A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it).
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids.
The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
> It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model...
Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers.
† Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
That's right. It is in fact advantageous in many ways for companies to prefer H-1B, they have far more control over those workers than they would over americans. They can even be worse than an american and you would prefer it if you were the type of employer who prioritizes control of their workforce over excellence.
But it's not like if the employee gets nothing out of this bargain. The company in exchange sponsors the visa. It's not unreasonable that they get a minimum number of years of work from the employee in exchange.
This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
If you have a high skill role and aren't willing to pay for those skills, it's natural you have a "shortage of workers". But, the problem is just the pay.
The normal fix for companies that can't afford to hire, is to let them go broke.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.
Yeah, a salary-based allocation would cut through a lot of the noise. If a company really needs top-tier talent and is willing to pay for it, fine... That’s very different from using H-1Bs as a way to fill mid-level roles at below-market rates while locking people into visa dependency
H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card.
Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely.
I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.
> But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes.
Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.
Except this isn't about H1B this is about the PERM process for EB2/EB3 greencards.
The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
"You can only stay in the country if you're sponsored by an employer" creates an environment where workers have low bargaining power, decreasing the pressure for good working conditions (e.g. high pay), which – among other things – has impacts on the working conditions for locals. One might say it "affects what the market will sustain" (personally, I don't think calling everything a "market" is insightful).
From a purely economic perspective, the ideal is no borders, and total freedom of movement – but, of course, there are reasons that people don't want that: the real world doesn't run on economics. Pretty much all of these measures are compromises of some description, with non-obvious (and sometimes delayed) consequences if you start messing about with them. Most arguments involving "$CountryName jobs for $Demonym!" ignore all that, and if that leads to policy decisions, bad things happen. (That's not to say there's no way to enact protectionist employment policies, but you'd need to tweak more than just the one dial if you wanted that to work.)
> Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
Could be filled by an American, sure.
Is the American willing to do the work? Probably not...
This is not a uniquely American problem.
In tech, I've always felt it was hard to hire Americans because it seems there's such a push for degrees in business/law etcetera as opposed to engineering.
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious.
The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work.
This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
I can't help but expect throwing yet more bureaucratic rules and control at the problem will only make it worse.
We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.
I think we should get rid of H1B altogether. We have EB1 and EB2 for exceptionally talented individuals (and other programs for post-docs, J-visas, L1-visa for companies transferring their own people around, etc.).
Applying the American immigration standard that only a small percentage of immigrants can come from one nation to H1Bs might change the situation as well and keep with our priority that immigration should be from diverse countries.
> It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
This is still true, right?
Overall, the only hard requirement of the H1B seems to be "can you hold down a job 100% of the time, until you choose to depart or receive a green card?" It is quite hard to think of other requirements that are possible to implement at scale, but I do wonder.
The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
It's not strictly about the money. (Though it is absolutely also about that)
> Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Herein lies the problem. This gives employers absolutely massive leverage over the employees, which lets them coerce things like ridiculous unpaid overtime and downright abuse.
Even if you pay the same nominal salary, the H-1B is "cheaper" if you can force them to work 60-80h whereas a top-class American is just going to demand 40h weeks. (Though in practice, those extra hours rarely see increased productivity, so whether it's actually cheaper for outputs obtained is up for debate.)
Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
> Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens.
Then why did my wife's friends that lost their H-1B jobs have to leave America?
American citizens don't face deportation with job loss.
Also, as a US citizen, I'm free to quit my job anytime I want. If I don't like putting up with my job because of some bullshit my employer pulls, I can easily leave. That is absolutely not the case for sponsored workers.
H-1B workers are stressed out and paranoid about their employment. They'll put up with far more, for far longer, with less compensation.
I work (in Europe) for an American company. All the people in IT we hire in USA are foreigners, they are cheaper. You cannot say it is discrimination on wages because everyone is paid low. The visa system allows the company to pay low wages and hiring foreigners is just a small detail in the scheme.
Anecdotal statistic, in my department all the people in US and Canada hired in the past 10-15 years are from Africa or India. The only Americans or Canadians are the managers, they joined 20-30 years ago and slowly retiring, now being replaced mostly by Indians.
It is happening the same in Western Europe, just with a different demographic.
> Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it.
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
You could also "solve" these problems by cutting every social service. That's the only reason H1-Bs are willing to work for less, because their country doesn't invest nearly as much into them.
People seem to have a moral problem with cutting social services, I wonder why this doesn't go both ways when hiring foreign nationals who can only work because their country doesn't.
They don't even have to be foreign red states have been supplying silicon valley with cheap labor for decades. If you want the pure solution you would have to block hiring from these states too, not just H1B. Do you really want to exploit someone who was taught that the earth is 6000 years old and will also have to uproot their live when they are fired?
You can try to classify underprivileged workers and scale compensation based on their class, but any mistakes would lead to unfair wages. The real solution is to increase the standard of living in developing countries and decrease the standard of living in advanced countries starting with relatively wealthy people. Your solution is just a weird soft ban that implicitly buys into the propaganda that there are genius H1B workers when we all know why companies hire them.
So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.
It's crazy. We have some job openings. 500 applications each. 95% of them are people who did their undergraduate in India and graduate degree in America. My interviews this week have been 9/10 people with thick accents, terrible answers, not sure what the hell is going on.
Is it HR, is it the leadership directing HR? No idea, but it feels like the company is shooting itself in the foot. Especially a growing company where these jobs are high responsibility and require a lot of initiative. I just don't see it happening with these candidates. Getting a simple point across takes long enough.
>It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
Then work for a body shop for 1/4 the billing rate in Arizona, Lansing or whatever. You can get a better gig at Burger King.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
Outsourcing needs to be eliminated. If the company is doing 20% of their business in Ohio, 20% of their workforce needs to be in Ohio. 12% in NY State, 12% of the workers need to be in NY State etc.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
Of course. Suppose one month NY had a surge in sales and Ohio had a slump. The company should therefore fire several Ohionian workers and hire several New York. So on every month.
So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface.
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
> Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
For some reason those stupid racist citizens don't want to compete with the whole world in a borderless economic zone. Thankfully we have wise corporations to subvert democracy for the better.
What’s evil about the current situation is that the system tries to have it both ways: bring in cheap foreign labor, but in such a way that makes it easy to exploit them and hard for them to become permanent residents or citizens.
If the country’s goal was really to avoid direct competition with people outside its borders, you wouldn’t deliberately import so many of them, and you’d also take steps to prevent businesses from depending so much on undocumented immigrant labor.
Now, you might say that you don’t agree with the government’s position on all these things, but in that case you ought to be more in line with the comment you replied to.
>But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
The spirit of the law is that this should not be your intent---that your intent should be to fill the job requirements, not to hire a particular person.
See for example a recent lawsuit accusing Tesla of running a systemic, ongoing scheme to replace or exclude US citizens in favor of H-1B visa employees.[1][2]
> Tesla prefers to hire these candidates [H-1B workers] over U.S. citizens, as it can pay visa-dependent employees less than American employees performing the same work, a practice in the industry known as “wage theft.”
> At the same time Tesla applied for these visa applications, it laid off more than 6,000 workers across the United States. On information and belief, Tesla laid off these workers, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens, so that it could replace them with non-citizen visa workers.
> The email also bluntly stated that the Tesla position was for “H1B only” and that “Travel history/i94 are a must” (i.e., proof of legal entry into the U.S.).
Yup and it's also worth mentioning that wage theft is the largest source of theft in the United States. Employers steal more wages from employees than shoplifting or basically any other form of theft, combined. Wage theft makes up 4x more theft than the next largest, which is larceny.
To anybody playing attention it's very clear SV tech vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local. It has been this way for multiple decades now (and gets worse every year.) I don't see this changing any time soon. Sure they get the occasional slap on the wrist, but the wage suppression saves them way more money over time.
> vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
Foreign workers are cheaper because you can use their visa to extort them. If they get whiny about pay, you threaten to fire and deport them.
It's really that simple. SV likes foreign workers BECAUSE SV salaries are high. Businesses will do literally anything to save a few cents, at any cost.
There are enough qualified domestic candidates. Your bosses don't want them because domestic workers demand wages that fit domestic cost of living. Foreign workers can be extorted into accepting much less than a domestic worker will.
This is all very simple and straightforward. Your big mistake here is in assuming that capitalism is fundamentally moral or logical. It is not. Literally only one thing matters and it's maximizing profit at any cost.
Nope, Infosys and friends aside, in SV companies would rather hire green card holders and US citizens because you have to sponsor the H1B/park and get a L-1, and sponsor the green card process. You just can’t ignore foreign talent, otherwise you’ll miss out on an incredible number of good employees
It’s not just that. It is also that people will do unsafe and unethical things to avoid being sent (back) to India. If it were only outsourcing it wouldn’t be dominated by Indians.
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
This is the wrong logic. Immigrants can make exactly the same as natives and still suppress wages.
Fundamentally how prices are set is someone sets a price, and if there are no takers they change the price. If a company offers a salary, and they bring in an H1-B to fill the role, they don't have to raise the salary. Over time it suppresses the wage.
Yes, but because the H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude. That forced loyalty, more than the salary, is the real draw.
I don't think wages are suppressed because immigrant tech workers make less money. Instead, It seems like the effect of the dramatically increased supply of workers would dominate, effectively lowering wages; i.e., you can pay less money for a job the more workers there are to take the job.
