I was thinking about this the other day in the context of the boardwalk town that I vacation in sometimes. There are a lot of college student aged workers who come from Europe for the summer and work in every service industry job imaginable in town. There are agencies that find these European workers and help them find jobs and housing.
It makes me wonder why there aren't more American young adults taking these jobs. I think it would be great fun to live at the beach for the summer. Maybe the wages are too low, or American kids are focused on internships? Or maybe the European workers are better employees? I don't know.
If you're a non-US citizen, I don't believe it's easy to just switch to a different job, which makes it difficult to just exit out of the job you have. US citizens could leave at any point for another job (or no job) if they chose, putting the staffing at the service roles at risk. Just speculating.
It's always seemed odd to me that your employer somehow sponsors your Green Card. It always felt like it should simply be a measure of
A) How long you have been working as an H1B in the united states (say 10 years).
B) How much you have paid in taxes (say 1 million).
Whenever either of the above has occured, you take some citizenship test, and then you have a green card. Nothing to do with your employer dangling something for you, literally a measure of your employment history and/or taxable income.
The reason why is the drafters of immigration law care a lot about US employers (as they are voters, donors and have a big lobby). US employers want to control the green card process so that they have leverage over their employees. If employees can get green cards without the company, they can leave or threaten to leave. If employees need their employer, they can't start the processes until the company assents, and can't leave while its in process. Depending on exact details that can give employers 5 or so more years where the employee is at their mercy.
The vast majority of immigration to the US is based on luck (family, diversity etc.) or misery (asylum, refugee, etc.). That's about 90% immigration. The remaining 10% is employment. Where did you pull the $1M figure out of? Is the Mexican sibling paying $1M in taxes to immigrate here? Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
He's speaking specifically about the green card process, at which point you've already been in the country for a long time and paid into U.S. taxes. Not people who might want to pay money to immigrate here (although for them, the EB-5 visa program exists).
I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.
Any changes to immigration require the legislature. Congress hasn't changed anything in over 30 years, so all this is moot. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It's a bit silly to reason backwards about what the anti-immigrant types want. There is no grounding principle there.
I did go in details in another comment so I won't repeat myself because that comment is LONG.
But a nation couldn't ask more than a working age adult where you invested zero in education and health for 20 years and suddenly pay taxes with none of almost no benefits.
In the UK, which I raised numbers due to the discussion going on in there, visa workers generated yearly 12 to 20 Billions in direct taxes and fees and they use 4B in health (which technically they paid in fees a combined value of 6B upfront If my numbers are right)
But the real numbers lies on what other revenue they generate. It is estimated in my calculations that +50B-70B pounds are from immigrants on UK with a working visa.
That's no amount to shy considering about it is 8M people in that specific situation.
And remember that none of them had to have their education covered by the government.
Someone in the other comment said that 8M British people would generate more taxes than that, but I did not find evidence of that.
According to the public consultation documents UK gov released about immigration a couple of years ago, about 10% of the immigrants are responsible for more than 35% of the taxes collected. Hence the suggestion on curb immigration considering the salary range which might make sense or not depending on where you stand on the topic.
I have no horses on this race and my impression as an outsider who just likes analysing data is that it seems as much of a claim as saying that EU took more money from UK than what it put in which turned out to be mostly incorrect.
> Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.
I think the "chud" immigration logic is rather, take whatever win you can get in the general direction of restriction, because you've been losing every single battle for 5+ decades.
you can already get a greencard by paying less than $1mm in taxes. in general, your requirements are way higher than what's even required for citizenship. and green cards don't need a civics test either.
but I agree that it would be nice to have a less fraught/complicated path to permanent residency.
There are different grounds for being granted a green card. One of those is that your employer wants to hire you permanently, and can't find an American to take the job. Getting a green card doesn't require an employer's sponsorship, that's just the most common application for green cards.
H1B's are temporary visas and they make it very clear in the application process; there shouldn't be a path to citizenship through an H1B. I like the tax idea though
Surly the “corruption” is big corporations pushing for the H1B program in the first place, at a time (early 1990s) when decreasing immigration was overwhelmingly more popular than increasing it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx. Surely the “corruption” is the government looking the other way for years while Indian body shops imported massive numbers of foreign workers while ignoring the requirement in the law to advertise to americans?
And this is hardly new. Ross Perot was opposing H1B when he was running for President in the 1990s.
I’ve not worked at Microsoft so I can’t speak for them, but I’ve been in tech for the last 15 years with the last 5 being in manager/director roles at at least 1 company that is a household name.
