiting" for GC for a decade and still not be able to move employers. In my case, at least, my H1B would run course and I'd have to leave the country. I knew I wouldn't get mine withing first couple months, after my director literally came to my desk at one point after my GC request and asked if I would indeed receive it within 6-12 months. I never heard back on the subject since, despite my repeated requests.
I am a liberal and absolutely hate what Trump admin does to the world, but they're also absolutely right on how companies exploit the system and it definitely affects actual wages and employment opportunities for US citizens.
Besides newspapers, they have to be posted with the relevant state workforce agency and 3 other methods. It would not be hard to require that one of those needs to be the company career site or wherever the majority of recruiting comes from.
Or he's trading off of it.
It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.
There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.
IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.
I really wish this was quantifiable in some way -- I have no way to tell if this statement is accurate.
I've worked with some very skilled H1B that definitely deserved to be here. If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem. Companies like these are not doing "highly skilled" work.
Edit: I kinda wonder if the "highly skilled" value judgement is a holdover from the era where people thought you were a genius if you touched a computer.
But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?
Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.
Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
It’s a scam.
This actually changed this year. Applicant gets 1-4 tickets depending on their pay relative to job/area. So $500k Google engineer has quite a bit higher chance than $100k WiPro one.
Of course it still has issues (Google probably has 1-2 possible applicants for that position and would prefer all of them, Wipro has 100 and cares more about what % of them pass).
It's hard to get data, but this is precisely what appears to me to be happening.
There's a limited number of slots by country. These companies specifically target those slots. I've worked with these folks (who are wonderful people, to be clear), and also had multiple friends with very niche, in-demand skills need to leave the country.
I don't have the data, but at a micro level, the system does appear to simply be set up backwards.
The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.
In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.
I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.
This is not to say that such programs are bad. To consider that, we must ask questions like:
- Is citizens being able to make much more than non-citizens a desirable outcome? (it's electorally incentivized, since citizens can vote in the relevant elections but non-citizens can not but that is not the same as being desirable in a more broad sense) - How big is this effect? - How badly do we (meaning society at large) want these final 100 jobs done? - How will this affect competition with other countries? - What about outsourcing?
Additionally there will be a loss in productivity for business and the 900 jobs will have more work on their plates, so in a way they could be underpaid for the job they do. This is just scratching the surface, but I assume there’d be a lot of second order effects.
Both are acceptable terms for me compared to importing cheap labor. If they automate, then at least it creates new high end jobs, and if they ship jobs away then they now have to deal with foreign cultures, foreign courts and legal system, etc that will hamper their business.
This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
Especially because when such processes are broken they usually got that way not on accident, but because of sustained lobbying by the same forces that then take advantage of the broken system they helped to shape.
(I'm speaking generally, not necessarily claiming it applies to the particular policy being discussed here, which I'm not super familiar with the history of one way or the other).
They were committing fraud fraud fraud
We need clawbacks from the C-suite and disgorgement of illicit profits
> they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes
If a law is on the books, but it's only applied to a specific set of people in a retaliatory fashion, then it's worse than not being applied at all.
The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.
Well if that's how one want to proceed. Fine. In that case these companies are not really prosecuted. Government is just doing fraud prevention out of abundance of caution.
Yes, but what is the implication of the word "just"?
It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.
"Hours after the [Microsoft H-1B] announcement, President Trump awarded Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a summit in Washington where Mr. Musk and other tech executives also were honored.
Mr. Nadella came to the United States for graduate school and joined Microsoft in 1992. Two years later, he wrote in his memoir, he turned in his permanent residency for an H-1B visa so that his wife could immediately join him in the United States."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/us/politics/microsoft-vis...
"Is there a credible source for that"
"Does that change the message I'm conveying?"
On the other hand, there is an equal amount of close-mindedness, and sometimes malice, from the side that demands "a better source" because they don't like where the information comes from, regardless of its veracity.
The same ad appears here: https://www.jobs.now/jobs/746612360-software-engineer-ref-10... and here: https://jobs.ieee.org/job/software-engineers/86091567/
Applicants are asked to send their resume to usresumes@netflix.com
FWIW, there are multiple job offerings for software engineers both in Seattle and remote on the Netflix page. Just not this one.
https://explore.jobs.netflix.net/careers?location=Seattle%2C...
The ads on Netflix' own website look quite different. No salary range but much more information about the job. And there is an application form to be filled out. The job ID has a different format.
(There is also another short ad for a Broadcast Operations Engineer: https://www.jobs.now/jobs/518941865-broadcast-operations-eng... )
AFAICT, the email address usresumes@netflix.com only appears online in conjunction with these very brief job ads on small job sites. It seems quite obvious that these ads are not really meant for serious candidates.
If one sends an email to usresumes@netflix.com, one receives the following automated reply. That does not necessarily mean that Netflix posted the above ads.
----------------------------------------
Thank you for your interest in Netflix!
So what happens now? Our hiring team is currently reviewing your application and should we find your background to be a fit for this role, we will be in touch.
We are always looking for stunning colleagues to join our team and do amazing work. So remember to check out our job site regularly as we are growing and adding openings often!
Thanks, Netflix Talent Acquisition
https://jobs.netflix.com/candidateprivacy
----------------------------------------
Not sure what to make of this. Either Netflix is very brazen here - posting minimalistic job adverts where they don't want anyone to apply - or someone else is posting these to further their own agenda.
Do you really think that Netflix has a preference for non-Americans?
On one hand we say they chose Americans to pay less money on the other hand we see this absurd amount of money for a remote job
Why? Because this is not them looking to fill a position but rather trying to get a PERM for an employee that they are already happy with. We don’t even know if it’s H1B or L1
Not saying that the H1B program doesn’t have its problems, but this is not the case of let’s fill this job with non-Americans for less pay
What do you think happens to wages when the supply of labor decreases?
• The job must be advertised in the print edition of two different Sunday newspapers.
• The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.
• Both ads must run between 30 and 180 days before you file the PERM application.
• The advertisement must clearly state the name of the employer.
• The ad must outline the job duties, requirements, and the work location.
• Listing the wage is optional, but if included, it cannot be below the official prevailing wage.
• Employers must keep the full-page newspaper tearsheets for 5 years in case of an audit.
It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.
[1] https://www.jobs.now/blog/unveiling-the-truth-about-h-1b-vis... "The Jobs.Now team has reviewed job postings from dozens of top companies like Meta, Block, Doordash, and Netflix which require unusual application processes like emailing or paper-mailing the application to specialized addresses, or using unbranded separate websites for collecting applications for jobs." + search for occurrence of "Apple" [2] "My understanding is that this is pretty much how everyone does it, no?"
I suspect the courts would welcome it.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-labor-depart...
They are wildly out of date compared to how jobs are actually filled. Regardless of any other enforcement actions, this needs to be fixed.
I don't think it even needs congressional approval to change these. The DoL could do it.
(B) Advertisements in newspaper or professional journals.
(1) Placing an advertisement on two different Sundays in the newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment most appropriate to the occupation and the workers likely to apply for the job opportunity and most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers.
(2) If the job opportunity is located in a rural area of intended employment that does not have a newspaper with a Sunday edition, the employer may use the edition with the widest circulation in the area of intended employment.
(3) The advertisements must satisfy the requirements of paragraph (f) of this section. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by furnishing copies of the newspaper pages in which the advertisements appeared or proof of publication furnished by the newspaper.
(4) If the job involved in the application requires experience and an advanced degree, and a professional journal normally would be used to advertise the job opportunity, the employer may, in lieu of one of the Sunday advertisements, place an advertisement in the professional journal most likely to bring responses from able, willing, qualified, and available U.S. workers. Documentation of this step can be satisfied by providing a copy of the page in which the advertisement appeared.
Edit: And thats not a R vs D thing. The requirements have been this way under multiple administrations, and newspapers have not been a primary way of sourcing candidates for two decades.
lol, I feel old now talking about this :)
This made me look up when the rules about posting in the newspaper went into effect. I was surprised to find that it was 2005. This is much later than I thought. I would have guessed the 90s. By 2005, it was clear that the newspaper industry was dying due to the internet. I guess this is one example of how out of touch government can be.
Someone else mentioned in the thread elsewhere about whether the rules would need Congressional approval. Gemini says that these are purely an agency regulation and the Department of Labor can update them at anytime. It's kind of mind-boggling that no administration has updated them in 20+ years.
Like many things in US law, they have been deliberately ignored as time moves past them to ensure the laws no longer constrain them.
Most governments actually have no difficulty doing "Keeping the lights on" work like updating laws to reflect the times changing. Even here in the US, Republican state governments will have no difficulty keeping the lights on and running day to day tasks, and it usually moves at a reasonable clip.
Another good example of this is any time something comes up that a government body is very very for, it takes almost no time to actually get done. In principle, the turnaround time for a government to react to something can be a single day if necessary. Or less.
