Every year US absorbs 120k+ H1B+L1+OPT new visa holders. Considering there are 1.9M software engineers, market has to grow by 5% every year just to stand still. Add US graduates and you are talking about 10% growth required just to maintain employment. It's not realistic long term.
Congress/president should pause H1B visas or hike up fee to 200-500K so that only truly exceptional talent are allowed in. Right now it's just give away to corporations that are laying off people by tens of thousands.
1) how many of these people leave the country in this analysis.
2) OPTs likely will get h1b/l1s/leave the country and are being counted distinctly.
3) not all h1b/l1/OPTs are for tech. majority for sure, but there's a conversation factor.
specially in the current situation that green cards are much harder to obtain and many OPTs don't find a job, I expect 1 to be much larger than in the past.
Oh, there's a name for it! I've sometimes been struggling to verbalize in the past the logical issue I perceived with the "immigrants steal are jobs" absolutists, and this is a useful reference.
As far as I understand the $100k fee applies only to consulate issued H1Bs. L1 -> H1B path (via AOS) is possible without fee. (Recent) US university graduates can also use similar path from what I understand.
We will see how much the $100k fee affects things during this H1B lottery round in few weeks.
> Only about 70 employers have paid a $100,000 Trump fee on H-1B workers from outside the US since it was imposed through a September White House proclamation, a government attorney said Thursday.
I think a lot of people have just moved to L1/O1/etc visas to get around it as OP pointed out, although a lot of people are still hiring H1B's. Amazon has applied for over 2000 H1B's so far this year, which puts them on track for ~7000 for the year https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
We have hit the cap for H1B's every year and we will always do so until we get rid of the program. Cheap labor will always be in demand.
A 100k one-time fee is nothing for big employers. That's 25k/year for 4 years, and if you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job it's obviously worth it.
Compare hiring an H1B that is stuck at their job, to an American who can leave at any time. You can pay the H1B a lower wage to compensate for the fee you paid to get them into the role. 25k/year for 4 years is worth it for not only the reduced churn that comes with training a new person, but also you don't have to pay any of the incentives that come with getting a new employee into the role like sign-on bonuses, wage bumps, benefits etc.
There's an X account which just posts universities hiring H1B's for ~half of what it would normally cost to hire people. An 80k/yr senior software developer will always be in demand, especially if the team is already predominantly non-american
Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.
$80k/y isn't "we're paying H1-B half of what the going rate is" but rather "the state legislature has set this pay scale and we're paying everyone that amount" ... And many times, H-1B visas aren't eligible to work in those roles.
> Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.
There's absolutely no reason government couldn't pay competitive rates for software engineers. They do it for doctors and administrators of state-owned medical centers. Not to mention football coaches
Football coaches are revenue generating for universities... software developers at universities not so much. Doctors are licensed professionals that have a decade of schooling... software developers frequently reject licensure and celebrate their lack of a formal education.
But there's no reason they couldn't just pay them more. The way to make them pay more is to force them to hire applicants at market rate, and when that's impossible, they'll go to the state legislature. Allowing for the H1B loophole is the problem universities are too eager to abuse
Exactly. The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue. There IS no reasonable counter argument.
It's supposedly a program for importing the best and brightest talent that doesn't exist in the US but somehow those best and brightest people get paid LESS than their American counterparts? It was never about the best and brightest it was always about bringing in cheap labor that can't leave.
Sadly I don't think we'll ever fix it either, right leaning industrialists support it because they benefit from cheap labor, and the left leaning politicians get to continue importing people who overwhelmingly vote for them. As usual the loser in the equation is the middle class American worker.
How many H1B visa holders become citizens eligible to vote for those "left leaning politicians?"
I don't think having an H1B helps you accelerate your citizenship application in anyway, and for many countries the wait for legal citizenship is decades long.
You didn't answer the question at all. Getting an H1B visa is merely the first step in a very long process towards citizenship. Decades long. For example, if you're from India and you get an H1B, it'll be roughly a decade before you can get a green card. From then you have a mandatory 5 year waiting period before naturalization. And this assumes a normal, functioning immigration process; something we definitely don't have in the US.
This can be sped up if they marry a US citizen, speeding up the process quite a bit, but it will still be several years. Now their children would be citizens, but that's another 18 years before they can vote. Politicians aren't known for playing the long game...