If you look at the total cost of an employee and not just an annual salary, then the fact that they have far less mobility makes them cheaper. Why hire the person who will bail when you mistreat them so you have to spend all that time and money finding someone new when you can have someone who risks deportation if they decide they are done with your bullshit.
I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
Instead of having job openings posted by those who don't want them found what if people posted willingness to work, perhaps in some sort of registry. That way a company would have to prove that none of the people willing to work are qualified. I'm sure many qualified people would be open to moving.
Yes, something like this would be great. You could tie the registry to both IRS and SSA databases ensuring a) the job hunters are real, and b) the jobs offered are (eventually) real. It would also be great to carve an exception into liability law and require employers to give feedback to workers about a rejection. I'm sure this leaves lots of room for malefactors on all sides, but it would handle the biggest flaws of the current system.
At the very least, if you want an H1-B, companies should be forced to post the secret jobs on a standardized, embarrassingly public database. Think MLS, but for jobs.
Please don't post in this inflammatory style on HN. You've set off a whole flamewar – nearly 100 comments so far – with many of the comments debating the definition of racism. This is the last thing we need here.
The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
In the past, having to work with Indians from firms like Cognizant or HCL is pretty much torture. Instead of working with 2-3 Americans, you get stuck working with 10-20 Indians who dont know jack shit about shit.
Thankfully the company recently nuked their contracts and brought everything back on shore because of how much of a shit show dealing with those companies is lol. Literally tens of millions of dollars wasted.
Im kinda convinced that's their entire business plan. They lure these mega companies with omg "skilled labor" and having to pay them less, sign XX-XXXM contracts, 2-3 years go by and these mega corpos finally see how shit it is and just cancel them. HCL and Cognizant make money still regardless.
I have seen this myself. I have also experienced more than a few Indian colleagues who were far more critical of Indians in management than the rest of us were. I feel like there is an extra layer of dynamics that just isn't apparent if you are not accustomed to seeing it.
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
I made the mistake once of insinuating the reason no else was complaining about current conditions was that everyone else was on a visa. That was pretty much the end of my job there. Which only made me more confident in my opinion in the end.
Yup. You see this when any org hires a top exec externally: they bring their trusted lieutenants/golf buddies and push out the old brass, and then this repeats down the chain when these hires do the same.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
Thanks, was actually my main question on reading the article. "Why go to all that effort if an American will accept the job for the same pay and you don't have to deal with sponsorship?" This seems like one of the most likely reasons. Racism's been mentioned, yet leverage over employees who have very little other alternative seems somewhat more likely. American's will just leave and go look for another job. Probably much larger chance of having them lateral to a different company also.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination (by skin color, name or something else, I'm not sure) by other Indian managers and execs.
funny question, I believe we're more precisely talking about Brahmin "upper" caste hiring only from their caste. Muslims don't even come into the picture...
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
I wouldn’t say it’s people ‘preferring’ it. The fact is, finding people that are competent enough to be hired is easier through referrals than other ways. And if you are receiving referrals, why wouldn’t you put them through the hiring process to see if they’re talented enough to hire? Rejecting those because they share the same race as the hiring manager is itself racist (since it would be taking race/ethnicity as a factor). In most big companies the hiring process has enough checks and balances to prevent nepotistic hires anyways (for example hiring panels or bar raisers or whatever).
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.
> What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent?
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
You really think nobody in the continental US can do good work in tech? You will have to fight really hard to convince me that all the talent is non existent.
Why is hiding the jobs necessary? I applied for one of these jobs years ago.
The recruiter told, "I have no idea how you applied for this job, but its not available for you. let me have you interview a different, but similar, role."
What was I supposed to do other than say, "ok! Send over the other job description."?
Because they'd gave to commit outright fraud with no plausible deniability if they have to hide US Citizens applications for jobs they've earmarked for current immigrant employees' PERM. Hiding the jobs gives them deniability.
If Apple and Meta have had to pay $38 million for engaging in these practices I don't understand why they used the subtle "chronically-online" dig against people trying to expose it:
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
What the… Yeah, I’m with you on that one. “We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling chronically onlines seeing if we’re obeying federal law!”
The Hill stays afloat by laundering political operative and rat-fucking articles. Politico to a lesser extent, but similar. Read those two sites with suspicion. Always.
Personal anecdote: I hired an exceptional H-1B worker to a role while I worked in SF, but was legally required to first advertise their role in 2 places. We put it in a 2am TV spot and a Modesto newspaper ad. But the whole thing was a legally required farce. We already knew from months of aggressive sourcing that no other qualified candidates existed - in fact we were over the moon to hire this person.
I don't get it - if you were aggressively sourcing for months, presumably advertising your job via normal channels, wouldn't that already satisfy the requirement for perm?
I keep seeing annecdotes about exceptional one of a kind talent, world class PhDs etc. I think we can all agree that majority of H1Bs we work with are not those people. They are regular devs without exceptional skills (not saying no skills, just nothing especially unique). There are thousands laid of, qualified US workers that can fill those roles. You can't convince me that we have such lack of talent in tech today that massive amounts of h1bs have to be brought in.
We were advised by our counsel that as part of applying for the H-1B on this person’s behalf, the ads were needed.
Since the advice was given in a clear way and was very procedural, I treated it as necessary, did as told, and moved on to work that has actual impact as fast as possible.. I had actually forgotten about this until now. Hence banal.
I think the hill is trying to create a narrative here. The law specifically states to post job postings in newspapers and it is congress's fault if they have not updated the laws.
As per PERM regulations (20 C.F.R. §656.17):
For professional positions (those requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher), the employer must conduct two Sunday newspaper advertisements in a newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment.
For non-professional positions, at least one Sunday ad is required.
Instacart sent a cease and desist for trademark violation. You cannot become a middleman for random businesses/services. Kind of similar to how doordash and others got into trouble by hijacking restaurants' order flow without consent.
Finally, someone in this thread says this. Thank you!
This opinion column from The Hill is written by a Fox News contributor. Of course it’s going to leave out certain inconvenient facts in service of a nativist agenda. The HN community time and time again shows that they are ready to be whipped up into an anti-immigrant frenzy at the drop of a hat.
Freedom of movement of labour is the principal reason unions and the British labour party had significant brexit support: the view was that EU labour migration was designed to reduce bargaining power.
I can't say if that's true or not, but it does suggest that the best path out for tech workers in the US might be to unionise. Because hateful though it is, and I remain a steadfast "remainer" .. brexit happened.
If you don't like H1B rules, organise. But bear in mind who you will be associating with promoting a closed labour market.
Plays both ways. As many British kids denied low barrier entry to Europe suffer as people who saw their job value defended. And, cheap EU/shengen labour was just replaced by non EU equivalents, driving the British right wing faragists even crazier. It also dis-incented the French to stop migration transit across the channel in boats. So, Labour cost dilution happened anyway. And small business tanked with market access losses.
All of this could affect the USA. Sales of US sw and service, access to European CDN and DC markets could dry up, and startup culture see less interest in product in the wider market, as H1B displaced workers "back home" carry American models into their domestic VC market.
Tbh, I think that's less likely to work. People (not me I hasten to add, I'm past the age) want to move to an idea of America they grow up with, and VC friendly economics don't export well: people outside America hate failure.
I guess I'm saying current WH policy doesn't favour the "open market" side of this, regarding non US market access and there will be a consequent reaction in those non US markets to American labour and ideas.
For some visa types, companies are obligated to prove that they advertised the position to American citizens. Failed, hence they needed the foreigner.
This is a huge dealbreaker for campus hires, and specifically masters/PhDs who are, well, by definition, specialized in their field and hence very rare.
So you recruit at her graduation the girl who has done groundbreaking research in deep neural nets and is the key to one of your big projects. She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans).
Now what? You know that there is nobody else on the planet that has done this research, yet you have to start recruiting for this position for Americans.
What is the incentive you have as a company to pour a ton of resources on this effort? Recruiting is very expensive. Time is also very expensive when you are at the forefront of innovation.
And what percentage of H-1Bs are these PhDs with groundbreaking research backgrounds? The vast majority of the H-1Bs are hired by a handful of consulting firms (mostly indian) to do mundate SWE/IT jobs that don't require any special skills but a few months of bootcamp.
Also, don't forget that truly exceptional researchers can self-file for green-card using national interest waiver categories: EB1NIW, EB2NIW don't require employee sponsorship.
How does the green card solve my problem as an employer? Should I also force them to get married with Americans so that they have better chances of working for me?
I just want to sponsor a visa for a worker of rare qualifications. If they choose to become permanent residents of the US it’s their choice, and frankly none of my business.
> According to the Justice Department, the companies absurdly required applicants to submit applications by mail [...] How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
I always wondered how they made sure no one applied to the position they wanted the H1B to fill
We have already decided that we want to be a multi-cultural society in the US, so we impose immigration caps from each country. We should do the same from H1Bs. All of the smart people can't honestly be in just one or two countries. H1Bs should have their total limit also have a percentage allowed from a country requirement.
From experience: big tech has to post jobs to US citizens before it can hire on a visa or sponsor a green card. So the trick is to put an ad in a physical news paper and present that as evidence.