But the US Federal congress, explicitly Republicans, has purposely and explicitly and publicly made it a part of their platform to prevent the government from doing anything, including day to day tasks. The modern federal congress does so much less than it used to. On purpose.
Somehow the things that were trivial to do back with ink and quill are suddenly impossible to do in a timely manner. Because it's entirely by choice. Democrats aren't innocent, and are perfectly willing to not do their job when they can get away with it.
I think it is implies in: "The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located."
Anyway, I went checking and I wasn't able to find any opening in Microsoft in the Seattle times online version. Which is definitely not a nice optics and would play unfortunately well with the current allegations
In that context, "Widely distributed" really shouldn't be such a complicated concept. What does the NYT charge to run a classified ad?
"Nobody in redmond could do this job!". Cool, did you try any of the other 49 states at all? No? Then go away.
Maybe it's time to rewrite the aged and archaic laws, instead of selectively applying them to a handful of companies...
American companies are for Americans.
I have several friends who works in Microsoft and would disagree
Based on that I would expect that if you advertise in small town newspaper, the job needs to be located in that small town. Want them to work in your big office next to big city, then it must be a newspaper widely distributed in that city not a small town on the opposite side of continent.
1. You choose newspapers that are least likely to actually reach people looking for tech jobs.
2. You post an small ad specifying the role in the most vague and unappealing terms.
3. There is some weird and inconvenient way to apply (e.g., fax- or snail-mail-only) that goes to /dev/null.
You can argue that it follows the letter of the law, but as a practical matter, the outcome is always that there are no US-based applicants for any H-1B SWE role, so something is wonky, right?
Here's one for Android Developer.
Must apply by snail mail.
If only they made a device (with an OS perhaps) where one could apply to such things electronically.
I'm not American and I don't live in the US, and I pretty hate Trump and his allies but this ad is just...wow. I think this is a loophole that should be closed.
So yeah, everyone do that, that's kind of the de facto way of hiring specific people when there is a requirement to post jobs. That doesn't make it ok though.
It's a lot less accounting work to have most of your workers in the same state. Imagine single workers or small groups in many different countries.
For instance, what labor laws apply? And who enforces them? And how, given parties in two different countries?
Does the company want to subject itself to some arbitrary country’s tax man or labor law enforcer prosecutions? Does the employee want to work under effectively zero labor protection? Possibly, but rarely.
It’s not even always possible, it’s very complicated to work remotely in France, for instance. The state cracks down on one person one client companies, and EoRs beyond being impractical (as they must adhere to drastic labor laws compared to the US) are in a legal gray zone.
The laws of the worker's locality is generally how it works. In the film industry, a production company based in LA might do a shoot in NYC- they have to follow NYC's labor laws since that's where the workers are and the work is being done.
The workers at the home base in LA have the LA laws applied to them.
>And who enforces them?
The local government.
The company has to adhere to labor laws in foreign countries (most likely plural if this is a general policy). That’s quite the overhead and opens you up to legal trouble.
The employee has to trust their government can prosecute or otherwise coerce a foreign company with no entity on their territory (otherwise they’d just get hired normally through the subsidiary).
LA and NJ remain two states of a common country and I'm sure that simplifies a lot of things.
Although none of this applies if the company is a multinational with offices in the employee’s country. But then that is offshoring rather than remote work.
If you bring them to America you've basically created a worker who is dependent on staying employed with you in order to keep their place
Any tech savvy person in NYC or SF would not be scouring newspapers for tech jobs and even if they are, they are most likely to be H1B or Greencard themselves.
A small town newspaper may actually make people apply to those roles.
But either way, people who likely to come through these ads can be easily disqualified just by adding a few technology stacks
- If you apply, you will not be hired, because we're only looking to hire the guy we already have in mind, who we're already working with under some other relationship.
- But, if you apply, that guy also won't be hired, because we proved to be able to fill the role locally.
- This annoys us and him and you.
From a systems perspective (and taking this description as accurate), if people make it their business to apply to those ads, it really will stop companies from using this method to get green cards for foreigners they'd like to employ. The downstream effects are open to question; maybe a given company will employ more domestic employees and maybe it will just keep using the same foreign contractors it's already using.
Why pay to reach many thousands of people with a widely read paper when you can pay pennies to reach dozens of people that you don't want to apply to the job anyway?
This is an entire business model.
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
was this how those 'free newspapers' back around 2005~2010 worked?
Nearly all these ads say "Send CVs to immigration_department@tech.corp" they aren't even trying to conceal what they're doing.
Not that socialism is inherently bad, but why not just be honest about it and implement it more directly?
Who am I kidding, socialism is the bogeyman doing hero's duty sustaining unrestricted ultracapitalism.
> It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.
What does 'widely distributed' mean if not "not just in a small town"?
It does say in the law [1]: "there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the United States and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor".
The rules of DOL are just guidelines how they are going to determine this but they are not the law. I will argue that if you are planning to publish your job ads in a small town newspaper you do not believe yourself that there are no "able, willing, qualified and available" Americans for your job.
1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182
You, or the government in this case, should argue that in a court of law. So far, the government has not won any of these cases in a court of law. And I mean over the last 2-3 decades. The number of successful prosecutions will be in single digits. It's a bit like voter fraud when it comes to actual numbers.
"Q Are any PERMs denied for fraud? A Not to my knowledge."
There is a PERM process, the government overwhelmingly approves it, it does not take anything to court or win. I am not sure what you are trying to argue.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.266...
1. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2007/05/17/E7-9250...
This is misleading. "Fraud" is a legal term, and it's difficult to prove. However, DoL can and will do an audit to verify that the PERM application is correct. If the audit fails (and they fail them often) they just deny the petition.
It's not a large percentage, but nowhere near the "never heard about DoL denying a petition" level.
> Specifically, the department’s investigation found that Apple did not advertise positions Apple sought to fill through the PERM program on its external job website, even though its standard practice was to post other job positions on this website. It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions.
Of course court itself could have arrived in different result.
1) The magical 10 year experience resume for a person straight out of college who has never worked a day in his life. Does not know what ssh is, what excel is or anything that any literate individual can figure out on their own.
2) The tens of thousands of consultancies marketing these people on OPT with 10 year experience. Fraudulent interviews, some other person will do proxy interviews.
3) The FTE employees creating dozens to hundreds of contractor positions under them. Interestingly, all of those will be filled by a specific contracting firm.
4) The contracting firm is a Women-Minority-Business owner, usually the wife or sister or sister-in-law of the FTE employee.
5) The FTE employee works assiduously get his relatives more FTEs, together they control a few hundred to a thousand contracting positions. The billing rates will be $100 - $120 to the contracting company, but they pay $40K - $50K for these people straight out of college, pocketing a huge margin.
6) Then, after 3 years, they will file H-1 with a pay of $50K - $60K in a very remote location, because the prevailing wage determination in that location will be $22 - $25/hour for a Computer Analyst.
7) The H4 visa fraud, FTEs spouse gets employed at the same company or a relative/buddys company. These spouses know absolutely nothing, but are hired at a very high wage.
8) The COVID PPP loans fraud.
9) Fraudulent 'employees' because these people have zero skills, they employ another person in a third world country.
Almost ALL of the US consulting is fraudulent. Most of the positions are completely unnecessary. Big companies are just as corrupt and blind as any other govt orgs. And this is happening in state govts too where they are hiring a lot of people in 'tech'. If the US Govt starts pulling the threads, issue subpeonas, they can extract tens to hundreds billions in fines for so many different kinds of fraud.
This is nothing new, has been going on since late 90s. These 'consulting' companies started with Y2K and since then grew exponentially. For a while, there wasn't enough supply of 'degree' holders, but now there are millions of degree holders with zero skills. That leads to other frauds:
1) The fraudulent degree certificates (lots of people can't even clear the 4 year degree in India) used to apply to US universities. 2) Students going to garbage universities and working in malls, doordash, etc. These degree mills and university<->consultancies nexus that guarantee I-20s is another thread.
1. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Will be even harder soon to find a small-town newspaper. Because I bet a number were kept afloat by this.
Many companies fulfill the intent of the law. They run a real hiring process — where they advertise online and interview people with work authorization/citizens and people who would require sponsorship.
But if someone requiring sponsorship was the best candidate for the job, then they have to run an additional “fake” process that fulfills these requirements, since no one actually hires tech workers from the newspaper.
It's the other way around. The "need" creates the ridiculous requirements. Companies get the laws they want and the laws they want are those that give them an excuse to do what they want to do.
Let's be honest they want a captive workforce that depends upon them to stay in the USA and build a life.
There has to be a better way to does not make them captive, and allows Americans to be the first ones, and even after that the priority should be people in North America, even International students.