>Politicians aren't known for playing the long game
There are plenty of politicians who have played the long game, also political parties take actions on longer time scales than individual politicians. Stances that politicians take on issues often come down from the party anyway. Many politicians don't care about many issues, but they vote based on their party's stance. The blue party is staffed with all types of people, many of whom will live to reap the benefits of changed demographics.
Heck many politicians are still in office 18 years later! Look at Nancy Pelosi, she was in office for 38 years. That's multiple batches of anchor babies.
It's not that long of an investment. We have seen this entire country go from 99% white in most places to below 50% in most places, in ONE generation and that change is clearly visible in national elections.
I mean just look at the data, it's a story that tells itself. One party does indeed benefit from increasing diversity and they are also the party that coincidentally spends a lot of time working on initiatives to increase diversity.
It seems that you are using the term "Great Replacement" as a tactic to dismiss the argument and all the data by which it is supported because you have no real counter argument.
I also did say that the other side benefits from importing cheap labor. Which is why both parties seem to do very little to slow immigration no matter which is in power, despite overwhelming demand from their constituents to slow immigration.
> The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue.
Except this is literally false. Every single study I’ve seen that claims this has no real evidence - just speculation without knowing the details of the jobs or the people being hired, based on their own self-serving false comparisons to make dubious claims that similar jobs are paid differently.
Since you said “across the board”, do you think Google or Amazon pay a software engineer at the starting level differently based on immigration status? No, they don’t. Literally every manager at big tech could tell you this confidently.
I have worked at Apple for a decade, H1B's absolutely do get paid less. We have many H1B's that literally just sit around and push buttons and file bug reports, and barely know how to code. Some of them can't code at all. Ofc some of them are good engineers, but they are not even in the majority.
There is plenty of data to back this up.
>A total of 60% of all H-1B jobs are assigned wage levels that are well below the local median wage.
The EPI report is one of the commonly cited baseless reports. Dig in a level beyond their press claims and you’ll find no real method behind it that justifies their claims, because they have no actual way to compare one worker to another to know they’re equivalent and comparable for the purpose of compensation.
As for your claims about Apple - I am guessing you aren’t a manager and don’t know about how their pay scale works. I’m not doubting your claims about the quality of some workers - although I bet you’ll find plenty of non immigrant people not doing work as well. But I know the claim on pay is wrong, once you adjust for performance ratings and levels.
We have moved far-away from the notion of a factory work who's labour can easily be traced to the output.
I think in general we have to question what work one does - not in a negative way - I think its healthy to do so. Standard economic models and thinking are pretty dated and don't really reflect reality as the world of work evolves.
H1Bs are not cheap labor. They’re almost always pricier than the alternative to the company. This is a myth that is ultimately rooted in racism more than facts. Most of the top H1B filers - big tech companies in particular - pay literally identically for the same job. They have fixed pay structures internally, in part because if you don’t, you could face discrimination lawsuits - but mostly to just not lose the competition for talent.
But the cost to the company isn’t the cost of the pay anyways. It’s also the cost in lost time of the H1B process, the fees you pay as part of the process, the costs of law firms you have to hire, the cost of time delays, the risk of the immigration process not working out. Those work out to a lot more value than 25K/year.
An H1B is also not stuck in their job - you can transfer H1Bs.
I do not see how the facts you present call into question the basic logic that as you increase the availability of a commodity, say labour, you anticipate its price to diminish. All of the immigrant workers could be better-compensated and more productive than all of the American workers, and still their presence could drive the price of labour for native workers in that sector down. E.g., if there is a shortage of repairmen certified to fix some medical equipment, introducing a glut of new repairmen who are even more productive will fail to reduce the compensation of the incumbents only in exceptional circumstances.
People applying for H1B visas are getting partially compensated in the right to legally reside in the US rather than in money. The right to legally reside in the US is something that a lot of foreigners want badly, and are willing to accept otherwise-poor compensation for; and by definition it is not something you can pay an American citizen with.
Why is the company getting to pay their employee with that legal-residence-value and therefore get a discount on compensation?
The cleaner approach is the immigrant has to pay that value in visa expenses, taxes, or something else; while the company should have to pay market rate for the position.
Like many school systems facing teacher shortages, South Carolina’s Allendale County has looked overseas for help. A quarter of the teachers in the rural, high-poverty district come from other countries.
The superintendent praises the international educators — mostly from Jamaica and the Philippines — for their skill and dedication, but she is preparing to lose some of them as the Trump administration reshapes visa programs.