What you’re saying gets repeated a lot, but I’ve never seen it to be true. Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level. I just don’t believe that it’s happening on the scale that people make it out to be.
Also, I don’t want to get too into it unless people are interested, but at least at the companies I’ve been at, the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty wrong with these programs and I’m glad to see reform, but I don’t believe the underpaying thing is happening nearly as much as people claim it does.
I've been a tech manager for 21 years, much of that at a large Fortune 100 that had tens of thousands of employees from Infosys and TCS. The hourly rates we were charged were $15-$30 less than we'd pay American contractors from body shops like Teksystems, and that is just what we were paying Infosys. The employee didn't see anywhere near that.
Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.
The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.
Maybe in real tech companies its a different story.
> You’ll take these low wages and be happy about it or I’ll import a foreign worker who will be happy about it. And if they complain, I’ll have them deported.
The problem isn't just whether they're hiring below market. It's that market rates themselves are impacted by there being a whole underclass of workers who can't just freely move between jobs, and has to speedrun getting a new one if they ever lose their existing ones. The precarious nature of it makes an H1-B worker less likely to speak up about most things related to working conditions due to the precarious nature of the job.
I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.
Abuse of the H1-B program isn't just about hiring people for less money right now. It's about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline.
I think the H1B process gets abused by body shops. Salaries are pretty demonstrably lower there than at many other tech companies.
At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).
and how much pressure do they feel to raise the band over time when theres a constant stream of people coming in form another country who accept anything presented because its still higher than back home
The problem with H1B and some of the other employment visas is its really difficult or impossible for the worker to change jobs. JD Vance calls them indentured servants. I suspect the situation for actual indentured servants is a bit worse but in any case the workers dont have a lot of options at their disposal. They cant just leave without losing their visa. So their “choice” to work for less money isn’t really a choice at all.
Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?
If it were me, I would make companies "bid" on the visas, where their bid is the salary (including all benefits, minus ALL expenses) they will pay the employee.
Employers who really need employees for high-skilled work would thus get visas. Employers who want to underpay their foreign labor will not.
Well it does impact h1b because h1b has a maximum time of 6 years unless the visaholder has an approved green card application. So, by blocking new green card applications (at least the most common path) this effectively puts a ceiling on the number of H1B visaholders.
The most racist part of the program is the per country quotas. Right now they are granting EB3 for Indians who applied in 2014 while EB3 visa for the French from 2024. So that's an extra 10 years Indians are stuck in limbo. And, no, this is not just because there's more Indian's immigrating.
H1B visa's are a modern form of indentured servitude. The employer knows you can't quit, and if they fire you, you have 6 weeks to somehow find a new job (which is already hard if you are a US citizen or green card holder) or you have to leave the country.
Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.
Paying people less because they came from somewhere else and can get away with it, sounds a bit exploitative to me.
The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).
I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.
One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.
I fail to understand how it is racism to support offshore hiring. Does that not help the local economies of remote workers? I am not sure what the admin is thinking and why they are making such decisions but for people who want to stay where they are it is king great.
Also why are you singling out Indians? Are you racist against other nations?
> it just sounds like the goal is to keep Indians out
Bingo.
This is a pre-midterm messaging move aimed at shoring up support with young men who voted for Trump in ‘24. The chances that the policy even lasts more than a few months is slim.
I sponsored an employee and that's not how pay works, in fact you have to tell them how much they are making and you have to pay them your average. The example given by the US government is a level one software developer makes on average 110k but your company pays on average 115k then you have to pay 115K and it has to be submitted to the government. So the answer to whether H-1B workers are paid less is: they are legally required not to be, but the system relies on employer attestation first and enforcement second. Companies get caught abusing this when the get audited but H-1B laws require they be paid the same.
Yup, this is much more likely to lead to more offshoring than companies hiring more American workers. Which also means that communities in the US with a large amount of workers on visas will also suffer.
Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.
Of course it's not new. And of course it never really stopped. But there is a new incentive for execs to give it a much bigger push given all the recent remote work tooling and when they now think a programmer is just monitoring AI output. So why not pay the monitor SE Asian wages rather than US wages.
The trend is away from remote work though. So much more stuff is hybrid then it was a few years ago. SE Asian wages means a 12 hour time zone difference and that carries a real cost on efficiency (I personally experienced this at two companies). Future poorly thought offshoring attempts will go just as badly as they have in the past. If anything AI makes it worse, since each individual dev is responsible for a bigger slice of the output they need to be in the loop on business / customer needs and significant timezone differences make that harder.