But the fact they keep hiring mostly and overwhelmingly people from the same five countries that are desperate to come to the USA is an indication these companies are profiting formt he desperation of people.
You’re assuming without evidence that for any given job, that there will be qualified Americans willing to perform that job who aren’t already happily employed. You haven’t established that.
Hell, ask restaurateurs. They frequently have difficult hiring qualified local labor, too, even though the bar isn’t nearly as high as for a technologist, in major cities.
You can offer them more money, better work/life balance, a more fulfilling job, etc. When the government allows the hiring of foreign workers on visas, it's tilting the playing field in favor of employers. Why offer a better wage when you can just cry to the government and get an indentured servant at a discount?
Exceptional talent is a different argument - most H1bs are average at best. Claiming to be unable to hire for an entry or mid-level software engineer job is absurd.
If the qualified workers are already fully employed, how will this result in more of them in the short term?
> Why offer a better wage when you can just cry to the government and get an indentured servant at a discount?
The law requires H1B workers be paid the prevailing wage (20 CFR 655.731), and studies indicate that they're paid pretty close to the average wage (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34793/w347...) -- well within the statistical band. If we keep in mind that half of all citizens holding a particular job are paid below the average wage, too, then perhaps the hue and cry over pay is overblown.
Note that there are also plenty of other factors besides wage, eg. 24/7 on-call, working in a remote location, mandatory overtime, etc. Even if an employer actually is paying the market wage for the general job category, there is likely a reason why American candidates are not interested.
No, there's no contradiction. Again, you and others seem to be assuming--without evidence--that for any given job opening, there is an additional qualified local resource available in the prevailing wage band. But that's not necessarily the case. You don't have to take large tech companies' word for it; just ask small business owners around you.
There's no shortage of qualified US tech workers. Microsoft and many other tech companies (cough Accenture cough) abuse this system. They want workers who cannot easily get jobs with another company due to the visa system and will take the lowest of wages.
If I lay off experienced buggy whip makers because the market for horse-drawn buggies is shrinking, and I need to hire experienced aluminum workers instead to meet my customers' demands, it doesn't necessarily mean I can hire the buggy whip makers back for that job. Labor is not necessarily substitutable like that. Not even software developers.
It's also worth noting that companies often use layoffs as a way to efficiently trim the worst-performing labor cohort. They don't do it because they want to hire cheaper labor; it's because they want to let these workers go without the overhead of going through the formal termination process for each one individually.
> There's no shortage of qualified US tech workers.
This statement is so broad it's difficult to evaluate. There might be plenty of US tech workers, and there might be a surplus of US tech workers qualified for some job, but it doesn't necessarily mean they are qualified for the specific job openings.
Speaking from my own experience, my team is hiring several senior SREs, and we're not seeing a flood of qualified candidates. We get a flood of resumes, but the signal to noise ratio is low. The candidates' CVs claim the requisite qualifications, but when we actually evaluate the candidates for role fit, we are finding that their actual skills aren't those we need for success in these roles.
staff SRE here, got a link? :)
The quirks of individual managers don't matter in this context.
This is a common argument, but for some reason nobody follows up on that to say: let's not make H1Bs depend on the company. Say, let's give them a 1-year grace period to find jobs if they decide to switch jobs. It's actually the opposite. The 60-day grace period is being challenged. Maybe some people want this reason to exist, compared to other reasons for hiring a foreign workforce.
Without running a process how do you know someone requiring sponsorship is, and a correction to language, an adequate candidate for the job.
If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud, they would have required the company to advertise the position in the same places they advertise their other jobs.
I wouldn't default to assuming malice. These laws were written by extremely old people who are still living in the 1950s, where they think the paper boy still rides up on his bicycle on Sunday to deliver the news paper to them, and that's the only way to read about jobs.
Ah yes, the newspaper, the bastion of where all millennial and Gen Z software engineers deign to get their news from in 2026…
Advertising in the Sunday newspaper seems a bit antiquated. I don't think I've looked in a newspaper for a job since the 90s.
I never get a reply via indeed and the rest online.
what can be a reason for an upper limit?
What an absurd carve out seemingly designed to facilitate exactly the sort of fraud being alleged. If you want to argue that you couldn't find qualified local workers one of the basic prerequisites ought to be documenting what the prevailing wage is and openly advertising the position at some small percentage _above_ that rate in order to attract local talent. In all cases the accuracy of that value should absolutely be audited by the government before granting the application.
"We couldn't find any qualified local applicants willing to accept substandard pay and we don't feel up to competing properly" is absolutely not the stated purpose of the program yet the rules apparently cater to that. A complete farce on the part of the federal government.
I forget what they are, but i think its something like "must post 3 notifications of your incorproation in newspapers"
"I saw a thing once, and I'm going to wildly guess some incriminating details, and then claim it's proof of some sort."
Even Vance does a better job of manufacturing outrage than that.
I'm not sure what about this made you question your intuition. Is there something about this story that made you think it might only be Microsoft doing this?
Abuse of the H1B system is pretty widespread if you look at the types of roles that these companies submit applications for. I'm convinced that if you aren't looking for someone who is literally a PhD candidate, lead of their field you can probably find someone somewhere who can write a damn REST API.
Somebody I believe is spiritually hideous, morally corrupt, and plain old incompetent, saying something I am in atomically perfect alignment with, using almost the exact same words I would.
I flew into a co-working space for a team onsite this summer. While walking the halls, I saw a job posting printed out and taped onto a glass door facing out from one of the single-occupant offices, surely to claim a similar approach.
I was reminded of this article
Burying job listings is part of the kabuki theater, but it's being misrepresented here. Usually companies already have a candidate in mind when they do this. It makes no sense to run a complete hiring process in the US, and then turn around and run a second one for international candidates. You may as well do a complete candidate search and then post the canned jobs again if you need to get Visa sponsorship.
I have not met a single one who was not over qualified for the job they were doing.
I have only met a couple who were (to some extent) getting screwed because of an agency in the middle. However I would not have found the wage unreasonable and the markup was well within the industry standard.
H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here... We need to fix the portion of the process where it is onerous to go from H1B to green card and citizenship.
There is truth to this, certainly. In software engineering or related positions? I don’t think so, generally. If this was the case we wouldn’t also outsource positions.
Invert your argument: If outsourcing was so great, we wouldn't have any software jobs in the US.
The reason to outsource, to offshore are far more nuanced than "cost".
Source? But also what difference does that make? Just pay American workers more.
> Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
> Just pay American workers more.
If we set aside software engineering - 40% of rural doctors in the US are here on H1B visas. There's not a "pay them more" button we can hit that generates more domestic doctors, especially not in under 10 years. All you'd do is compete amongst a limited supply.
At the same time, the doctor with just 4-5 years of school and hundreds of thousands less debt can not only treat patients more cheaply, but will have more years of practice too.
That leaves the only real difference (other than degree inflation) as being 3 years of residency, but most of the older generation of doctors effectively did the same thing entering into an existing practice or working in a hospital under an experienced physician.
If you climbed the ladder (like a lot of nurse practitioners do), the ADN+BSN took 5 years with 3-4 more years for the MSN or 4-5 years for the DNP.
Put another way, that nurse practitioner has MORE applicable years of schooling than a doctor who got some random degree with the handful of med prereqs then went to med school, internship, and residency. Lots of nurse practitioners also work in the field all the while they are in school which further increases their actual experience.
The real takeaway is that all these extra years, loans, and interest combined with fewer years to practice medicine translate into more expensive care without improving outcome.
That's literally how the button works. An undersupply in the market, increases prices.. kids and students deciding what they want to do with their life, see the wages and decide 10 years of school is worth it... and after 10 years you get more doctors.
If there's an undersupply, that's a clear indication that young people are looking at the field and deciding the wages don't justify the investment.
By short-circuiting the process of the free market, you're guaranteeing the shortage will continue.
The problem is that the relationship is non-linear. The data shows that at a certain amount of comfort and income, most people really aren't willing to make drastically uncomfortable lifestyle choices for any amount of money. I'm not suddenly going to become a lineman even if it pays double what I make now.
How many kids in our culture are actually looking at earning potential as the #1 factor when they choose a career?
Immigrant doctors may also hate working at these facilities, but the prospect of raising their family somewhere in the USA is a huge value add for them.
Eh I think this is sort of BS. First yes literally you could be paid enough. Everyone has a price, including you, and you’re not fooling anyone. Second you can find arrangements that perhaps enable you to spend a few years doing what amounts to public service in exchange for maybe no debt or higher pay and then move on - this is a very common thing in the labor market.
Also, what does that say about you that you hate being around your fellow countrymen more than someone from outside of your country?
This administration could address that, but if anything, they seem to be moving in the opposite direction.
There are also tertiary effects in that bringing in young working families into the US is overwhelmingly good for the economy.