Facing higher visa sponsorship costs and uncertain immigration policies, Superintendent Vallerie Cave said it feels too risky to extend some international teachers whose contracts are up or bring on others.
So, split out technology careers from H-1B so that they can be regulated with less impact on the other careers that are currently under the H-1B.
The other part would be to properly fund DOL so that they have the resources to inspect H-1B-dependent employers ( https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer ) more carefully and prosecute visa fraud in a more timely manner (note that this also gets to other parts that got struck down with Chevron deference so instead of DOL being able to do things administratively it requires going through the courts).
And yes, I do believe that upping the filing fees for H-1B-dependent employers would be a good thing... and auditing them to make sure that they have a butt in seat position for their employees and aren't hiring to try to make a deeper bench of poorly qualified individuals doing routine tasks that do not require a specialty technology degree.
The current (rather hamfisted) approach to trying to cut back on immigration has knock on effects that are impacting rural and remote parts America to a much greater degree than urban areas.
The current $100K fee doesn’t apply to people changing from a student visa. This was long the path of people in software dev or other high tech careers: get a masters or PhD in the U.S., then get an H1B to start working. For those already on H1B after starting on that path, again the fee does not apply if they want to change jobs and have the new employer sponsor their H1B. So hiking that fee to $200K or more wouldn’t really change things much, at least in tech.
200-500k would make a large negative impact in healthcare. Specialty doctors cannot be trained in a snap, and there are limits on how many MDs and DOs are churned out of schools.
So healthcare industries turn to H1Bs to hire specialty positions in underserved / rural areas. The alternative is to shut these facilities down, which has other negative aspects to communities.
I was surprised to hear in this thread that there is a physician shortage in the US, because my understanding was that most Americans go to university and that doctors are paid well. Why aren't more graduates pursuing careers in medicine?
It turns out that they are, but (if I do not misread the situation) there is a regulatory bottleneck:
>The United States is grappling with a physician shortage, but the solution does not lie in simply opening more medical schools. As a physician-scientist and former founding dean of a medical school, I argue that the true bottleneck is not the number of medical school graduates but the insufficient number of residency training positions. Since the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which froze the number of Medicare-funded residency slots, the United States has seen a steady increase in medical graduates, yet the availability of residency spots has stagnated. This mismatch between undergraduate medical education (UME) expansion and the lack of corresponding growth in graduate medical education (GME) is the key issue.
As this has been the arrangement since 1997, by now a graduated American child of an immigrant H1B specialist trained in a foreign country may be unable to secure a 'residency training position' and therefore unable to practice medicine in his or her own country? It sounds absurd.
Half the Fortune 500 is founded by an immigrant or child of an immigrant. Most of the others rely on immigrants in key positions. Pausing visas or hiking fees up doesn’t protect jobs - it just causes a future decline in the American economy. I think it’s literally cheaper in terms of the country’s future to just pay those who can’t get jobs to take a one-way flight elsewhere, if they’re not able to compete, than to make it harder to get talented people to move here.
So immigrants are in fact taking away the jobs? Do you have the same opinion of illegal immigrants jumping the border and taking jobs from average Americans?
I find this argument extremely funny because when immigrations are taking the white collar jobs, you guys get anti immigrants, tighten the visa stuff, but when blue collar and low level jobs are taken by illegal folks you turn and blind eye and noone is illegal in stolen land login.
I 100% agree that H1B has been extremely abused by folks from specific country running body shop tech consultancies but the solution is not to hike up the fees to 200k-500k.
The 100k fee by Trump admin is already showing effects in the job market. Most companies are not readily sponsoring H1B visa anymore, getting a big tech job as a intl student is already tough and only exceptional ones are getting such jobs.
I honestly don't see that much hypocrisy on this point. People in tech who are supportive of expansive rights for foreigners to immigrate to the US generally ground their argumentation in either claims that it's immoral for the US to limit immigration (the view characterized by the slogan "no one is illegal on stolen land"), or claims that they benefit from immigration even if they are competing for jobs with immigrants. And often the people making these claims are socially adjacent to immigrants in their workplace or other social circles.
Meanwhile, the people in tech who oppose immigration often do bring up the same argument you do - that it's bad to allow immigrants to compete with blue collar American citizen labor even if this competition would make some things that these white-collar tech workers buy cheaper - or ground their opposition to immigration in negative effects of immigrants on American society that aren't directly related to competition for blue-collar jobs (generally, that the presence of large numbers of immigrants has bad cultural or political consequences for the US as a whole).