I recall there being a proposal to prioritize H1Bs based on salary, which would at least lessen or eliminate the race to the bottom and stuff like people training their lower paid replacements
Corporate crimes punishment is a real joke in the US. Meta/FB was fined a couple of million dollars for the same type of violations of temp work visa. I'm sure, it didn't even register on their bottom line.
We need to put execs behind bar, before they'll ever respect labor or competition laws.
I agree. Corporations excel at finding ways to disperse authority and accountability to do illegal things, sometimes intentionally, sometimes simply by letting the natural corporate incentives play out -- "oh, look, this department didn't fully understand the situation"... to which the follow up question is "Ok, but _who_ designed the departments? They seem pretty good at maximizing profit, so why can't they also manage to comply with the law?"
I see lots of good ideas about changing the selection process. Another option is to change is to change the new hire process and require employers to advertise every recent H1B hiring decision for 60 days, including job description and resume. Then a native with an equal or better resume, and a willingness to fill the role, can raise their hand and offer to replace that person. If a native with a better resume is denied, then it is a cause for action against the employer (ideally a fine paid to the applicant that would at least fund further search time). Repeated violations would result in wholesale revocation of H1B access.
Or just require H1B workers to be paid above average (by some factor) for the position. Average pay for <workplace> is 50k? If you want a foreign worker, you must pay them at least (eg.) 1.2x the average, so 60k. This solves the problem of abuse (since they'll probably find a local for 55k), and solve the genuine need for foreign workers in areas where there are not enough locals (eg. touristy areas needing tourist workers) ... at a bit higher price of course.
Perhaps that would work, but I'm not so sure. I don't think the employers we're talking about are sensitive to a 20% price premium. And they might find the additional leverage H1B gives them over the employee to be worth the premium anyway. My proposal would give natives a chance to get a real job (not a ghost posting) that was given to a real person (the H1B person), and simply take their place.
Employers already have to publish H1-B applications, including wages (but not personal information of the applicants, which would be a very bad idea to publish).
Fun fact: the payout from the meta settlement they reference works out to there being less than 4,000 members of the eligible class. Otoh getting a large check is always a pleasant surprise. I kept the letter cause it’s a huge amount
Let me play the devil advocate here:
- first, I don’t think the measures they put in place are unreasonable: publishing on newspapers, mailing your application instead of emailing or using online forms may feel outdated, but they are all standard practice in other countries. You cannot say you don’t know how to mail(!) or that reading newspapers is beneath your dignity, especially if you need a job!
-second, what is wrong with free competition on the job market between US- and non-US citizens? Competition is good for the business, isn’t it?! It should be a competition on qualification and wage, not races, your skin color or some rubber stamp on a paper. Protecting domestic workers by artificially restricting competition risks creating complacency, higher costs, and slower growth.
- I hear you say: but it’s our country! We (or our parents) paid tax to build it. Yes, but if companies hire non-US employees, they will pay good tax, rent housing, spend in local economies, and contribute to Social Security and Medicare, too, while often receiving less in return.
- many foreign students already invest heavily in the U.S. by paying high tuition and living expenses, without subsidies. This is not charity; it’s a deliberate transfer of wealth into American universities and communities. Denying them a fair chance to compete for jobs means taking their money while closing the door to long-term participation, which is both unfair and economically wasteful.
- intentionally barring foreign talent to artificially inflate wages for domestic workers undermines U.S. competitiveness. High labor costs without corresponding productivity gains make companies sluggish and less adaptive to global competition. The U.S. became great by being open to talent and ideas from everywhere, reversing that openness risks slow growth and stagnation.
The real solution is domestic reform, not exclusion, for example by redistributing wealth more fairly through tax reforms that ensure the rich contribute proportionally.
America grew strong by opening its doors to talent and competition. Shutting out qualified foreign workers to protect wages may feel safe in the short run, but in the long run it weakens our economy, breeds complacency, and wastes the very investment we’ve already taken from those who studied and contributed here. If we want Americans to compete better, fix student debt and inequality at home, but don’t impede the nation by closing the market to global talents.
The problem is the inconsistencies. Fine, if a company wants to source talent from a news paper, great! But to only make postings in hard to find places, away from where the 'good' talent looks is bad.
The problem is its not a free competition. I applied for one of these jobs 2 years ago, but a company was trying to sponsor a green card for an internal employee. The recruiter said I can't interview for that team, but I could interview for another similar, but different role. These companies aren't even offering interviews for these jobs!
> many foreign students
Schools limit how many people can attend. Foreign students take seats away from American students. These programs deny American students a chance to compete for American jobs before they even start college. An American student, rejected from Stanford, will not have as strong of a job application as the foreign Stanford graduate.
Maybe the foreign student was more qualified and wasn't an affirmative action case. Maybe the university doesn't select % of students to be foreign to help subsidize the costs of american students. I don't know.
> intentionally barring foreign talent to artificially inflate wages for domestic workers undermines U.S. competitiveness
Sure, but the Americans here don't really care about American competitiveness - they care about their inflated wages! The biggest thing they fear is that American wages will become more in line with the rest of the world.
And to be fair, the American tech industry is still doing pretty well in spite of the enormous wages. Probably because America is such a friendly environment for startups.
That is what everyone is asking for though. As you can see from the complaints in the thread, people are angry about jobs going to immigrants in the US. The alternate is for jobs to go to immigrants abroad, i.e. offshoring. It appears that people are generally happier about the latter.
That's an editorial point, not a substantial one. Obviously requiring an application be submitted by an inconvenient and antiquated method that isn't used by the demographic in question is going to create friction and reduce the number of applications.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
It also has the effect of making the job posting seem fake, or like a scam, because who in their right mind would believe META, who has their own, in-house operated, online job application portal, would require a job application to be mailed in.
I'm not complaining about the substance, but the tone feels weirdly disdainful of the people impacted across the whole thing. It almost feels like the author was assigned this topic & overall goal, but hates the people she's writing about.
> However, in order for applications for permanent residency to be successful, companies must certify their inability to find a suitable American candidate to take the position they’re looking to fill with a foreign national
I mean, you know, if you already have an employee working on H1B, why would you take the risk to hire someone else to replace them? The perm process is pretty broken in that way.
Or companies could, you know, train people to fill permanent positions instead of claiming permanent positions are temporary and acting shocked when they aren't.
I understand and sympathize with the interest in keeping American jobs for Americans first, if there aren't enough to go around. Generally makes sense. I feel the same way about my kids chances of getting into a good state college (increasingly difficult when you're competing against kids from the whole world).
But it's the height of stupidity to employ ICE "thugs" to hunt down and round up poor laborers doing jobs that most Americans don't want to do, while letting big companies hire lots of foreigners on H1Bs for SWE jobs, while at the same time you have Americans graduating from college and unable to find jobs.
The US should get rid of ICE and drop the H1B program altogether -- (maybe with some narrow exceptions and not even sure about that). For exceptionally talented people wanting to work in the US there's the EB1 and EB2 programs. That would both largely solve the "illegals are taking our jobs!" problem and stop us acting like some 3rd world police state with masked police acting like the Stasi.
If the hiring process is dishonest, wouldn't that be a good sign to avoid them as a potential employer?
I know I'm out here in my own space capsule, but it seems like a non-sequitur. Again, perhaps this is my own bias speaking, but wouldn't you prefer to solve your own business problems as an entrepreneur, rather than battle to be employed by someone who has the intent to screw you, so that you might have the privilege to solve biz problems for them? In both cases you have problems, but only one gives you autonomy.
Alternatively, you might look towards employers who want you and do not desire to screw you.
That's the real reason for the job market crisis; it is not AI, it's just corporate greed to have borderline slaves to lower job wages and workers willing to work extra hours for peanuts. AI is just the scapegoat, easy to blame it on something that's still new while also milking investors' money by promising how it will reduce costs and increase profits. If the job market crisis were really from AI, not only should it happen within a few years of adopting such new tech, but we should see its impact on other industries like lawyers, medical doctors, administrators, and lastly on tech workers, not the other way around.
That's why I keep saying and repeating: the tech industry and especially the engineering one should be further regulated and restricted just like other professions out there, otherwise, you are only allowing anyone to scam and game the system with any potential bubble currently happening.
The only requirement for H1B should be that you must get your degree in the United States. H1B’s should not be given out otherwise. It would solve almost all current shortcomings of the program
Many h1bs get masters degrees in the USA, b/c they are lower cost than undergrad, can be done online/remotely, and are higher chance of winning the lottery.
I don't think requiring a US degree would impact even half the candidates.
There's another thing happening which people haven't really heard much about, which is basically ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments. And so people that previously would never have filed something like a discrimination lawsuit can now use ChatGPT to understand how to respond to managers' emails and proactively send emails that point out discrimination in non-threatening manner, and so in ways that create legal entrapment. I think people are drastically underestimating what's going to happen over the next 10 years and how bad the discrimination is in a lot of workplaces.
That's all well and good, but anyone who does this will likely just be terminated asap without cause, possibly as a part of a multi-person layoff that makes it appear innocuous.
That’s not quite right. To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year. Most people can’t afford a lawyer to manage that. But if you’re a regular employee, you can use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently. With diligent, organized evidence, you absolutely can build a case; the hard part is proving it, and ChatGPT is great at helping you gather and frame the proof.
> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
Essentially, they want to hire a specific person, while the law requires that they post the job and prefer American citizens, so they don’t want American citizens to apply not that they prefer foreign workers in general they just have a specific candidate in mind.
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
If they had someone specific in mind the usual method is to have their resume next to you when you write up the job app. Make the requirements perfectly match their skills. Now you can say when you picked them that they were the best candidate all along.
I think it’s lot tricker for the large companies that tend to hire H1B visa holders to do this, because a manager would need to convince the HR department to violate the law, and the company might be concerned the risks involved are not a good idea if enough candidates apply.
Plus, there seems to be some indicator tha the job you are applying is an H1B position and they are posting them on sites for Americans to apply too. So it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of highly qualified idealogue’s applying to jobs they never wanted in the first place and reporting them to the government when they get rejected.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea to try and manipulate the system with the current government’s willingness to go after companies.
If they’ll go after a US ally like Hyundai for using ESTA under the VWP illegally, when Hyundai could probably have easily applied for and been granted B-1 visas. Can you imagine what they would do to a company illegally sponsoring H1B visas?
That's one of several tactics. But if someone did apply and was close enough, you still have to do the interview and reject song and dance. Better to deter applications in the first place.
Old news. This has been going on for decades. If you even look badly on youtube you will find corporate videos from "HR Consultants" teaching companies how to bury job listings so noone will be likely to find them.
Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
For those curious, a common method is to publish the job listing in the newspaper classifieds.
This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.
Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.
There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..
A newspaper of record is in theory something you are “supposed” to continually read, but it’s kind of like saying you’re “supposed” to know all the laws of the land. While probably true, no one actually can or would do that.
I've also seen this done when the hiring manager, or someone else in the process, already has a candidate to hire and needs to post the job listing for legal cover.
> Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
We could also give them a clear, short path to citizenship if we didn't have enough. Instead we do our best to keep it as chaotic as possible so that those SWE we need can't push for 175/225k
How about we stop centralizing tech talent around 7 big companies that hire H1Bs, and instead let all companies engage in international (and domestic) exchanges of labor and services? Aka, all software engineers now self organize into small groups funded by independent contracts from larger companies.
This solves many, many problems, including where should laborers live, fairness in interviews, etc.
> Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
This is not true now, if it ever was (maybe for very short periods); there is tremendous competition for every good SWE job out there, and has been for a long time.
This is a sorry excuse. If companies were required to hire American students, they would have a strong incentive to foster the development of American talent. It would not be a problem.
> Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
The idea that Americans wouldn't fight tooth and nail for these jobs is just idiotic.
The thing this article didn't mention and the author likely doesn't know is that there's a guide going around instructing people on how to apply for H1B jobs on forums like 4chan.
Semi-related: reminds me of reports that public tenders in Russia had to be submitted into a central portal according to law, but to prevent anyone from finding them, various Unicode tricks would be applied to the document to replace characters and prevent effective searching.
Please don't post in an inflammatory style or make swipes at the HN community. We don't know what "a large portion of HNers" think about any topic. Controversial topics bring out the people who feel the strongest about that topic, but the people commenting are only a tiny share of the whole community. Your point about the different reactions people have to different kinds of immigration controversies is valid, but topics like this need to be discussed with sensitivity.
Please take care to observe the guidelines when commenting here, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The immigration raid and what was happening at these plants is 100% different…not sure how you can even pretend they are the same. The system they are discussing is one where you’ve already been in the US legally for 6 years.
Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
The US has been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The result of trying to wall out competition is not going to be jobs for Americans. The result will be what happened to the American automotive industry, the American electronics industry, etc. They could not deliver competitive products at competitive prices and the various "Buy American" advertising campaigns were ignored by American consumers. Your Nintendo Switch, your Samsung SSDs and smartphones, your Hynix RAM, your Toyota cars, etc. are all proof of that. And it's much, much easier to for a competitor to create a new developer job opening overseas than construct a physical factory.
> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs.
They already do though. Do you own any items made in other countries? If so, you’re competing with other workers already. It seems weird to focus on immigrants workers in America versus citizens in America while importation is allowed at all. I find all of this also very much in conflict with HN’s anti tariff attitude.
The best jobs are with large corporations with offices all over the world. Workers from all over the world are competing with each other, regardless of the Kafkaesque state of American immigrant policy.
The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.
I assume they would try to venue-shop for somewhere Anti-SLAPP protections are much weaker. Maryland and Virginia look particularly bad, for example (but IANAL).
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).
Yeah, I think people mistake country and geographic area. The US is the 300+ million people that build and apply systems and institutions within an area, not the area itself. Coming to the conclusion that people here are interchangeable with people anywhere else and should constantly have to earn their place is fundamentally divorced from reality.
Posted more info in a separate thread, but our latest req had 500 applicants. 95% from India with their grad degree in America. I spent 10 hours his week trying to do technical interviews with people I could barely understand. F me.
If we were to separate all jobs into categories like most-preferable, least-preferable, and a few other buckets in the middle of those, would the H1Bs be evenly distributed among them?
What percentage are they of the top (preferable) quintile of jobs? Are they just 0.5% of those, or are they more like 4% of those? Is it higher still?
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
"On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens."
This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).
Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.
The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
This is the bigest misconception that H-1B is meant to hire the best. It is NOT. Foreign H-1Bs are typically rank-and-file employees to take mid-level jobs en masses. The best and brightest cannot go through H-1B due to oversubscription and resulting lottery. Thus the best and brightest are using different visa types like O-1 and self-apply for green cards using EB1/EB2 National Interest Waivers.
I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).
A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it).
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids.
The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
> It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model...
Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers.
† Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
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That's right. It is in fact advantageous in many ways for companies to prefer H-1B, they have far more control over those workers than they would over americans. They can even be worse than an american and you would prefer it if you were the type of employer who prioritizes control of their workforce over excellence.
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But it's not like if the employee gets nothing out of this bargain. The company in exchange sponsors the visa. It's not unreasonable that they get a minimum number of years of work from the employee in exchange.
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This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
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Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
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If you have a high skill role and aren't willing to pay for those skills, it's natural you have a "shortage of workers". But, the problem is just the pay.
The normal fix for companies that can't afford to hire, is to let them go broke.
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> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.
> starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
Nobody has a _right_ to cheap labor! Not attracting enough talent? Offer more!
Yeah, a salary-based allocation would cut through a lot of the noise. If a company really needs top-tier talent and is willing to pay for it, fine... That’s very different from using H-1Bs as a way to fill mid-level roles at below-market rates while locking people into visa dependency
H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card.
Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely.
I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.
> But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes.
Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
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What are the disadvantages of the points system? In what ways do companies abuse it?
Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.
What is the problem with green cards?
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Except this isn't about H1B this is about the PERM process for EB2/EB3 greencards.
The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
"You can only stay in the country if you're sponsored by an employer" creates an environment where workers have low bargaining power, decreasing the pressure for good working conditions (e.g. high pay), which – among other things – has impacts on the working conditions for locals. One might say it "affects what the market will sustain" (personally, I don't think calling everything a "market" is insightful).
From a purely economic perspective, the ideal is no borders, and total freedom of movement – but, of course, there are reasons that people don't want that: the real world doesn't run on economics. Pretty much all of these measures are compromises of some description, with non-obvious (and sometimes delayed) consequences if you start messing about with them. Most arguments involving "$CountryName jobs for $Demonym!" ignore all that, and if that leads to policy decisions, bad things happen. (That's not to say there's no way to enact protectionist employment policies, but you'd need to tweak more than just the one dial if you wanted that to work.)
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> Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
Could be filled by an American, sure. Is the American willing to do the work? Probably not...
This is not a uniquely American problem.
In tech, I've always felt it was hard to hire Americans because it seems there's such a push for degrees in business/law etcetera as opposed to engineering.
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Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious.
The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work.
This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
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Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
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I can't help but expect throwing yet more bureaucratic rules and control at the problem will only make it worse.
We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.
I think we should get rid of H1B altogether. We have EB1 and EB2 for exceptionally talented individuals (and other programs for post-docs, J-visas, L1-visa for companies transferring their own people around, etc.).
Applying the American immigration standard that only a small percentage of immigrants can come from one nation to H1Bs might change the situation as well and keep with our priority that immigration should be from diverse countries.
> It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
This is still true, right?
Overall, the only hard requirement of the H1B seems to be "can you hold down a job 100% of the time, until you choose to depart or receive a green card?" It is quite hard to think of other requirements that are possible to implement at scale, but I do wonder.
The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
It's not strictly about the money. (Though it is absolutely also about that)
> Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Herein lies the problem. This gives employers absolutely massive leverage over the employees, which lets them coerce things like ridiculous unpaid overtime and downright abuse.
Even if you pay the same nominal salary, the H-1B is "cheaper" if you can force them to work 60-80h whereas a top-class American is just going to demand 40h weeks. (Though in practice, those extra hours rarely see increased productivity, so whether it's actually cheaper for outputs obtained is up for debate.)
Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
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> Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens.
Then why did my wife's friends that lost their H-1B jobs have to leave America?
American citizens don't face deportation with job loss.
Also, as a US citizen, I'm free to quit my job anytime I want. If I don't like putting up with my job because of some bullshit my employer pulls, I can easily leave. That is absolutely not the case for sponsored workers.