Plenty of offshoring to both Central America and South America has occurred in recent years. It was a somewhat untapped offshoring location, but that no longer seems to be the case.
A key difference is that at least one isn’t competing for limited housing with offshoring. That is the number 1 driver of the affordability crisis atm.
I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!
Offshoring (form the US) to Europe, especially eastern Europe is not new either. The newish offshoring location was Central America and South America, but those have been tapped as well.
For starters, compensation is almost entirely location-based now. Situations where a person lives in cheap city / country but paid close to US rates were never common, but in last 5 years or so they disappeared almost entirely. Moreover, every company seems to know about local rates, they all source this data from the same sources, so if you're job hunting they all give you the same offer. And, since there are so much competition for positions companies are very reluctant to bid on candidates, and most offers do not allow negotiations. Even if paying you slightly above market would still save the company quite a lot of money they don't do it. So, situations where you receive the same offer from multiple companies, and all of them are "take it or leave it", became pretty common.
I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.
Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food. If an American isn't getting the job anyway, then why bring them here in the first place to drive prices up for everyone else?
> Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food
You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.
As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.
The government exists for the general welfare and and economic system that subsidizes idleness because the disingenuous say "look over there, its a net positive" while ignoring the externalized cost borne by the taxpayer is just theft from the taxpayer.
Me buying food from restaurant would make the owner richer, but would also employ more people at the restaurant.
The scarcity issue is valid when the resource is limited. In case of US, I was not aware of food scarcity. Even housing is more due to policies than actual land scarcity.
Economic activity does have positive feeback. Yes, some people get unfairly rich - but the solution is not to stop the activity, instead try to get the rich pay their fair share of contribution to the country.
FWIW the "international" folks I work with hardly spend any money in the US. Most of it is saved and spent or invested during 2-month annual visits to homeland.
Your logic is incorrect, you are thinking that a "international" folk buying a TV is what they mean. But that's not correct. Paying income taxes, paying tax on cars, paying tax on gas, paying rent, these matter a lot more to the government then you buying an iphone from the apple store in the mall versus one in "international country".
That's probably just your company. In Silicon Valley, "international" folks spend a lot of money on buying houses (multiple of them sometimes), cars, home improvement, going out to restaurants, etc.
Sorry but there is no competition for health care in US. US basically has no health care. Unless of course you buy it (i.e. pay the fraudulent companies to give you false sense of security and leave you alone in the worst moment of your life)
Is it meant as rhetorical reply to the officials as in "aha, but Microsoft will prevail and make it even worse for you, American workers" or as a reply to the workers: "don't fret, move back to your country and work the same job anyway". Or was it meant as a hint for the officials "don't forget to close that loophole as well"?
Sure, who doesn't want unlimited money? That's decidedly different from "needing" it (I could in no way manage to live on the West Coast on a Spanish salary, for example)
One might argue that it should, but as a remote worker in a low cost area I don't mind making 20% less than my NYC/Bay colleagues as I can still live like a king in my midwest city on regionally adjusted swe comp.
Hiring remote workers also doesn’t require filling out H1B applications and dealing with USCIS. If using remote workers was just as good, companies would already do that.
Regulated industries often have business language mandating onshore, citizens-only employment. If it isn't required by immigration, the businesses buying the product are requiring assurances (likely due to their own compliance).
As for non-protected roles, global market participation has ups and downs.
Can you explain more? This statement is already true before this policy change, so I don't understand why this is not a non sequitur. But I know this is a common rhetoric so I am trying to understand what the logic is.
People need to stop asking what's better for the "economy" and start asking what's better for themselves. If the two don't align, it should be tough luck for the "economy", not the people.
"The economy" is often just another way of saying "everyone in aggregate."
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
This is an incredibly blinkered view. The economy is important, but there are many other factors as to whether a given policy is overall good for the citizenry or not.
Probably not a simple question or answer on the face of it, but it's really not worth looking at this action in such a narrow lens, because this is not happening in a vacuum. Instead, we should look at it through the overall context of all of this admin's immigration policies, which have been bad for the US economy.
This is an inane comment. Here are the two types of "remote" work:
1. Remote within the US. You still need valid work authorization;
2. Remote outside the US. This is just offshoring and if it really worked, every tech jobs would be offshored. Companies have been trying to do this for decades. Companies would love nothing more than to offshore every white collar job. They would if they could.