If bringing in workers shrinks an economy, then how does one go from a country of 40 million to 400 million without 360 million people being unemployed? Because wage earners actually contribute more to the economy than they crowd out.
No one in their right mind would argue that having kids is going to put downward pressure on the job market, and yet we have the idea that grown, educated adults will. (Not to mention these grown, educated adults cost us nothing in taxes in education or retirement, so overwhelmingly less of a burden on our economy)
Once he got his green card via lottery, his pay went up and his mandatory overtime went down. His Japanese coworkers without green cards still had to work late.
Anyone, best of luck for people.
(Imo, anti immigration is the easiest way to cut ties with other nations if you plan to send your boys in there to get a trauma)
Selectively applying that standard to advance a specific cause is fascist.
This isn't even a good basis. The question is what the purpose of visa to residence work programs achieves. No one ever questions the underlying assumptions. Like for example, could filling skilled roles actually cause a self fulfilling prophecy? If Americans assume immigrants will fill a role, they don't acquire the skill which actually creates a dependence on immigration to fill it.
It achieved wage suppression and control over workers livelihood.
And it should be illegal, perhaps even criminal the way some companies go about it.
1. https://www.ft.com/content/5cfecbba-69ed-42d0-98fd-3ae019144...
If they change the ad between the local newspaper and the foreign search, they would be breaking the law. That's not what is claimed, even by Vance.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-20/part-656/section-656.1...
Some of us know just as well as folks in San Francisco how to instruct claude to write code.
Wait but PERM process is precisely for getting that foreign person outside of the temporary "effective indentured servant" phase. It's to get a green card... Once you have it you can leave the company and work anywhere.
Where it gets maybe abused is only India/China pipelines, where they're stuck in that GC backlog for years. so it makes them in this limbo of renewable H1B until the GC is granted, which might be decades out.
This looks to be a shakedown for cash. Companies are retaining existing h1bs and not hiring new, so this "change" is coming at a meaningless time.
I think people should be asking why JD has eye shadow on as if he just came from a drag party. The guy looks like a clown and is making a meaningless announcement to fake out the maga base for the election. The h1b announcement from last year still hasn't changed anything. The lottery is still maxed out.
This is not alarming to you?!
It's not an administration thing. Vance is positioning himself for a presidential run in 2028.
Literally hours later, the head of the same administration gave the head of Microsoft an award.
And companies need to advertise outstanding positions on their own website to prove they can't find any candidates. Seems to me that would be impossible and you could scrap the entire H1B Circus right away.
And employees with an H1B visa should leave the country after 4 years for at least 3 months to prevent them from applying for citizenship.
Vance simply exploited the fact most people don't know that.
On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers. I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it, but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots. Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back. Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
> with clear path to citizenship.
Or no path at all. Tying the citizenship carrot to the visa and letting the employers hold the stick is the worst of all possible outcomes.
So I think what some in this thread are saying is it quite literally 'will' bring American workers the literal jobs that the H1Bs aren't doing anymore.
> but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots
So two things can definitely be true here. They can be hardworking and well-intentioned, and they can still be used as a wedge between American workers and slightly better jobs
(a) competent enough to pass the hiring bar (b) willing to move to places like Seattle / SF / NYC where these companies were hiring.
You only need to scroll back to a couple of years ago where people were turning their noses up at all forms of recruiter outreach and complaining about how aggressive the recruiters were. What privileged times we lived in.
Since 2022 / post COVID interest rate hikes / AI, the hiring dropped and college kids can't get jobs. The first bump in the economic road you hit, you want to scale down H1B capacity, cancel green cards, banish people. What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program? Or be resigned to getting high tax paying / high spending jobs shipped off shore? Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
IMO this is all very short term thinking / political theater to score brownie points with the republican base for the elections.
Nothing here is good policy. Sure there's fraud, fix the fraud. You don't like the ad process, make it better.
But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.
As far as I know there isn't any wage discrimination at these big companies like Adobe or Microsoft. Everyone gets paid basically in-line with what levels.fyi says as a band for their level.
Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.
I don't think any country invites and then carries out a massive purge of existing labor as it sees fit.
If it does, then it won't be appealing to the class of person you're seeking to attract.
Perhaps you could attempt to steel-man why point-based immigration allocate and de-allocate points for certain professions over time? Or why temporary visas exist in the first place.
> If it does, then it won't be appealing to the class of person you're seeking to attract.
Such is the nature, complexity and self-contradicting character of any large-scale public policy; and it's "classes" (plural) because immigration cuts across social strata, not just your software and service industry "rockstar" geeks.
Yes, why not? Or more practically: keep the program but adjust the quotas annually or even quarterly based on needs. When you see tech companies laying off workers by the thousands, as happened over the past few years, that's the sign that there is plenty of local talent to be hired.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
The solution to that is to separate visa renewals from new hires: allow companies to keep existing workers, while forcing them to hire new ones locally. This actually makes America _more_ attractive for immigrants because they know they cannot be replaced with a new generation of cheap workers from their home country when economic conditions worsen.
> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false.
In what sense is it false? Microsoft claims that of its 6,800 H1b filings 80% were “related to employees already working at Microsoft” (note no mention _which country_ those employees were working in) which translates to 20% to or 1720 new employees they hired.
And for pay, they only state that “international workers that Microsoft does hire through the H1b visa program are paid the same level of compensation that a worker from the US would receive”, but of course the point is that the average level of compensation for new hires today is significantly lower than it was 10 years ago, when there was a tech worker shortage.
So it can be simultaneously true that the current-year H1b hires are hired at the same rate Americans are, but that those rates are substantially lower than the negotiated compensation of the people Microsoft laid off. The fact that Microsoft declines to comment on this,
So the following are almost certainly all true:
Please, if you think this narrative is false, which of these facts are you specifically disputing?I don't think this really holds up. They could offer the American engineers the opportunity to move divisions, but they don't because what they really want to do is what they did do: Fire Americans and hire foreigners.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
Then make H1B what it is supposed to be for: elite specialists, not infinite low cost non-American laborers. Then you won't even need to have this discussion.
The contention is pretty clear to me: the law currently says hiring companies should look for Americans who can do the jobs first (not best), and only sponsor visas if they can't find them - but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.
Sure, immigration is hard, stressful and gruelling fight against an an uncaring system. But the damaging aspects of widespread illegal corporate[1] conduct shouldn't be ignored.
I'm saying this as someone who believes American should increase its immigration and end widespread gray-area tolerance that harms the immigrants - who have the least power of all parties involved, which employers love to exploit. Sadly, partisanship makes otherwise smart voters really dumb, with one party lying to its base and the other going along with it and avoiding hard discussions about why America needs immigration.
1. Or farmer/roofer/construction
The later is specifically called out for an EEOC discrimination. https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination
> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.
> ...
> National origin-related disparate treatment in hiring related to job advertisement also can include an employer making it more difficult for applicants from one national origin to apply for positions (for example, subjecting U.S. workers to more laborious application methods than H-1B visa holders during the PERM labor certification process).
Part of the challenge here is that the EEOC tends to not be funded well and is limited to acting on tips rather than being able to investigate or audit.
And they do act... https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/eeoc-sues-sibitalent-h-1b-visa... for example...
Though note:
> The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to investigate and litigate against businesses and other private sector employers for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.
And if this is important...
https://cwc.org/CWC/CWC/Updates/2026/Partial-Spending-Deal-W...
> Congressional negotiators have reached a bipartisan deal to fund the EEOC at $435.4 million for fiscal year 2026. The funding level is the same as that requested by the White House, but nearly $20 million (4.3%) less than last year’s budget.
And the funding and staffing by year: https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc-budget-and-staffing-history-1980-p...
Does it make sense to declare the "America is full" and deporting people who have been granted asylum while welcoming white South Africans with open arms?
> On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers
HN had its mask off moment some time around the 2024 election.
If you made assumptions that turned out to be wrong, that might look like a "mask".
You're advocating against people seeking higher salaries because that hurts competitiveness? That is competitive behavior in a nutshell.
That change FAR predates the most recent election.
This is just what happens when communities get bigger, they become more reflective of the societies which the people are drawn from.
I do remember HN getting much nastier around 2015-16, and again around Covid, but this is just a reflection of society again and unlikely to be a purely HN thing.
If anything, in the 15 (fuck) years I've been hanging out here, it's amazing how well the community has held up.
I have a Chrome extension there but I also have an iOS app that I use for myself alone (it’s really not production grade). The Chrome extension is pretty rudimentary so if you want to replicate it you can just tell your agent to do so and if it helps the source is on GitHub. The iOS app is vibe-coded entirely so perhaps you’re better off starting from scratch there.
It’s a pretty basic requirement to interact with social media these days, I think because the information feed is full of noise.
Here’s another user who implemented a different approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459985
You may like his approach as well.