H-1B workers are stressed out and paranoid about their employment. They'll put up with far more, for far longer, with less compensation.
I work (in Europe) for an American company. All the people in IT we hire in USA are foreigners, they are cheaper. You cannot say it is discrimination on wages because everyone is paid low. The visa system allows the company to pay low wages and hiring foreigners is just a small detail in the scheme.
Anecdotal statistic, in my department all the people in US and Canada hired in the past 10-15 years are from Africa or India. The only Americans or Canadians are the managers, they joined 20-30 years ago and slowly retiring, now being replaced mostly by Indians.
It is happening the same in Western Europe, just with a different demographic.
> No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.
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Econ 101: increased supply lowers prices (wages).
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> Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it.
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
Why?
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This is an absolutely perfect and extremely simple solution.
But people would have to implement it. Sorry.
You could also "solve" these problems by cutting every social service. That's the only reason H1-Bs are willing to work for less, because their country doesn't invest nearly as much into them.
People seem to have a moral problem with cutting social services, I wonder why this doesn't go both ways when hiring foreign nationals who can only work because their country doesn't.
They don't even have to be foreign red states have been supplying silicon valley with cheap labor for decades. If you want the pure solution you would have to block hiring from these states too, not just H1B. Do you really want to exploit someone who was taught that the earth is 6000 years old and will also have to uproot their live when they are fired?
You can try to classify underprivileged workers and scale compensation based on their class, but any mistakes would lead to unfair wages. The real solution is to increase the standard of living in developing countries and decrease the standard of living in advanced countries starting with relatively wealthy people. Your solution is just a weird soft ban that implicitly buys into the propaganda that there are genius H1B workers when we all know why companies hire them.
So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.
It's crazy. We have some job openings. 500 applications each. 95% of them are people who did their undergraduate in India and graduate degree in America. My interviews this week have been 9/10 people with thick accents, terrible answers, not sure what the hell is going on.
Is it HR, is it the leadership directing HR? No idea, but it feels like the company is shooting itself in the foot. Especially a growing company where these jobs are high responsibility and require a lot of initiative. I just don't see it happening with these candidates. Getting a simple point across takes long enough.
It's HR. HR should just be headhunting, handled externally to the company. Legal can handle the rest.
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Everybody has an accent. If you wish to hire accent-less people, you’d have no one to hire.
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>It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
Then work for a body shop for 1/4 the billing rate in Arizona, Lansing or whatever. You can get a better gig at Burger King.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
Or you tariff work done offshore and work done by foreigners onshore. We do that for manufacturing and agriculture, why not tech?
I have no problem with giving the job to someone overseas but they can do that on their home turf.
Outsourcing needs to be eliminated. If the company is doing 20% of their business in Ohio, 20% of their workforce needs to be in Ohio. 12% in NY State, 12% of the workers need to be in NY State etc.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
Of course. Suppose one month NY had a surge in sales and Ohio had a slump. The company should therefore fire several Ohionian workers and hire several New York. So on every month.
So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface.
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
It's still picking someone for the job when there might be other qualified workers who are fit for the job, but you're not even giving them a chance.
The whole point of the system is that you shouldn't do this, and you legally can't.
So it really is as nefarious as it seems.
> Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
For some reason those stupid racist citizens don't want to compete with the whole world in a borderless economic zone. Thankfully we have wise corporations to subvert democracy for the better.
What’s evil about the current situation is that the system tries to have it both ways: bring in cheap foreign labor, but in such a way that makes it easy to exploit them and hard for them to become permanent residents or citizens.
If the country’s goal was really to avoid direct competition with people outside its borders, you wouldn’t deliberately import so many of them, and you’d also take steps to prevent businesses from depending so much on undocumented immigrant labor.
Now, you might say that you don’t agree with the government’s position on all these things, but in that case you ought to be more in line with the comment you replied to.
Some call it subverting the tyrrany of the majority.
>But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
The spirit of the law is that this should not be your intent---that your intent should be to fill the job requirements, not to hire a particular person.
You're basically saying you think breaking the law is okay, because you don't agree with it.
The problem is, a lot of people don't agree, and would rather have your former employer prosecuted for the fraud.
Isn’t it funny that in the past the only thing you had to do was simply show up?
> anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
I agree. There's 8 billion people in the world and we should let them into the US if they really want to be here.
The process forces everyone to act like they are
"The "hacker ethos" seems to be in decline, for any number of interconnected reasons"
See for example a recent lawsuit accusing Tesla of running a systemic, ongoing scheme to replace or exclude US citizens in favor of H-1B visa employees.[1][2]
> Tesla prefers to hire these candidates [H-1B workers] over U.S. citizens, as it can pay visa-dependent employees less than American employees performing the same work, a practice in the industry known as “wage theft.”
> At the same time Tesla applied for these visa applications, it laid off more than 6,000 workers across the United States. On information and belief, Tesla laid off these workers, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens, so that it could replace them with non-citizen visa workers.
> The email also bluntly stated that the Tesla position was for “H1B only” and that “Travel history/i94 are a must” (i.e., proof of legal entry into the U.S.).
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71325887/taub-v-tesla-i...
[2] https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/lawsuit-say...
FYI to anyone reading this, this is not what wage theft means. Wage theft is an employer not paying wages they owe to an employee.
Yup and it's also worth mentioning that wage theft is the largest source of theft in the United States. Employers steal more wages from employees than shoplifting or basically any other form of theft, combined. Wage theft makes up 4x more theft than the next largest, which is larceny.
Americans are waaaay too corporation friendly.
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To anybody playing attention it's very clear SV tech vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local. It has been this way for multiple decades now (and gets worse every year.) I don't see this changing any time soon. Sure they get the occasional slap on the wrist, but the wage suppression saves them way more money over time.
> vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
Foreign workers are cheaper because you can use their visa to extort them. If they get whiny about pay, you threaten to fire and deport them.
It's really that simple. SV likes foreign workers BECAUSE SV salaries are high. Businesses will do literally anything to save a few cents, at any cost.
There are enough qualified domestic candidates. Your bosses don't want them because domestic workers demand wages that fit domestic cost of living. Foreign workers can be extorted into accepting much less than a domestic worker will.
This is all very simple and straightforward. Your big mistake here is in assuming that capitalism is fundamentally moral or logical. It is not. Literally only one thing matters and it's maximizing profit at any cost.
Nope, Infosys and friends aside, in SV companies would rather hire green card holders and US citizens because you have to sponsor the H1B/park and get a L-1, and sponsor the green card process. You just can’t ignore foreign talent, otherwise you’ll miss out on an incredible number of good employees
It's just outsourcing training/education (again, the first wave already happened circa 2009-2013).
It’s not just that. It is also that people will do unsafe and unethical things to avoid being sent (back) to India. If it were only outsourcing it wouldn’t be dominated by Indians.
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> the wage suppression
Do immigrants earn less than locals?
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
This is the wrong logic. Immigrants can make exactly the same as natives and still suppress wages.
Fundamentally how prices are set is someone sets a price, and if there are no takers they change the price. If a company offers a salary, and they bring in an H1-B to fill the role, they don't have to raise the salary. Over time it suppresses the wage.
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Yes, but because the H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude. That forced loyalty, more than the salary, is the real draw.
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I don't think wages are suppressed because immigrant tech workers make less money. Instead, It seems like the effect of the dramatically increased supply of workers would dominate, effectively lowering wages; i.e., you can pay less money for a job the more workers there are to take the job.
If you look at the total cost of an employee and not just an annual salary, then the fact that they have far less mobility makes them cheaper. Why hire the person who will bail when you mistreat them so you have to spend all that time and money finding someone new when you can have someone who risks deportation if they decide they are done with your bullshit.
I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
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Instead of having job openings posted by those who don't want them found what if people posted willingness to work, perhaps in some sort of registry. That way a company would have to prove that none of the people willing to work are qualified. I'm sure many qualified people would be open to moving.
Yes, something like this would be great. You could tie the registry to both IRS and SSA databases ensuring a) the job hunters are real, and b) the jobs offered are (eventually) real. It would also be great to carve an exception into liability law and require employers to give feedback to workers about a rejection. I'm sure this leaves lots of room for malefactors on all sides, but it would handle the biggest flaws of the current system.
At the very least, if you want an H1-B, companies should be forced to post the secret jobs on a standardized, embarrassingly public database. Think MLS, but for jobs.
The fact that Instacart threatened legal action against jobs.now is proof that you're correct
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Please don't post in this inflammatory style on HN. You've set off a whole flamewar – nearly 100 comments so far – with many of the comments debating the definition of racism. This is the last thing we need here.
The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
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That’s extremely racist to assume that Indian execs are all D tier or worse.
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There are also Indians who loathe being on such teams and actively seek diverse meritocratic teams, as one of those Indians.
In the past, having to work with Indians from firms like Cognizant or HCL is pretty much torture. Instead of working with 2-3 Americans, you get stuck working with 10-20 Indians who dont know jack shit about shit.
Thankfully the company recently nuked their contracts and brought everything back on shore because of how much of a shit show dealing with those companies is lol. Literally tens of millions of dollars wasted.
Im kinda convinced that's their entire business plan. They lure these mega companies with omg "skilled labor" and having to pay them less, sign XX-XXXM contracts, 2-3 years go by and these mega corpos finally see how shit it is and just cancel them. HCL and Cognizant make money still regardless.