So the exact same person working within the US, even better if sitting in an office, is a good employee but if they're working from abroad all of a sudden they're not that good?
I know this is a much popular opinion now. But I can't help and ask this again:
If a company hires an engineer in India, instead of Seattle, how does America (and workers) benefit? Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains, its just a hiring decision.
The question is whether these restrictions increase American employment or just accelerate the exodus of jobs while making the US a less attractive place for talented people.
> For one, the engineer in India doesn't drive the demand for housing in Seattle thus keeping it more reasonably (less insanely) priced.
I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.
If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).
Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.
Supply is rising from builders and also from lack of buying, iiuc the flattening and recent drops does line up with immigration and layoff changes, and its often quoted by the multiple local real estate agents weve talked to.
Obviously supply matters most but that doesnt mean demand isnt still a significant factor.
The engineer does marginally increase housing demand. They also increase local and federal tax revenue to support education, healthcare and other services. And the engineer will spend a large portion of their salary in the local economy, helping to support all the other business in Seattle. So there are also positive externalities.
What are some of the other "many negative externalities" you mention?
I feel like we could have the best of everything if you we just built more housing to keep up with demand.
The engineer in India also doesn’t drive demand for managers and product teams and ops people and HR and payroll staff and canteen workers and office space construction and highways and education spending in the US. All that happens in Chennai instead.
people don't buy "housing." They buy views, they buy location, they buy neighborhood character. There are perfectly good houses in Nebraska---yet people aren't swarming to Nebraska. It's not because there's anything wrong with the housing.
It's mostly due to absurdly difficult to get permits.
A benefactor decided to solve the housing crisis, created a development company. Gave up 2 years later. Stating the legal burden to get permits was the biggest financial obstacle. We are ready to build from the start, 2 years later we still couldn't build and spend most of our capital in lawyers in hope to get any approval.
Its Azure Hardware division that manages its first party silicon and its deployment has a huge hardware and electrical engineering presence. These fields don't have as many people in America in them, because Software has paid so much more for the last two decades, why would anyone go EE when they could go CS and make 2-3x more. In other countries, these degrees were paid similar so there is a larger pool to pull from then in America.
You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer
That's true. Problem is a lot of the time Middle America is comfortable and doesn't want to move out to the valley or Seattle.
Remote work makes that easier now, but with silicon / EE its not always the most optimal way to work.
Middle America EE is also not building data center class chips or infrastructure most of the time, would it be easier to get one of them up to speed, yes. But it's the equivalent of throwing a front-end engineer into C or embedded programming or vice versa.
At that salary, you're just proving the "why go EE when you can go CS and make 2X more" argument, at least if we're talking about a 20+ year senior dev/architect type.
I agree. Specialized engineering is very different from software, you can't easily replace that expertise.
My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.
They may. I think the government should probably tax the diff in salary in those cases. The problem is, that is probably incredibly hard to define and pass as legislation or whatever has to be done.
H1B and offshore jobs can be beneficial to America though, and that was why the program started. Sufficient guardrails just never went up and now there is opportunity for some abuse. But that abuse isn't across the board, there is still beneficial H1B and offshoring going on mixed in with abuse.
Well, you can only offshore jobs complex up to a certain degree, not frontier talent or higher management. The O1 visa will likely still be in effect for them; what's getting rejected are worker-level visas.
> and they then chain migrate other people over by putting in referrals for random people.
I have one of the worst passports in the world. It was already difficult to travel to many places, and now more and more countries are soft-banning everyone from here.
The reason being that whenever a country makes their tourism visas more accessible, people from my country known as "labor exporters" or "visa brokers" apply for visas for hundreds of people.
Honest question and I'm probably going to ruffle a lot of feelings:
In the age of AI coding, what is the point of outsourcing your programming to TCS, Wipro, et al? These consultancies are not building groundbreaking innovative stuff, they're building the drudgery enterprise software to handle taxes or business intelligence tools. Things that are perfect for AI (don't get me wrong, AI is perfect for a lot of other types of coding too).
Or is it that outsourcing is cheaper than AI tokens?
The market IS very good at that, what it's not good at is handling externalities for citizens of a country that arise from taking the most efficient market path.
Ironic phrasing, as in my experience the steelman argument in favor of these companies is "The customer is really bad at thinking through their own requirements."
I agree that we don’t need a central planning committee.
But if you’ve ever worked with the public, you know there is almost no cultural onus on nontechnical people to properly hire or contract technical people for technical tasks.