Hacker Smacker in particular would be awesome if more users picked it up (since it's a web of trust, albeit 1 hop only).
How about sparing a moment for the anguish of American citizens and graduates that either lost their jobs, or cant find work, because they were replaced by foreign scab labor willing to work longer hours, for less pay, with no mobility?
They should get paid the sane as American workers is all...
Source? If the job legitimately needs to be done, and the foreign option is eliminated, the domestic option is what's left.
Switzerland: 10 million people, around 600'000 with permit B (limited to 5 years), over a million with permit C (persistent living permit, but no citizen, available after 5 years of B).
When Microsoft lays off 6.000 American workers and then refills those positions with H1Bs, I would argue that cancelling visas will definitely bring those jobs back.
I think you missed the arguments. It's not they're not 'deserving' - although you should probably say qualified as it sounds less moral in the context of job competition. No, it's that as indentured servants, they effectively allow corporations to hire cheaper, more pliant workers. H1 workers from India might be very qualified, but they keep their heads down and work long hours to avoid risking getting sent back.
We don't like that. Would you want co-workers who say yes to everything and accept long hours, all due to immigration? It's a form of labor power dilution and it hurts us all.
FWIW H1B recipients immediately get started on the PERM/GC process (if they wish), with only whatever new-grad level plus 0..2 years experience they have accumulated thus far.
Meanwhile job ads are posted in the kitchens as required by law (and I’m sure the local newspapers) with ~$80K salaries even though I that way way below what they paid even for new (US) grads [in the Boston area]. So no surprise no one ever applies for them (if they even see it).
It’s a fiction, like the idea that contractors would prefer contracts over full time employment. Its a less-privileged workforce with fewer protections to benefit the companies.
I’m pro immigration, and that means actually paying people for their expertise rather than semi-indentured workers. Too often companies get all the benefits of the workers without having to pay them. The fact of all the staffing agencies put in alongside Microsoft. Of course, the current admin couldn’t care less about any employee, citizen or migrant, they’re just using it to try to show their base they care. The dems have done absolutely nothing when they are in power either.
There are exceptions, but in 20 years in both SF and Seattle you can basically set your clock to this being what’s happening.
IDK, with a lot of things it seems like big companies are just incredibly myopic. When I got my PhD people interviewing me used to love to say "well in industry, we do things that actually matter" (a weird premise) and boast about how efficient they are. Yet IME I just see an incredibly suboptimal setting. They routinely waste tons of money to save pennies and the attitude of "I just care that it works" really just ends up with "it looks like it worked but it's actually broken". But that's the obvious result if you surround yourself with yes men and don't let people do their jobs
Whats the cost of setting up new offices in developing countries like India and China vs sponsering here. It seems setting up office offshore is much cheaper, the only issue seems to be the upfront cost and know how which is an issue for starups but not for a reasonably established software business
That may be uncommon but it is not a fiction. I worked as a contract for one of the telco companies for a couple years by choice. My boas would regularly ask about making me full time, I was getting paid a bit more as a contractor, didn't need the benefits, and my work was otherwise identical to what it would be full-time. Why bother?
The biggest one is the program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job.
why is it racist to find workers willing to accept a lower wage to do the same quality work?
Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?
Employers who really need employees for high-skilled work would thus get visas. Employers who want to underpay their foreign labor will not.
Other uses of the H-1B (e.g. French teacher https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+teacher&city=&... ) wouldn't be able to compete. There are also places in rural America where the only way to get doctors and nurses ( https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=nurse+practitioner&ci... ) is to hire them from abroad (the other option is to close the facility as insurance reimbursements aren't high enough to pay more).
Auctions are bad because need is not entirely measured in money. Highest bidders win is not egalitarian. Sometimes we do want to subsidize rocket surgeons visas for disadvantaged parts of the country.
We keep saying H-1B. There used to also be a H-1A visa and an H-1C visa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1A_visa
What if, instead of trying to solve the H-1B visa problem from companies that have gone through the roof for visa applications ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Top_H-1B_employers_b... ), instead split off all the jobs that are classified by the BLS as 15-0000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes150000.htm ) and move them to a new section ... Lets call it H-1D.
Within the H-1D which is for tech jobs (just like H-1A and H-1C were for healthcare while they were active), it can have a different pool size and requirements and for that one could require a certain base pay and have an auction on top of that.
https://www.uscis.gov/archive/h-1c-registered-nurse-working-...
This could allow for regulating tech job immigration differently while minimizing the impact to French teachers or medical professionals in rural America that have no way to compete with Big Tech salaries.
The reason I think this is more likely doable is that it works the same way that the H-1A and H-1C visas did before to address one section of the skilled labor visa applications.
is it because you personally would benefit from having tech jobs visas regulated so that your own wages don't get pushed down?
I think skilled labour import is, on the whole, beneficial. The bigger issue isn't this, but that they're legally bound only to that single company (and would need to reapply for the visa when they would change jobs).
If this condition could be changed, then it fix the issue.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/a314508.html or https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-11-26.pdf
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1289... The system that works for most other employers is being abused. Changing the system that helps staff rural schools and hospitals to one that benefits Big Tech because of body shops hurts everyone else.Again from the GAO:
This is where the changes should be addressed. Making sure that the DoL has the funding, staffing, ability to audit.Strengthening those abilities for BLS classification 15-0000 jobs rather than trying to rewrite H-1B for everyone is likely easier to accomplish.
Video of him saying that: https://youtu.be/BVdIWy9bCEA
The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).
I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.
One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.
He was fed up and he went to a meeting and he had to hear "what are you going to do about it?" Manager knew his wife was pregnant and wanted to use it, or I suppose it was it. He told he would pack his stuff and leave. So he did. He packed his stuff, shared the news and another senior manager rushed after him to bring him back to his team with the raise.
I left the company few years ago but now and then I think about it. How someone can be so opportunistic with to the point of trying to abuse someone about to be a father for few thousands of dollars that do not even belong to him. And EVEN if he got a bonus or something it would have been much much less than that to the point that, if it was me, I would be so ashamed to admit that.
Possibly he would have done that with anyone in a special situation. And I am sure this is more common than not, but how f'up it is to hide behind "it is just business" cover to act like this.
Some people just identify with the company and/or like the power they get through the position.
Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.
So, yeah, it is not about race, but is very much discrimination that should be illegal.
yes it is right? am i mistaken here?
Bingo.
This is a pre-midterm messaging move aimed at shoring up support with young men who voted for Trump in ‘24. The chances that the policy even lasts more than a few months is slim.
And this only got _worse_ as more and more advanced STEM degrees in the US go to foreigners.
Agree. Isn’t it odd that the H1B and offshoring aren’t being touched? Just green cards? The kind that gives employees leverage with employers?
This is a messaging move. We need immigration reform and a pro-labor movement in America. This is crumbs to peasants.
Couldn't agree more. I can see the admin flailing in trying this, the fact they didn't go farther just means there's an opportunity for the midterms.
Also why are you singling out Indians? Are you racist against other nations?
I've never had to worry about visas, so this is just stuff I'm getting from visa-holding friends, but that always seemed a bit scary.
That isnt true. A SWE engineer working at the same level at Redmond gets paid the same band irrespective of visa status.
Employers benefit from regulations that exist to benefit employers. We should have completely open borders or actually do what's best for citizen workers.
Employers would have to pay more competitive wages if the candidate pool was smaller. Then there is the free legal services given to some workers and not others, that leaves less budget overall for compensation.
Big Tech has hired functionally every domestic worker interested in and capable of doing the job. They pay so much already.
But a contributing fact is flooding the tech market with H-1B visas spikes labor supply, kills workers' leverage and lets companies cheap out on salaries instead of bidding them up.
The imported worker, on the other hand, is a more efficient and compliant machine. Maybe if we make those youths as poor as the workers we import, they'll eventually learn some gratitude.
There's another option: without a sufficient workforce, the projects just happen somewhere else. Then the local market stagnates, and you end up with very little competition between employers. And the salaries go down to match.
This is not a conjecture. The European tech sector is experiencing exactly this phenomenon. Even in large tech companies, the salaries for the same positions are about 50-100% higher in the US.
Tech companies do not generally do this for their product teams, but may do it for their internal IT and reporting systems.
What you’re saying gets repeated a lot, but I’ve never seen it to be true. Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level. I just don’t believe that it’s happening on the scale that people make it out to be.
Also, I don’t want to get too into it unless people are interested, but at least at the companies I’ve been at, the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty wrong with these programs and I’m glad to see reform, but I don’t believe the underpaying thing is happening nearly as much as people claim it does.
You're so close to getting it... keep going...
That’d be a dumb way to run an economy.
At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).
Quite honestly I am in amazed at this ingenuity. Art vs artist type of awe
it's been true 100% of the places I've worked. I can't name names on the internet.
Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.