I have seen this myself. I have also experienced more than a few Indian colleagues who were far more critical of Indians in management than the rest of us were. I feel like there is an extra layer of dynamics that just isn't apparent if you are not accustomed to seeing it.
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> It's extremely racist
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
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I made the mistake once of insinuating the reason no else was complaining about current conditions was that everyone else was on a visa. That was pretty much the end of my job there. Which only made me more confident in my opinion in the end.
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Yup. You see this when any org hires a top exec externally: they bring their trusted lieutenants/golf buddies and push out the old brass, and then this repeats down the chain when these hires do the same.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
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It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
Thanks, was actually my main question on reading the article. "Why go to all that effort if an American will accept the job for the same pay and you don't have to deal with sponsorship?" This seems like one of the most likely reasons. Racism's been mentioned, yet leverage over employees who have very little other alternative seems somewhat more likely. American's will just leave and go look for another job. Probably much larger chance of having them lateral to a different company also.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
Out of curiosity, do they favor hiring Indians in general, or Hindu Indians in particular. (To the exclusion of Muslim Indians)
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination (by skin color, name or something else, I'm not sure) by other Indian managers and execs.
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funny question, I believe we're more precisely talking about Brahmin "upper" caste hiring only from their caste. Muslims don't even come into the picture...
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
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that is definitely part of it
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Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.
I wouldn’t say it’s people ‘preferring’ it. The fact is, finding people that are competent enough to be hired is easier through referrals than other ways. And if you are receiving referrals, why wouldn’t you put them through the hiring process to see if they’re talented enough to hire? Rejecting those because they share the same race as the hiring manager is itself racist (since it would be taking race/ethnicity as a factor). In most big companies the hiring process has enough checks and balances to prevent nepotistic hires anyways (for example hiring panels or bar raisers or whatever).
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
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This is why DEI is so important. It’s a blunt tool, but still a tool, to short circuit the basic human desire to be within their network.
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Do you see them selectively picking based on the caste of the Indian?
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What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.
> What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent?
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
You really think nobody in the continental US can do good work in tech? You will have to fight really hard to convince me that all the talent is non existent.
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Why is hiding the jobs necessary? I applied for one of these jobs years ago.
The recruiter told, "I have no idea how you applied for this job, but its not available for you. let me have you interview a different, but similar, role."
What was I supposed to do other than say, "ok! Send over the other job description."?
> Why is hiding the jobs necessary?
Because they'd gave to commit outright fraud with no plausible deniability if they have to hide US Citizens applications for jobs they've earmarked for current immigrant employees' PERM. Hiding the jobs gives them deniability.
I’m not sure why. Because they’re usually at salaries that you wouldn’t accept. Like paying 30% below market rate.
Is instacart a lowballer employer? levels.fyi suggests software engineers at L3 are getting 222k
"You have just committed visa fraud and I am calling a labor lawyer"
That would force a career change to become a political grifter. Might work for you, but not for many.
“What do you mean it’s not available to me?”
They don't have to answer this. The lady told me the job posting was in a "weird system" and quickly moved the conversation to other open roles.
If Apple and Meta have had to pay $38 million for engaging in these practices I don't understand why they used the subtle "chronically-online" dig against people trying to expose it:
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
What the… Yeah, I’m with you on that one. “We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling chronically onlines seeing if we’re obeying federal law!”
The whole thing seems to oddly disdainful of the people being impacted:
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
To "use" a post office?
What like... any... other... store or building where you walk in, perform an action, and leave?
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I feel like there was a lot of nonsense ideas for what is such a short, and supposedly journalistically rigorous article
The Hill stays afloat by laundering political operative and rat-fucking articles. Politico to a lesser extent, but similar. Read those two sites with suspicion. Always.
It’s much more banal than it seems.
Personal anecdote: I hired an exceptional H-1B worker to a role while I worked in SF, but was legally required to first advertise their role in 2 places. We put it in a 2am TV spot and a Modesto newspaper ad. But the whole thing was a legally required farce. We already knew from months of aggressive sourcing that no other qualified candidates existed - in fact we were over the moon to hire this person.
I don't get it - if you were aggressively sourcing for months, presumably advertising your job via normal channels, wouldn't that already satisfy the requirement for perm? I keep seeing annecdotes about exceptional one of a kind talent, world class PhDs etc. I think we can all agree that majority of H1Bs we work with are not those people. They are regular devs without exceptional skills (not saying no skills, just nothing especially unique). There are thousands laid of, qualified US workers that can fill those roles. You can't convince me that we have such lack of talent in tech today that massive amounts of h1bs have to be brought in.
We were advised by our counsel that as part of applying for the H-1B on this person’s behalf, the ads were needed.
Since the advice was given in a clear way and was very procedural, I treated it as necessary, did as told, and moved on to work that has actual impact as fast as possible.. I had actually forgotten about this until now. Hence banal.
Reminds me of the shenanigans you see when a govt job is required to be posted for open bid, but the dept already has an internal hire lined up.
I think the hill is trying to create a narrative here. The law specifically states to post job postings in newspapers and it is congress's fault if they have not updated the laws.
As per PERM regulations (20 C.F.R. §656.17):
For professional positions (those requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher), the employer must conduct two Sunday newspaper advertisements in a newspaper of general circulation in the area of intended employment.
For non-professional positions, at least one Sunday ad is required.
I don't understand how that justifies Instacart suing the organization that is reposting the job ads in a more accessible way.
Instacart sent a cease and desist for trademark violation. You cannot become a middleman for random businesses/services. Kind of similar to how doordash and others got into trouble by hijacking restaurants' order flow without consent.
Finally, someone in this thread says this. Thank you!
This opinion column from The Hill is written by a Fox News contributor. Of course it’s going to leave out certain inconvenient facts in service of a nativist agenda. The HN community time and time again shows that they are ready to be whipped up into an anti-immigrant frenzy at the drop of a hat.
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Freedom of movement of labour is the principal reason unions and the British labour party had significant brexit support: the view was that EU labour migration was designed to reduce bargaining power.
I can't say if that's true or not, but it does suggest that the best path out for tech workers in the US might be to unionise. Because hateful though it is, and I remain a steadfast "remainer" .. brexit happened.
If you don't like H1B rules, organise. But bear in mind who you will be associating with promoting a closed labour market.
That tension between protecting labor rights and promoting open markets is real
Plays both ways. As many British kids denied low barrier entry to Europe suffer as people who saw their job value defended. And, cheap EU/shengen labour was just replaced by non EU equivalents, driving the British right wing faragists even crazier. It also dis-incented the French to stop migration transit across the channel in boats. So, Labour cost dilution happened anyway. And small business tanked with market access losses.
All of this could affect the USA. Sales of US sw and service, access to European CDN and DC markets could dry up, and startup culture see less interest in product in the wider market, as H1B displaced workers "back home" carry American models into their domestic VC market.
Tbh, I think that's less likely to work. People (not me I hasten to add, I'm past the age) want to move to an idea of America they grow up with, and VC friendly economics don't export well: people outside America hate failure.
I guess I'm saying current WH policy doesn't favour the "open market" side of this, regarding non US market access and there will be a consequent reaction in those non US markets to American labour and ideas.
You can find jobs that corporations tried to hide on jobs.now: https://www.jobs.now/
>Should the system rely so heavily on asking out-of-work Americans to act as goalies — if or when they happen to have the time?
A zinger of a concluding line if ever there was one.
For some visa types, companies are obligated to prove that they advertised the position to American citizens. Failed, hence they needed the foreigner.
This is a huge dealbreaker for campus hires, and specifically masters/PhDs who are, well, by definition, specialized in their field and hence very rare.
So you recruit at her graduation the girl who has done groundbreaking research in deep neural nets and is the key to one of your big projects. She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans).
Now what? You know that there is nobody else on the planet that has done this research, yet you have to start recruiting for this position for Americans.
What is the incentive you have as a company to pour a ton of resources on this effort? Recruiting is very expensive. Time is also very expensive when you are at the forefront of innovation.
And what percentage of H-1Bs are these PhDs with groundbreaking research backgrounds? The vast majority of the H-1Bs are hired by a handful of consulting firms (mostly indian) to do mundate SWE/IT jobs that don't require any special skills but a few months of bootcamp.
Also, don't forget that truly exceptional researchers can self-file for green-card using national interest waiver categories: EB1NIW, EB2NIW don't require employee sponsorship.
So, I think your point is moot.
How does the green card solve my problem as an employer? Should I also force them to get married with Americans so that they have better chances of working for me?
I just want to sponsor a visa for a worker of rare qualifications. If they choose to become permanent residents of the US it’s their choice, and frankly none of my business.
The system we have is insane.
For every job like that, there's 100 jobs that are "Write basic Java CRUD app against RDBMS backend"
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> She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans)
Is this not by itself a problem?
Americans don’t go to graduate school.
With a bachelors in an engineering field as an American you can be making close to 6 figures the day after you graduate.
With a huge student debt and the clock ticking, do you get a job or do you join a PhD program to get a stipend of 25k/year for at least 5 years?
Grad school becomes attractive to Americans only during recessions.