I had a chat today with a friend about this. I think my working thesis is that AI is bad news for outsourcing/offshoring.
What was it good for? Well, often it was prompting a person in a low-cost location what code to write. He would pick it up in his timezone and implement it overnight, and present findings/questions as a response.
The problem is, coding has made implementation super cheap. It is now so cheap you have to compare it to the cost of dealing with someone in another timezone, who does not have the same cultural context on the problem. They also can't ask you clarifying questions while you're asleep. AI wins against the offshore guy, on both money and context.
Who does it help? Amazingly, the experienced onshore dev who thought he was going to be unemployed past 40. This person is now able to implement several things concurrently, has experience in making technical decisions, and has local cultural context.
1. Risk - you throw an SLA on services and can point fingers when shit hits the fan
2. Circular agreements - you get them to sell your goods/services in the region of their home country
3. These count as "Services" on the P&L and provide massive tax advantages to the company because these aren't treated as labor costs.
This may be from an old context in my brain since I worked with some of those companies, so those reasons may have changed or impact may have with various regulations, etc.
Addendum to risk: larger companies can throw bodies at escalated issues.
Good luck trying to get a 6 person shop with a full calendar of other-customer work to suddenly prioritize a show-stopping bug that's only affecting you.
Based on the last 5+ years at working at FAANG adjacent companies - less than 5% of a SWEs time is dedicated to coding (Exceptions of course for crazy things like porting massive code bases to Rust...) - If anything - now that "coding has been solved" - it significantly reduces the need for body-shops, because now you require strategic product decision making - much harder skill to hire for/develop than yet another LeetCoder.
Is it possible that individuals or groups use outsourcing as a way to funnel money into their private interests? IMO we're looking at good old corruption.
No, people should honestly confront your question. The “skilled labor shortage” premise for the H1B is dead, at least in tech. Maybe we still need to bring in a handful of superstars. But at this point I think TCS, Wipro, etc., exist only due to foreign lobbying efforts.
Not always. Many places will avoid hiring people to do the work instead they just contract it out. Saves them money in short term. Why hire someone at 100k, pay 401k, insurance, pto when I can simply buy it for 50k.
They tend to take care of sustainment and certain tasks more cost effectively.
This is a pretty stupid thing to do, btw, as whatever isn’t AI will just be offshored, which reduces government and social security revenue and closes a pipeline to get smart immigrants, who tend to vote Republican.
> President Donald Trump’s administration is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using H-1B visas
Everything described in the article, is about H1-B. So yes, the action is preventing greencard applications for those H1-B visas, but that is functionally the same as restricting Microsoft's access to H1-Bs since a future green card sponsorship is the reason many are there working for them on that visa.
The entire program is a farce. It's the process generating the fraudulent "golly, we just can't find a US citizen for the job" claims, complete with fake ads designed to be undiscoverable.
We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations. And most of that time we’re at full employment. This policy with squander that asymmetric advantage, resulting in less innovation, lower growth, fiercer global competition as the talent starts competing from local markets, lower job growth for American workers. This will get worse over generations because the first gen immigrants in h1b have kids. We will lose out on their future talent.
Is your main source of income investment in unlisted burgeoning tech companies? If not, you're arguing against your own wealth. Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose, with no serious attempt whatsoever to try and get local talent. It doesn't have to be sinister, it's just what HR departments are used to doing again and again.
Do you know what stops Microsoft from building an office in, say, Czechia, hiring all the same people who were previously able to get a US work visa/green card/etc. but are now unable to, for the same labour, and paying Czech rates rather than US rates?
Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.
Outsourcing happens but larger firms repeatedly run into the issue that management, admin, and local talent provides diminishing returns. Most of the larger US-based firms have standards that are built on decades of developed industry practices, something that can sometimes be missing from outsourced workforces on a cultural level. Hiring in domestically at least plants folks in environments where they can learn those processes over time. I suspect this is one (amongst many) reasons why US work visas are so single-employer contingent - you don't want talent you trained from the ground up to be able to easily leave for another role somewhere.
The alternative, as we all know, is well educated people staying in their home countries and creating companies that compete globally, meaning more services will move overseas. I'm OK with that but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that in no way will reducing H1Bs (or similar) increase local wages or employment rates in the software sector.
Why "unlisted burgeoning tech companies"?? H1 Bs are going to big, publicly listed US companies. Which by the way, 60%+ of Americans own a stake in due to their 401ks, pensions, IRAs etc. So I think bringing in top talent from around the world could be really good for the average American.