The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.
Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.
I will also add a data point for big tech. I have managed people on h1b, on o1, with green cards, and citizens. I have never even sniffed any sort of disparate treatment across these groups once hired. During hiring the bias was against h1b since it was a huge pain in the ass to arrange everything and their start date could be delayed.
It's much cheaper to setup shop outside US, which almost all companies do, but still they bring in foreign employees on visa just to keep the entire local market salaries to the minimum
Idk if people don't realize you can look this up? Pay doesn't look suppressed to me....
I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.
Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The job switching process for foreigners should be easier.
This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.
Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.
Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.
Are wages too low to incentivize local talent? Tech companies already pay high six figures. What is this "local talent" doing that pays more?
Instead they just throw their hands up and call it quits, hiring elsewhere instead.
(This is not outsourcing. The foreign workers are still on the company's payroll, just in an office where they don't need a visa to work).
Laughs in ESG. Companies stopped reporting this in 2024, but go look at prior year results compared to US demographics.
My $0.02 here is that AAPI and African applicants have crowded out ADOS and Hispanics when you look at corporate demographics.
The only reason I think is because they want the local market dev prices to keep down,so they bring in visa restricted foreigners
(In the economical sense, not in the political sense)
where is this data coming from? Engineers frequently move between Amazon/Meta/Google/Microsoft, even on H1B.
MSFT has always been one of the higher paying tech companies out there: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/job-lists/highest-payi...
The chances that this lasts for even a few months beyond the midterms is zero.
I know people that work for FAANG as immigrants in the US, and I myself worked for one.
They made as much as anyone else there.
https://h1bgrader.com/compare/infosys-limited-vs-microsoft-c...
There's some real ways in which it's unfair. As a software engineer in Seattle I've quite possibly lost $100-300K to the H1B program over the past 10 years. It's not a problem though, I don't need anyone's protection from Microsoft.
I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
Enforcing existing regulations and supplying the resources for the agency to effectively audit the already existing category of H-1B-dependent employers (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer ) could be an approach taken.
This is not racism, it is abuse of the visa system. It can happen to any race.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/26/trump-microsoft-lis...
And when trump does something which clearly hurts himself, you have to remember that he is fantastically stupid, undisciplined, and insane.
Every company is doing what Microsoft pioneered years ago. Yet only MS is facing the consequences.
Oracle. Apple. Any Fortune 500 company. They have the same playbook.
Can you explain how its racist?
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? It is not true. Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Meta etc. do not do this and they have no need to. They just need the top employees, and lots of them.
You want to know who does this? Companies like Disney and other IT type jobs who hire H-1B workers then lay off citizens and have those citizens train the immigrant workers. There is no reason for H-1B workers in IT departments. But there absolutely is a need for immigrant workers in high tech companies. How else do you ensure your employees are the best in the world?
Where is the proof of this? I constantly see comments like this with no proof. The h1b process requires the foreign worker to receive the prevailing wage.
Nationality != Race
Connect some dots for me here, where is the racism you claim?
Even if they are paying foreign workers less, which isn't substantiated here by data, that is someone willing to do the same job for less money and doesn't clearly have anything to do with race. The job market is a market, markets aren't equal for all participants or its racism.
Wipro - https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/wipro-limited-l9k5mz3r21/...
I picked two examples to show the disparity. I do like where this is going, but as it frequently happens, it feels like a weapon than can be wielded selectively.
A law should handle fraud across all abusers.
It seems to me the newspaper requirement needs to be nerfed and moving forward companies should require jobs be listed at the top most popular job advertising platforms (whether it be a website or what have you) as fully remote, US citizen only. Every application and interview needs to be submitted before applying for a VISA for a clear paper trail.
Theres no shortage of talent in the US, companies just need to hire remote more. Not everyone wants to live in one state for tech jobs.
A) How long you have been working as an H1B in the united states (say 10 years).
B) How much you have paid in taxes (say 1 million).
Whenever either of the above has occured, you take some citizenship test, and then you have a green card. Nothing to do with your employer dangling something for you, literally a measure of your employment history and/or taxable income.
And this is hardly new. Ross Perot was opposing H1B when he was running for President in the 1990s.
I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.
For example, right now, nobody is thinking of how many immigrants come to the U.S. through family unification for each H1B worker that eventually gets permanent residency. If you open up the issue now it’s going to become a firestorm when people realize that “65,000 skilled workers a year” actually results in millions of people every year, most of whom aren’t skilled workers.
Also case in point, both me and my wife went from F1 to green card. We never worked illegally and had fully funded gradute programs. Our parents refuse to settle in the US, they have assets and families in home countries and rather live there. We haven't tried to bring in any other relatives. 3 of our siblings have also went through the F1 route, all of them fully funded gradutes, one of them left the US after graduation, other two settled and got green card.
In my case, spouses are siblings are all skilled workers, and we have not sponsored each other.
We have one kid, even he is advanced for his age in terms of reading/math.
Each legal immigrant who becomes a citizen is the root of a tree that can continue indefinitely. If you come from anywhere other than India or China, it takes about 10 years to get citizenship from when you get your H1B. It took us less than 10. After that you can sponsor family for green cards directly. That person only needs about 6 years before they can get citizenship and start sponsoring their own family members. So it’s easy to see how we went from 10,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S. in 1990 to 300,000+ in just 35 years.
That’s very easy within a few decades when you consider that the people who are sponsored will get citizenship and can then sponsor their own parents, siblings, etc. My dad sponsored six people, and he just has one brother. My mom has 12 siblings, but them and their families went to Australia following my uncle.
There are 300,000-600,000 Bangladeshis in the U.S., up from under 10,000 in 1990. Based on H1B petitions and natural growth, the population should be more like 15,000. People are bringing their entire extended families over.
FWIW, my community is 30% foreign-born and we don't really have any social cohesion problems. I think that length of time in the country actually matters more than the absolute number of immigrants; people who have been here since they were teens are very well acculturated. But if I were to put numbers on how many new people a group can absorb per year without radically changing its culture, I'd put it at about 10% (that's like having one new person on a 10 person team hired within the last year). If we extrapolated to the whole U.S. population and assumed they were all evenly distributed, this'd be 34M people/year.
Honestly, I think the bigger problem is that they're not evenly distributed. Some places in America never change, over generations, and remain very suspicious of outsiders. Other places become 80% immigrant over a span of 10-15 years, and then they never talk to anyone outside their ethnic background. In not very long, you end up with multiple different Americas that can't relate to each other. The parable of the polygons is very relevant here:
https://ncase.me/polygons/
You think you can absorb 10% of the population every year without radically changing the country’s culture? My parents are still 80% Bangladeshi even after 40 years in the U.S.
We have empirical data showing that cultural differences in everything from social trust to savings rates persist for generations. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/09/th...
But a nation couldn't ask more than a working age adult where you invested zero in education and health for 20 years and suddenly pay taxes with none of almost no benefits.
In the UK, which I raised numbers due to the discussion going on in there, visa workers generated yearly 12 to 20 Billions in direct taxes and fees and they use 4B in health (which technically they paid in fees a combined value of 6B upfront If my numbers are right)
But the real numbers lies on what other revenue they generate. It is estimated in my calculations that +50B-70B pounds are from immigrants on UK with a working visa.
That's no amount to shy considering about it is 8M people in that specific situation. And remember that none of them had to have their education covered by the government.
Someone in the other comment said that 8M British people would generate more taxes than that, but I did not find evidence of that. According to the public consultation documents UK gov released about immigration a couple of years ago, about 10% of the immigrants are responsible for more than 35% of the taxes collected. Hence the suggestion on curb immigration considering the salary range which might make sense or not depending on where you stand on the topic. I have no horses on this race and my impression as an outsider who just likes analysing data is that it seems as much of a claim as saying that EU took more money from UK than what it put in which turned out to be mostly incorrect.
I think the "chud" immigration logic is rather, take whatever win you can get in the general direction of restriction, because you've been losing every single battle for 5+ decades.
Yup real chud. I'd play world's smallest violin in solidarity with these most productive people.
but I agree that it would be nice to have a less fraught/complicated path to permanent residency.
Not really.
Your only generic option is EB-5, with $750k in direct investments. However, right now it takes 3 _years_ to process the initial application (https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times - look at the I-526 form). And after the initial form is approved, you need to apply for the actual green card, adding another 1-3 years.
But they are in fact full-fledged human beings living physically in the United States. They are buying groceries, paying rent, getting their haircut.
Once you realize they are fully participating economic actors, it is much less clear whether they are a net positive or negative.
As if your (very American) bosses wouldn't find another to put you down and wrong everything they could from you. Today ICE is going after immigrants, tomorrow Pinkerton is going after you.