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> According to the Justice Department, the companies absurdly required applicants to submit applications by mail [...] How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
I always wondered how they made sure no one applied to the position they wanted the H1B to fill
We have already decided that we want to be a multi-cultural society in the US, so we impose immigration caps from each country. We should do the same from H1Bs. All of the smart people can't honestly be in just one or two countries. H1Bs should have their total limit also have a percentage allowed from a country requirement.
From experience: big tech has to post jobs to US citizens before it can hire on a visa or sponsor a green card. So the trick is to put an ad in a physical news paper and present that as evidence.
I recall there being a proposal to prioritize H1Bs based on salary, which would at least lessen or eliminate the race to the bottom and stuff like people training their lower paid replacements
Corporate crimes punishment is a real joke in the US. Meta/FB was fined a couple of million dollars for the same type of violations of temp work visa. I'm sure, it didn't even register on their bottom line.
We need to put execs behind bar, before they'll ever respect labor or competition laws.
I agree. Corporations excel at finding ways to disperse authority and accountability to do illegal things, sometimes intentionally, sometimes simply by letting the natural corporate incentives play out -- "oh, look, this department didn't fully understand the situation"... to which the follow up question is "Ok, but _who_ designed the departments? They seem pretty good at maximizing profit, so why can't they also manage to comply with the law?"
Fun fact: Meta was fined 57 minutes of revenue for these practices.
I see everyone is for maximizing shareholder value until they are reminded they are workers first.
I see lots of good ideas about changing the selection process. Another option is to change is to change the new hire process and require employers to advertise every recent H1B hiring decision for 60 days, including job description and resume. Then a native with an equal or better resume, and a willingness to fill the role, can raise their hand and offer to replace that person. If a native with a better resume is denied, then it is a cause for action against the employer (ideally a fine paid to the applicant that would at least fund further search time). Repeated violations would result in wholesale revocation of H1B access.
Or just require H1B workers to be paid above average (by some factor) for the position. Average pay for <workplace> is 50k? If you want a foreign worker, you must pay them at least (eg.) 1.2x the average, so 60k. This solves the problem of abuse (since they'll probably find a local for 55k), and solve the genuine need for foreign workers in areas where there are not enough locals (eg. touristy areas needing tourist workers) ... at a bit higher price of course.
Perhaps that would work, but I'm not so sure. I don't think the employers we're talking about are sensitive to a 20% price premium. And they might find the additional leverage H1B gives them over the employee to be worth the premium anyway. My proposal would give natives a chance to get a real job (not a ghost posting) that was given to a real person (the H1B person), and simply take their place.
Employers already have to publish H1-B applications, including wages (but not personal information of the applicants, which would be a very bad idea to publish).
Fun fact: the payout from the meta settlement they reference works out to there being less than 4,000 members of the eligible class. Otoh getting a large check is always a pleasant surprise. I kept the letter cause it’s a huge amount
Let me play the devil advocate here: - first, I don’t think the measures they put in place are unreasonable: publishing on newspapers, mailing your application instead of emailing or using online forms may feel outdated, but they are all standard practice in other countries. You cannot say you don’t know how to mail(!) or that reading newspapers is beneath your dignity, especially if you need a job!
-second, what is wrong with free competition on the job market between US- and non-US citizens? Competition is good for the business, isn’t it?! It should be a competition on qualification and wage, not races, your skin color or some rubber stamp on a paper. Protecting domestic workers by artificially restricting competition risks creating complacency, higher costs, and slower growth.
- I hear you say: but it’s our country! We (or our parents) paid tax to build it. Yes, but if companies hire non-US employees, they will pay good tax, rent housing, spend in local economies, and contribute to Social Security and Medicare, too, while often receiving less in return.
- many foreign students already invest heavily in the U.S. by paying high tuition and living expenses, without subsidies. This is not charity; it’s a deliberate transfer of wealth into American universities and communities. Denying them a fair chance to compete for jobs means taking their money while closing the door to long-term participation, which is both unfair and economically wasteful.
- intentionally barring foreign talent to artificially inflate wages for domestic workers undermines U.S. competitiveness. High labor costs without corresponding productivity gains make companies sluggish and less adaptive to global competition. The U.S. became great by being open to talent and ideas from everywhere, reversing that openness risks slow growth and stagnation.
The real solution is domestic reform, not exclusion, for example by redistributing wealth more fairly through tax reforms that ensure the rich contribute proportionally.
America grew strong by opening its doors to talent and competition. Shutting out qualified foreign workers to protect wages may feel safe in the short run, but in the long run it weakens our economy, breeds complacency, and wastes the very investment we’ve already taken from those who studied and contributed here. If we want Americans to compete better, fix student debt and inequality at home, but don’t impede the nation by closing the market to global talents.
The problem is the inconsistencies. Fine, if a company wants to source talent from a news paper, great! But to only make postings in hard to find places, away from where the 'good' talent looks is bad.
The problem is its not a free competition. I applied for one of these jobs 2 years ago, but a company was trying to sponsor a green card for an internal employee. The recruiter said I can't interview for that team, but I could interview for another similar, but different role. These companies aren't even offering interviews for these jobs!
> many foreign students
Schools limit how many people can attend. Foreign students take seats away from American students. These programs deny American students a chance to compete for American jobs before they even start college. An American student, rejected from Stanford, will not have as strong of a job application as the foreign Stanford graduate.
Maybe the foreign student was more qualified and wasn't an affirmative action case. Maybe the university doesn't select % of students to be foreign to help subsidize the costs of american students. I don't know.
> intentionally barring foreign talent to artificially inflate wages for domestic workers undermines U.S. competitiveness
Sure, but the Americans here don't really care about American competitiveness - they care about their inflated wages! The biggest thing they fear is that American wages will become more in line with the rest of the world.
And to be fair, the American tech industry is still doing pretty well in spite of the enormous wages. Probably because America is such a friendly environment for startups.
Didn't Apple used to post job openings in small local newspapers in the Midwest?
Has anyone started to think that tech industry in the USA is going the way of the manufacturing industry?
And by that I mean mostly gone/offshored?
That is what everyone is asking for though. As you can see from the complaints in the thread, people are angry about jobs going to immigrants in the US. The alternate is for jobs to go to immigrants abroad, i.e. offshoring. It appears that people are generally happier about the latter.
I mean it's six of one half a dozen of another to an American who lost their job.
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
Ok, come on, this is just an insulting "kids these days" throw-away line that is absolutely not necessary.
That's an editorial point, not a substantial one. Obviously requiring an application be submitted by an inconvenient and antiquated method that isn't used by the demographic in question is going to create friction and reduce the number of applications.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
It also has the effect of making the job posting seem fake, or like a scam, because who in their right mind would believe META, who has their own, in-house operated, online job application portal, would require a job application to be mailed in.
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I'm not complaining about the substance, but the tone feels weirdly disdainful of the people impacted across the whole thing. It almost feels like the author was assigned this topic & overall goal, but hates the people she's writing about.
Doubley stupid because the task is about mailing a letter, which does not require a post office.
> However, in order for applications for permanent residency to be successful, companies must certify their inability to find a suitable American candidate to take the position they’re looking to fill with a foreign national
I mean, you know, if you already have an employee working on H1B, why would you take the risk to hire someone else to replace them? The perm process is pretty broken in that way.
Or companies could, you know, train people to fill permanent positions instead of claiming permanent positions are temporary and acting shocked when they aren't.
Abolish the H1B. Now.
I understand and sympathize with the interest in keeping American jobs for Americans first, if there aren't enough to go around. Generally makes sense. I feel the same way about my kids chances of getting into a good state college (increasingly difficult when you're competing against kids from the whole world).
But it's the height of stupidity to employ ICE "thugs" to hunt down and round up poor laborers doing jobs that most Americans don't want to do, while letting big companies hire lots of foreigners on H1Bs for SWE jobs, while at the same time you have Americans graduating from college and unable to find jobs.
The US should get rid of ICE and drop the H1B program altogether -- (maybe with some narrow exceptions and not even sure about that). For exceptionally talented people wanting to work in the US there's the EB1 and EB2 programs. That would both largely solve the "illegals are taking our jobs!" problem and stop us acting like some 3rd world police state with masked police acting like the Stasi.
One popular trick was to advertise the jobs in newspapers. The dead-tree edition only.
HN beat The Hill to this story by 5 days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45151086
https://archive.ph/LCAqn
If the hiring process is dishonest, wouldn't that be a good sign to avoid them as a potential employer?
I know I'm out here in my own space capsule, but it seems like a non-sequitur. Again, perhaps this is my own bias speaking, but wouldn't you prefer to solve your own business problems as an entrepreneur, rather than battle to be employed by someone who has the intent to screw you, so that you might have the privilege to solve biz problems for them? In both cases you have problems, but only one gives you autonomy.
Alternatively, you might look towards employers who want you and do not desire to screw you.
We effectively replaced 43 h1b’s with AI. Looking to do more soon.
What's wild is how blatantly some of these tactics skirt the spirit of the law while technically staying within its letter
That's the real reason for the job market crisis; it is not AI, it's just corporate greed to have borderline slaves to lower job wages and workers willing to work extra hours for peanuts. AI is just the scapegoat, easy to blame it on something that's still new while also milking investors' money by promising how it will reduce costs and increase profits. If the job market crisis were really from AI, not only should it happen within a few years of adopting such new tech, but we should see its impact on other industries like lawyers, medical doctors, administrators, and lastly on tech workers, not the other way around.