The political fight over immigration among white-collar tech workers I think has more to do with battling moral claims, or different visions of what the US should look like culturally and politically, than it does over purely-materialist job competition concerns that they are hypocrites about when the job competition is happening to blue-collar workers.
Do not mistake leadership and regular people. Afghanistan president Ghani handed over sovereignty to US too but Afghans disagreed. I am confident that there is significant minority in Kuwait wishing for Iran victory. As a datapoint, there were videos from Bahrain with people cheering for Iranian rockets hitting American bases.
Iraq right now is in roughly the same position as it was when Saddam Hussein was there but in the meantime a few million people died and the country went through a pretty traumatic period.
Estimates put the number of people killed due to the American invasion between half a million and a million. Saddam's brutality paled in comparison to the carnage the US invasion caused.
During the years which followed after the invasion, lots did, yes. This is first hand account btw. Now? I'm not sure as the country has mostly stablised.
is the civilian population being gassed in Iraq now? how about a brutal repressive regime backed by a secret police that tortured and disappeared thousands? is Iraq really the same as it was under Saddam?!!?!?!?!?!??!?!
Why should tech workers care about the small minority of tech workers that make obscene amounts of money? The median dev salary in the US is ~$130k. [1]
Besides that point, I would very much like to get paid over time for being on call. I would very much like a preplanned process that comes to layoffs rather than firing people at random. I would like paid paternity leave.
Always a classic HN post about the rockstar dev willing to fuck over their fellow workers so they can make a quick buck then feign upset over how meaningless their lives are because they devote so much time making capitalists more capital rather than bettering their community.
Why should workers care about productivity growth when income inequality is at its highest levels in the United States? Companies already don't take chances on American workers, hence why companies need so much corporate welfare to stay competitive.
I'm sorry but American workers are getting bad deals, and let's not act like the largest companies in human history can't pay more in taxes to fund training, education, and healthcare for workers.
You're telling people that are fighting for scraps to start fighting over dirt.
My Qs for you are why are you so greedy? Why do you think you deserve so much because of pure luck? Why do you think workers don't deserve a larger share of the pie when the elites and rich have rat fucked this country into having more money than necessary?
European countries with labor regs that make firing more expensive tend to have higher unemployment rates (specially youth unemployment) because hiring becomes more risky.
Cry me a river for the “average” senior developer who as a rule, makes twice the median income of whatever city they live in. It’s called saving money and living below your means. Yes I was a standard enterprise dev for 25 years before 2020 living in a second tier city.
Hey buddy, you may not believe this but helping workers does in fact help everyone. Maybe get out of the crab bucket mentality and help your fellow human, as I'm confident you would want your fellow man to help you when you make the call.
This is a terrible plan to get those devs onboard, and unless your theory is "these companies are idiots who don't know how much to pay for devs" they're still gonna try and find ways to hire them.
Really, it sounds like what you want is the European system where employee protections are so strong that the tech industry is barely willing to hire and is crippled as a result. Layoffs suck but the alternative (turning hiring into a patronage system) is worse.
No, it just sounds like you deeply hate your fellow man which I find profoundly sad. Not wanting to better the lives of people around you and would rather greedily hoard all the resources just shows your lack of humanity.
Sincerely hope you don't treat people around you with this disregard, but seeing how you selfishly only care about yourself I hope they find a new community that loves them more than what you can (or can't) provide.
These folks (in CA at least) have a marginal tax rate in excess of 40%. In the US they are the main payer of federal income tax - income tax that is then mostly used to fund social programs. Double your income and your taxes (at least) double.
But it's not good enough for you, apparently, because the only acceptable way for me to prove I care is to support YOU making more money and being immune to layoffs.
I'm self-interested and freely admit that I like making money because money is nice. You're self-interested but you're pretending this take is for your "fellow man."
If you're a well paid software engineer, you're already incredibly privileged. Most of the world would kill to have that job, but according to you the real unfair part is that companies can choose to pay some people more than you?
Right now is exactly the time when we need to pause issuing new or transferring existing H1B/L1/other work visas for least a year until we know full impact of AI on economy and employment.
Lots of people laid off by Block are on H1B Visas. With transfer they have 60 days to find new role. If they could not find new job in 60 days, they "fake" transfer to "bodyshop" company while they are looking for real work so status does not lapse.