P.S.: Conversely (inversely?) there's often a vague idea of "if we somehow make the positions suck ass, then immigrants will stop coming, and somehow locals will be hired to a no-longer-sucky position", which is, er.... Wishful thinking. It'll get one a sense of vengeance, but it wont help pay the bills.
Immigrants contribute to both supply and demand. It's not at all obvious whether this is net good or bad for natives' pay.
The job should go to the most qualified person. That's how america works. If that most qualified person is actually a guy who was born in india, great. I have no problem with that. You don't get to bogart opportunity based one what zip code you were born in.
The system we have is one that was politically feasible to implement. On paper, we have a system for “non-immigrant” temporary workers. Employers sponsor green cards for skilled workers because the theoretically temporary job is the only avenue for most of these workers to get to the U.S. in the first place.
> summary, the provisions of AC21 did the following:
> They helped increase the efficiency of utilization both of the H-1B status for temporary skilled workers (i.e., "non-immigrant workers")
All of this is done under the pretense that these are temporary workers who will eventually go home. That’s the only way Congress could get away with it, and it seems like people are now wising up to it.
Did you need this to get your point across?
they will dangle visa renewal for ppl to get to that time then.
One of these things is not like the other...
Do you have any evidence of that causal connection, or is that just an assumption? The US also accepts large numbers of immigrants and temporary workers.
Those are special circumstances, but utterly different than regular low wage worker issues.
European kids are not going to pick tobacco; they are doing 'lifestyle' summer jobs in America.
These jobs are meant for students/youth, and necessarily going to pay a bit less but they obviously shouldn't be under duress.
It's an aspirational trade off - the business owners generally are not making bank for the most part. The system doesn't work without a lofty goodwill all around.
My cousins all worked as 'golf cart girls' at public courses, they liked being in the sun but the pay was sketchy.
All of this is very different from H1s, regular temporary workers.
It makes me wonder why there aren't more American young adults taking these jobs. I think it would be great fun to live at the beach for the summer. Maybe the wages are too low, or American kids are focused on internships? Or maybe the European workers are better employees? I don't know.
the idea is that foreigners will do the temp/seasonal low value work, while Americans were supposed to educate and upskill using federal student loans and get a high value jobs.
unfortunately American education system made it impossible, ue to stupidity.
Only China is able to do that: massively educate population and upskill and go up the value chain of manufacturing and industrialization.
Just like farm labor: without importing foreigners, legal or otherwise, wages would go up, food prices would go up, prices, wages, and property values would normalize to market rates.
the reason why America wants to suppress low value jobs, is because they are input to the actual output of American economy: agriculture, high value industrial goods, tech services, financial services, real estate, financial asset s and services.
These are the actual components of US GDP and American government does everything possible to keep the input to these sectors stable/low, in order to protect the profits of these industries.
Do you see how wages seasonal workers are lower priority to the profits of Vail Corporation?
Any american bitchin about low wages and competition was supposed to set up own S-Corp/LLC and hire his "competitors" and take advantage of those "low wages"
You have unrestricted work authorization, you have SBA loans and everything possible to create your own American Dream(R)
Due to the jobs not existing in the number required.
same for microchip manufacturing (Micron and TSMC factories in US) and every other high value industry.
heck even Submarine production cannot find welders and machinists.
It's still incredibly hard to hire skilled devs.
The resentment is absolutely understandable.
What I am trying to explain is that, if magically, all foreigners are expelled, H1B/OPT banned, all Indian visas canceled, this will NEVER result in Americans getting more jobs. Quite the opposite. Global Capability Centers already are offshoring everything possible outside the US, just because of trump rhetoric.
American capitalist is not stupid, the billionaires are not idiots. Why should they hire and overpay for unskilled Americans just because they happen to be born here, instead of hiring the most qualified person? Any anti-immigrant legislation will simply accelerate the offshoring, or even worse, will create competing tech giants outside the US.
It is this entitlement attitude is whats going to ruin the US tech sector and scare the talent away.
More than half. Everyone is talking their book here, and the book that isn't blind to this problem belongs to the overwhelming majority.
A lot of tech jobs are paying six to seven figures, you cant really demand employers to train and lower barriers. Why should employers lower their barrier and increase salaries even further?
Where do you get this feeling of entitelement for other people’s money ???
What else do you want at this point, maybe just plain UBI and a million to everyone just for being white american ?
https://rusticpathways.com/blog/how-many-americans-have-a-pa...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/40-of-americans-one-step-from-p...
Do they have work visas for this, or are they abusing a travel visa? All the people I knew that did this were doing it illegally.
companies do stuff like this because american young people won't tolerate it
You don't get to experience much of the country because you're located in some dorm building that's not near much. So your summer ends up looking like 12 hour days standing around in the sun watching other people have fun.
A number of companies have been hit with slap-on-the-wrist fines for actually violating labor policies doing it.
I did this for a summer, worked my butt off, got back home, paid all my expenses with the paperwork and the plane tickets, bought a laptop and came back with about 500$. It was not much, but it was much more than I ever got the opportunity by that point to make.
The people I worked with treated me quite well. Everyone I met was welcoming and warm.
I did not manage to see a lot, but I did visit Yellowstone, had a couple of adventures, and overall was a positive experience for me.
A friend I was with did not manage too well and had a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to wash toilets.
But my point is, it can be a great experience and I don't buy for a second this feigned concern for "ooh, the poor kids are exploited". No, I think it's just job protectionism.
There's no feigned concern, this is actually a labor system that gets abused time and time again. Still happens today. These people have no advocates. A similar situation happens on cruise ships.
For those European workers, a US wage more than pays for the rent for their vacant rent back home.
That American complaints of this form are not unique and therefore should be disregarded? That American complaints of this form are universal and therefore indicative of a global pattern that should be concerning?
He's saying you can replace 'something' for 'other' in each of those patterns.
The J1s are then packed like sardines into houses where they pay rent by the week. Why by the week? To remind them they're expendable and can be deported at a moment's notice by the restaurant/hotel/amusement park/etc. they work at. The worst I've heard is 16 people living in a 3-bedroom, 1 bathroom house.
The J1s themselves are typically great people. A lot of them do everything they can to stay in the area via Green Cards or whatever. Business that treat their J1s like shit are usually blacklisted by locals, too. We'll actively tell tourists not to give those businesses any business and why.
The appeal for foreigners is living temporarily in Germany, Switzerland, etc.
It's an exchange: the host offers a roof, pays next to nothing for a live-in nanny, etc.
It's tourism + work.
I don't think anyone would do this as a career, and locals just do it in another country.
Interestingly the 26 refers to the USA. But a similar career would be legally possible inside the USA (not under the program) but not in EU, due to heavy labour regulations.
Locals like them, too - they're charming, generally well-behaved, polite, and it doesn't hurt that they don't have to pay them very much. I like to think the cultural exchange between the Europeans and the otherwise isolated locals is fantastic for broadening horizons, also.
Ep. 388
For non-native English speakers it also has the advantage of providing a free total immersion language course as well. People pay for opportunities like that.
So yes, an Italian 19 year old is willing to work for less money for the chance to work in a water park for a summer, improving their English and boosting their resume, and if it gives them enough money to be able to fund a couple of weekend trips to New York or DC so much the better. It’s a life experience and a working vacation.
That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.
Which should be pretty revolting for them if that's the case. Instead of American 19 year olds making some summer money at the waterpark to buy their first car, they get moved aside by disposable foreign workers, so then they need to stay supported by their parents for longer till they can get a "proper" job.
And I'm European not American, but I see the same issue here. Getting minimum wage jobs in the hospitality/service sector is super competitive now due to pressure from migrant workers who will accept anything. These are jobs that used to be done by teenagers in the past for summer money but not anymore.
Employers everywhere being able allowed to min/max wages against the most desperate labor on the planet should be banned.
And then governments have the audacity to complain about people not having kids anymore. Well no shit, my dad and his peers had summer jobs since he was 14 because there were no migrant workers to replace them, and after finishing high school he already had a job in the factory with housing benefits, he was already making enough money to have a family and 2 kids, not one.
If the government cut off the seasonal work visas, tourist destination hospitality businesses would have to increase prices, some would go out of business, and American tourists’ quality of life would be lower.
And where are 19 year old Americans getting money for water parks if they don't have jobs? Still having hobbies funded by your parents at 19 isn't really a societal win.
You say 30-50 years ago they couldn't afford that because labor costs were too high? Maybe they had jobs to pay those higher costs?
By finding a ready source of people willing to staff the water park at a lower price, more ‘water park amenity’ is available at a lower price.
This frees up the labor of local teenagers who can now be employed in other roles, producing other useful things for society, like… I don’t know what teenagers do nowadays. Provide market-clearing services on Kalshi by placing bad bets? Upload short form video to TikTok to enable ad buyers to find customers?
Or same prices but higher margins for the owner.