That's why I keep saying and repeating: the tech industry and especially the engineering one should be further regulated and restricted just like other professions out there, otherwise, you are only allowing anyone to scam and game the system with any potential bubble currently happening.
The only requirement for H1B should be that you must get your degree in the United States. H1B’s should not be given out otherwise. It would solve almost all current shortcomings of the program
Many h1bs get masters degrees in the USA, b/c they are lower cost than undergrad, can be done online/remotely, and are higher chance of winning the lottery.
I don't think requiring a US degree would impact even half the candidates.
Good point, definitely no online/remote, must reside in the US minimum 2 years to qualify
There's another thing happening which people haven't really heard much about, which is basically ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments. And so people that previously would never have filed something like a discrimination lawsuit can now use ChatGPT to understand how to respond to managers' emails and proactively send emails that point out discrimination in non-threatening manner, and so in ways that create legal entrapment. I think people are drastically underestimating what's going to happen over the next 10 years and how bad the discrimination is in a lot of workplaces.
That's all well and good, but anyone who does this will likely just be terminated asap without cause, possibly as a part of a multi-person layoff that makes it appear innocuous.
First call should be to an employment attorney and the EEOC, no matter what, before you sign anything.
https://www.eeoc.gov/how-file-charge-employment-discriminati...
That’s not quite right. To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year. Most people can’t afford a lawyer to manage that. But if you’re a regular employee, you can use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently. With diligent, organized evidence, you absolutely can build a case; the hard part is proving it, and ChatGPT is great at helping you gather and frame the proof.
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> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
Posted my response below, you have no idea how impactful this is going to be
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Essentially, they want to hire a specific person, while the law requires that they post the job and prefer American citizens, so they don’t want American citizens to apply not that they prefer foreign workers in general they just have a specific candidate in mind.
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
If they had someone specific in mind the usual method is to have their resume next to you when you write up the job app. Make the requirements perfectly match their skills. Now you can say when you picked them that they were the best candidate all along.
I think it’s lot tricker for the large companies that tend to hire H1B visa holders to do this, because a manager would need to convince the HR department to violate the law, and the company might be concerned the risks involved are not a good idea if enough candidates apply.
Plus, there seems to be some indicator tha the job you are applying is an H1B position and they are posting them on sites for Americans to apply too. So it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of highly qualified idealogue’s applying to jobs they never wanted in the first place and reporting them to the government when they get rejected.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea to try and manipulate the system with the current government’s willingness to go after companies.
If they’ll go after a US ally like Hyundai for using ESTA under the VWP illegally, when Hyundai could probably have easily applied for and been granted B-1 visas. Can you imagine what they would do to a company illegally sponsoring H1B visas?
That's one of several tactics. But if someone did apply and was close enough, you still have to do the interview and reject song and dance. Better to deter applications in the first place.
Old news. This has been going on for decades. If you even look badly on youtube you will find corporate videos from "HR Consultants" teaching companies how to bury job listings so noone will be likely to find them.
Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
For those curious, a common method is to publish the job listing in the newspaper classifieds.
This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.
Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.
There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..
In Poland a while ago, a basketball club submitted an opening to local labor office, looking for "basketball player with 5 years of NBA experience".
Update: source: https://radioszczecin-pl.translate.goog/1,116784,koszykarze-...
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A newspaper of record is in theory something you are “supposed” to continually read, but it’s kind of like saying you’re “supposed” to know all the laws of the land. While probably true, no one actually can or would do that.
Usually it’s a newspaper in the middle of nowhere too, in fine print, in the classifieds.
I've also seen this done when the hiring manager, or someone else in the process, already has a candidate to hire and needs to post the job listing for legal cover.
> Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
We could also give them a clear, short path to citizenship if we didn't have enough. Instead we do our best to keep it as chaotic as possible so that those SWE we need can't push for 175/225k
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How about we stop centralizing tech talent around 7 big companies that hire H1Bs, and instead let all companies engage in international (and domestic) exchanges of labor and services? Aka, all software engineers now self organize into small groups funded by independent contracts from larger companies.
This solves many, many problems, including where should laborers live, fairness in interviews, etc.
> it is still nowhere near the required amount.
How do you reconcile that with all of the SWE layoffs in the past few years?
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That's an obvious lie. If it were true, companies wouldn't be suing to keep their job postings hidden from American citizens (source: the article)
> Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
This is not true now, if it ever was (maybe for very short periods); there is tremendous competition for every good SWE job out there, and has been for a long time.
This is a sorry excuse. If companies were required to hire American students, they would have a strong incentive to foster the development of American talent. It would not be a problem.
> Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
The idea that Americans wouldn't fight tooth and nail for these jobs is just idiotic.
How dare that loser want a cushy, well paying job. This is America, that's not allowed for them. We like our workers desperate.
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The thing this article didn't mention and the author likely doesn't know is that there's a guide going around instructing people on how to apply for H1B jobs on forums like 4chan.
I've got out of work friends that would love to see this guide. Please share.
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So what if it comes from 4chan? I think it's a good thing for citizens to try and get jobs that should be going to them, no matter the source
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The frustrating part is that this isn't some loophole getting accidentally exploited, it's baked into the system
Semi-related: reminds me of reports that public tenders in Russia had to be submitted into a central portal according to law, but to prevent anyone from finding them, various Unicode tricks would be applied to the document to replace characters and prevent effective searching.
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Please don't post in an inflammatory style or make swipes at the HN community. We don't know what "a large portion of HNers" think about any topic. Controversial topics bring out the people who feel the strongest about that topic, but the people commenting are only a tiny share of the whole community. Your point about the different reactions people have to different kinds of immigration controversies is valid, but topics like this need to be discussed with sensitivity.
Please take care to observe the guidelines when commenting here, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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The immigration raid and what was happening at these plants is 100% different…not sure how you can even pretend they are the same. The system they are discussing is one where you’ve already been in the US legally for 6 years.
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Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://www.h1bsalaries.fyi/
The US has been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The result of trying to wall out competition is not going to be jobs for Americans. The result will be what happened to the American automotive industry, the American electronics industry, etc. They could not deliver competitive products at competitive prices and the various "Buy American" advertising campaigns were ignored by American consumers. Your Nintendo Switch, your Samsung SSDs and smartphones, your Hynix RAM, your Toyota cars, etc. are all proof of that. And it's much, much easier to for a competitor to create a new developer job opening overseas than construct a physical factory.
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> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs.
They already do though. Do you own any items made in other countries? If so, you’re competing with other workers already. It seems weird to focus on immigrants workers in America versus citizens in America while importation is allowed at all. I find all of this also very much in conflict with HN’s anti tariff attitude.
What is the original purpose of H1B visa program? To attract global talent or to reduce the payroll burden of the corporations?
The best jobs are with large corporations with offices all over the world. Workers from all over the world are competing with each other, regardless of the Kafkaesque state of American immigrant policy.
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> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs
Why not?
Also friendly reminder 99.999% of US population is made of immigrants.
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The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.
I assume they would try to venue-shop for somewhere Anti-SLAPP protections are much weaker. Maryland and Virginia look particularly bad, for example (but IANAL).
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).
Yeah, I think people mistake country and geographic area. The US is the 300+ million people that build and apply systems and institutions within an area, not the area itself. Coming to the conclusion that people here are interchangeable with people anywhere else and should constantly have to earn their place is fundamentally divorced from reality.
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That's not the only way you can work in the US. "In 2023 17.9% of employed workers were immigrants"
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percent-of-jobs-in-the-us-...
From your link
Immigrants are defined as foreign-born residents, including those who became US citizens
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Posted more info in a separate thread, but our latest req had 500 applicants. 95% from India with their grad degree in America. I spent 10 hours his week trying to do technical interviews with people I could barely understand. F me.
1% of all jobs is still a huge number of jobs in total terms. Spitball math put's h1b's much lower than that actually, .4 to .5% of all FTE positions.
That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.
If we were to separate all jobs into categories like most-preferable, least-preferable, and a few other buckets in the middle of those, would the H1Bs be evenly distributed among them?
What percentage are they of the top (preferable) quintile of jobs? Are they just 0.5% of those, or are they more like 4% of those? Is it higher still?
Ranges from 20%-80% in tech roles from my experience.
What percent of tech jobs?
Don't have a percentage handy, but these resources are likely useful for your inquiry.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...
https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U...
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
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I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
Yea that's exactly the point I'm making. If they came and paid a high visa payment, then they would not be significantly cheaper.
"On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens."
This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).
Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.
The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
This is the bigest misconception that H-1B is meant to hire the best. It is NOT. Foreign H-1Bs are typically rank-and-file employees to take mid-level jobs en masses. The best and brightest cannot go through H-1B due to oversubscription and resulting lottery. Thus the best and brightest are using different visa types like O-1 and self-apply for green cards using EB1/EB2 National Interest Waivers.
I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).
This will incentivize foreign intelligence services to fund their own market of conveniently cash flush moles.
Ah yes, any foreigner must be a secret agent
This crime has yet to be addressed.
This is hilarious.
It isn't just corporations, its the federal government. The same ones hiding the rampant student rape issue at UIUC Champaign
America is a god awful place. It's time to abandon ship. I intend to get out of this increasingly authoritarian naziesque hellhole.