With transfer you have 4k people looking and eligible for new role. With no H1B transfer, less people are looking for work and citizens and green card holders have higher chance to land roles in a few companies still hiring.
Even if you consider 50% of them are H1Bs, and out of them even majority don’t find jobs in 60 days (it’s actually more since they are keeping them on payroll for 5 months) that’s still a low number. Couple with the fact that not all would like to join body shops. I understand your frustration but I don’t think stopping H1B transfers is the solution.
Not really. I expect with AI and increased productivity allure of outsourcing will diminish. You want super productive engineers to be close to product and customers.
Besides if you are looking for work there is very little difference between foreigner on H1B taking the role and role being outsourced to India. Either way you do not have the job.
Coca Cola actually have to run ads to stay relevant. War in Ukraine provided nice experiment - Coca Cola stopped all advertisement in Russia in 2022 and results are in.
- Feb–Mar 2022 (before full production/marketing stoppage): RosIndex reported that 94.3% knew the Coca-Cola brand.
- 2023 (roughly a year after global brands stopped producing in Russia): 88.6% of consumers knew the Coca-Cola brand.
5.7% drop in recognition in one year translates to billions of losses if scaled to US market. So yes, Coca Cola has to constantly run ads.
If Coca-Cola both stopped advertising and stopped officially selling their products (and permitting their import) in the region, then this doesn't prove what you claim it does. Disentangle the two things, and then we can draw some conclusions.
Coca Cola stopped officially selling in Russia but Coca Cola products are widely available due to grey import from other countries (it's present in literally every store - though prices are higher than for local brands).
This is hard to believe without an underlying theory of what's happening. Did teens not know about Coca Cola and are now part of the survey? Was there rural to urban migration?
I have follow-up questions but they'll be much better if there's a source we can talk around.
Literally the first result of a google search for
"RosIndex" coca cola brand recognition in russia
returns this thread... I get 3 results... The next is a PDF (CANnual Report) that mentions "rosindex" but around 2016 and nothing about coke and then just a slideshare. Even the LLMs are returning this thread as the source.
So I have questions, but can we start with the source?
Money are stolen electronically every day - we do not know how to build secure systems. Considering the stakes for national elections (civil war or government instability) good enough is not good enough.
I agree with you on local elections - electronic voting is good enough for town or even state level elections. The stakes are dramatically lower.
Given the relatively low inflation in 2025, I’m skeptical of the claim that consumers bore 96% of the tariff burden. With CPI inflation at 2.7% and roughly $18,000 in goods consumption per person in US, total price increase in goods work out to ~160B. A $200 billion increase in customs revenues would exceed the total price increases attributable to inflation - which makes little sense if 96% of that was paid by consumers. Essentially tariffs did not increase inflation in any meaningful sense which means that somebody else paid the bill - not consumers.
This is a single Walmart and clearly dominated by outlier price swings. No, NPR didn’t make their own CPI. Surely there are other independent price baskets that actually attempt to do this, why choose this article, as interesting as it is?
I am not the one making the original assertion. I was pointing out that it relies on historically trustworthy statistics that the current administration is openly influencing.
Call the NPR methodology a canary or smoke test, if you will. Feel free to grab the brass ring if you want sources that you find more credible.
While consumers are paying for pretty much the entire tariff (according to the article), the volume what they are buying has "collapsed" (according to the article).
Consumers are just buying from other sources (domestically or otherwise) or not buying because it is no longer worth it.
There are a lot of reasons why these tariff's are bad, but economically, it is not a bad thing for people not to buy things they do not need, or to buy them from a domestic producer. Consumer spending actually increased last year, and inflation is low.
At the time it was not clear that GLP-1 solves obesity problem so effectively - many drugs suppress hunger (eg amphetamines), it's just that GLP-1 works long term and does not have significant side effects. Hard to predict without hindsight.
Insulin is injectable so GLP-1 was thought to be at best marginal improvement over already existing protocol - so likely profitable product but not excessively so. Company has limited resources so decisions on cuts have to be made and some of those decisions are naturally wrong - drugs are unpredictable.
On regret - they missed on 30B+ of profits so of cause they regret it.
Congress/president should pause H1B visas or hike up fee to 200-500K so that only truly exceptional talent are allowed in. Right now it's just give away to corporations that are laying off people by tens of thousands.
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