I think it just depends on the location? But also yes - if I'm worth my salt, why would I take these jobs over higher paying internships? At 19 I was able to land $25/h jobs in tech. Maybe we should rethink the pay scales in terms of sustainability. Unfortunately we live in the US where short term gains are the sole motivator for most companies.
Virtually all the hospitality staff there were European university students. Midway through the summer, they realized that they weren't earning enough to afford their return airfare and they threatened to strike. I don't recall how they resolved the issue, but I believe that they were netting less than minimum wage. Maybe things have changed since then, and maybe not.
There’s actually virtually nothing those two things have in common, except some unarticulated sense of grievance that in some unspecified way it would be better if Americans were doing those things.
And I didn't mean to give the impression that I have some grievance that these jobs aren't filled by Americans.
My curiosity was why aren't there more American kids having a working vacation in beach towns, not shame on these towns for importing labor.
I don't know their living situation, but I did see them both walking and riding bikes to the grocery store. It's a somewhat unique situation as the grocery store probably does 90% of their yearly business between June and August each year. I couldn't tell if they all knew each other from home or just from working together.
Do you mean that you are surprised that young Americans aren't working at the boardwalk in the USA or that young Americans are not working at the beaches in Europe?
And now that there's less of them, the jobs will be replaced by higher wage americans, which will increase inflation from the higher payroll costs.
Cursed companies:
- https://permtrack.app/employers/microsoft-corporation
- https://permtrack.app/employers/tata-consultancy-services-li...
Blessed companies:
- https://permtrack.app/employers/oracle-america-inc
- https://permtrack.app/employers/tesla-inc
November can't come fast enough!!
If a company hires an engineer in India, instead of Seattle, how does America (and workers) benefit? Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains, its just a hiring decision.
The question is whether these restrictions increase American employment or just accelerate the exodus of jobs while making the US a less attractive place for talented people.
Its Azure Hardware division that manages its first party silicon and its deployment has a huge hardware and electrical engineering presence. These fields don't have as many people in America in them, because Software has paid so much more for the last two decades, why would anyone go EE when they could go CS and make 2-3x more. In other countries, these degrees were paid similar so there is a larger pool to pull from then in America.
You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer
My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.
H1B and offshore jobs can be beneficial to America though, and that was why the program started. Sufficient guardrails just never went up and now there is opportunity for some abuse. But that abuse isn't across the board, there is still beneficial H1B and offshoring going on mixed in with abuse.
How would that work if the remote people were employed by a different company that was given a contract by the home company to provide certain pieces of software or specific computing services?
My best effort, the contract is a red herring, we only care about the company that employs the abroad remote employees which is the contractual company in this case. If that contractual company is also abroad, we tax (tariff?) the contract.
But but but I was told that unions will force employers to retrain folks instead of laying them off.
And they are good at it.
Remote work makes that easier now, but with silicon / EE its not always the most optimal way to work.
Middle America EE is also not building data center class chips or infrastructure most of the time, would it be easier to get one of them up to speed, yes. But it's the equivalent of throwing a front-end engineer into C or embedded programming or vice versa.
There are many negative externalities of mass migration that are borne by the locals while benefits mostly accrue to a handful of... shysters.
A benefactor decided to solve the housing crisis, created a development company. Gave up 2 years later. Stating the legal burden to get permits was the biggest financial obstacle. We are ready to build from the start, 2 years later we still couldn't build and spend most of our capital in lawyers in hope to get any approval.
So, I am not sure if that housing argument alone makes that a better outcome for America (and workers).
I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.
If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).
Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.
Obviously supply matters most but that doesnt mean demand isnt still a significant factor.
Would you say that supply and demand share some kind of economic relationship?
I think it’s pretty clear that Immigration has a direct strain on housing. It’s been a big problem in Canada too. Of course if you just keep building to increase the supply, that would be desirable.
What are some of the other "many negative externalities" you mention?
I feel like we could have the best of everything if you we just built more housing to keep up with demand.
Look at how people vote with their wallets: there is an enormous demand for housing in places like Brooklyn. That doesn't mean we need to turn the whole nation into Brooklyn, but I think (given the massive demand) why shouldn't we have a few more places like Brooklyn, i.e. dense urban areas?
Most places in the US have a remarkably low population density; we can definitely greatly expand the housing supply with a little infill and still have lots of suburbs.
Sorry, what now?
I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.
I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!
Offshoring to, say Poland or Portugal on the other hand...
For example see https://theenterpriseworld.com/offshore-development-centers/ where they are listing well established locations for (US) offshoring.
For the first time in my life I'm seeing high-income earners as a big drag on society.
That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.
The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.
It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.
Now apply that same line of thought to AI.
If you put yourself in the shoes of people in other nations, then... a) individuals might really like the option of emigrating to the U.S., but b) their nation might be better off with them staying at home. Interests conflict. The question is whether we should have selfish policies (such as putting a company's bottom-line ahead of a nation's, or one nation's development ahead of another) or not, and, of course, which is is which because one could argue that the only ones being selfish are the Americans who object to all these visas (I don't think they would be the _only_ ones being selfish, and arguably the 'nation' exists in part to protect its citizens, but yes, this is a case of selfishness).
Ok? Are we all supposed to maintain a consistent view with this group of people? I don't understand your point.
Now, I can totally see that maybe draining our adversaries' brains can be a good thing, unless it's a way of bringing in a fifth column, in which case... no. And it's definitely not good for countries we're on good terms with -- there that "win the talent war" comment shocks the conscience as a thoughtless, unnuanced, jingoist-but-dumb, and immoral/destructive as to our allies comment.
Consistency was not the issue. The question was: what has changed that so few seem to care about brain drain as a negative externality?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009507
Compared to having someone move to the US, does hiring a remote worker help or hinder the US economy?
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/05/12/g-s1-12...
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
I guess I did not express it well, but I wanted to highlight that "the economy" and "the people" are not in opposition. "The economy" is a vague term that usually approximates something like "the material well being of everyone in aggregate." There are lots of other things one might value besides material well being, but "the people" and the "the economy" and not opposed forces.
Obviously how wealth is distributed is a hugely important factor, which a "good" economy does not necessarily take into account.
Wealth inequality is a well defined economic measure and I see no reason why one couldn't use it as a yardstick when evaluating an economy, same as we use the unemployment, inflation, GDP, median household income, and so on. And indeed many economists do use it, and there are many well regarded books and papers that examine wealth distribution.
I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.
The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.
I think wealth distribution should be allowed to freely float within a large range, but at extremes it may have bad effects. You don't want a communist regime that tries to enforce complete equality, nor do you want a Russian style oligarchy where a few control almost all the wealth. US is heading towards the latter.
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
I mean, we don't really need that west coast comp either? If I was pulling my old FAANG comp here in Spain, I'd be in the top 0.1% of earners...
It's also a vicious cycle: high tech salaries in those areas have driven up the cost of living.
The prices in Madrid/Barcelona are not exactly far off already (through no fault of high tech salaries).
As for non-protected roles, global market participation has ups and downs.
The scarcity issue is valid when the resource is limited. In case of US, I was not aware of food scarcity. Even housing is more due to policies than actual land scarcity.
Economic activity does have positive feeback. Yes, some people get unfairly rich - but the solution is not to stop the activity, instead try to get the rich pay their fair share of contribution to the country.
A local working a restaurant will often need to take advantage of welfare. If instead we funneled the locals to higher paying jobs, we would be better off. We're supposed to look after our own citizens, afterall --that's the whole point of electing a government.
What of one of the employees at the restaurant had your job, and they bought food there? Or are you declaring only you can do your job?
As for buying multiple houses, I'm sure the wider population is happy with foreigners buying rental properties.
You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.
As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.
Who is in the mansion and who is in the slum?
The government exists for the general welfare and and economic system that subsidizes idleness because the disingenuous say "look over there, its a net positive" while ignoring the externalized cost borne by the taxpayer is just theft from the taxpayer.
You made an analogy!
> system that subsidizes idleness
You’ve genuinely lost me. What does this have to do with this thread?
Green cards? Companies pay for these applications. The applicants pay taxes. For this particular group, they're notoriously net tax payers.
As for idleness, if you lose your job your lose your visa and–I think–your green-card application.
There are legitimate complaints about all of this. These aren't among them.
Is it really just a matter of empire-building, at the end of the day? That can't last. Management realizes that, right?
1. Remote within the US. You still need valid work authorization;
2. Remote outside the US. This is just offshoring and if it really worked, every tech jobs would be offshored. Companies have been trying to do this for decades. Companies would love nothing more than to offshore every white collar job. They would if they could.
Is it meant as a rhetorical reply to the officials as in "aha, but Microsoft will prevail and make it even worse for you, American workers" or as a reply to the workers: "don't fret, move back to your country and work the same job anyway". Or was it meant as a hint for the officials "don't forget to close that loophole as well"?