Are you confident that globally uncompetitive wages are good for you long-term, though?
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
European auto sector didn't loose because they didn't flood the country with enough low wage workers (which they did anyway since 2015) to compete with China on labor costs. They lost precisely because they gave up investing in local labor that made all the pricy high-end innovations like electronic brakes, self-driving and EV-tech, and entered in the race to the bottom to boost shareholder value while cutting the expensive innovation R&D. This strategy did wonders for EU auto shareholders for about ~10 years while the badge prestige carried a lot of inertia, especially in markets like Russia, US and China, but it lost most momentum in the last couple of years, as EU cars are now seen as dated, overpriced, cheaply made, expensive to fix and underwhelming compared to the new players from US and China. Nothing to do with lack of cheap immigrant labor.
US was investing in AI powered self-driving tech, China was investing in new EV motor and battery tech with advanced manufacturing automation to cut costs, EU makers were just reselling diesel engines with fancy badges hoping the EV and self-driving fad will pass. EU car industry went from decades of being the global trend setter in terms of designs and technology, to being the follower, at least in technology.
Also, a lot of the manufacturing costs in EU not just for the auto sector, is now majority made of taxes, compliance, bureaucracy and labor's cost of housing. If you import workers they'll be under the same high compliance rules, and same expensive housing pressures, unless you bet they'll accept to live in slum-like conditions in order to undercut the locals, in which case you might as well cut the facade and just advocate for return to slavery.
That's just one perspective and I disagree with it.
European carmakers are where they are because electromobility reset their legacy advantages (a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages); now the same dollar amount gets them less R&D output than in China, because engineers are more expensive, and production itself is difficult to keep competitive for the exact same reason (also why a lot of car production has shifted east into lower wage European countries long before Chinese cars became competitive).
If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well (I'm not saying that would be desirable, just that it's a given).
>a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages
Wrong, auto-sector wages back then were much higher in regards to local purchasing power (especially on the housing front) and also unions were much stronger. Now they're already lower class jobs. A VW factory worker could buy a house and take his family on vacation with a stay at home wife. Good luck with that today when you see how much housing prices have outpaced wage growth since then.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor and less regulations. As do Japan's car makers.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
> just that it's a given
Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
The west's industry marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market. If your western cars aren't cutting edge and innovative you failed. And they aren't cutting edge and innovative because you didn't invest enough in R&D at the right time, because you valued short term shareholder returns, basically the plague of most western corporation.
> You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor. As do Japan's car makers.
Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers. Not saying this is bad, but makes it harder to compete.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would have internationally competitive cotton.
The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
> The west marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market.
This is an overgeneralization. E.g. Several of the most successful German companies are grocery retailers (as boring and low-tech as it gets).
> Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
I'm not saying you can't pay out globally uncompetitive wages as long as you're sitting on an R&D advantage, but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them (just consider the Japanese electronics industry in the 80s/90s for example; people said the exact same shit back then until they no longer could).
>Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers.
Not true anymore.
>The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
Because of imported cheap labor or because of automation at scale no country can match?
>but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them
Only if you make poor deals where you voluntarily give them all your hard earned technology for free in exchange for access to their market. Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers it all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
> Foreign labour depreciates the wages companies have to pay for employees. It has been shown again and again that concerning quantities of foreign labour is used exactly for that purpose
That's a (citation needed) right there.
The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:
Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."
What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.
The general idea of academia is (massive) amounts of international exchange to help ideas get spread around and, hopefully, improved upon. That is why most universities participate in student exchanges or why many academic degrees include at least one semester in a different country.
I would argue this is not accurate. The Elite Overproduction theory suggests you can have too many highly educated people and H-1B requires a bachelor's at least but incentivizes higher education. However, as it stands we already have an oversupply of highly educated people. The theory predicts that having an oversupply of highly educated people destabilizes society.
I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?
I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.
>We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.
Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".
Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.
In my experience H1B workers are consistently exceptional. At big tech most employees are pretty good so it doesn’t stand out, but at random fortune 500s tech teams are often led by h1bs who are clearly the most competent employees on the department even though they usually aren’t involved in management. My experience from around 5 Fortune 500 non tech companies. These companies would have big problems if they couldn’t recruit exceptional foreign workers
No one really cared when we were at full employment, the problem is that CS is the new liberal arts degree and it looks like it might only be getting worse.
Thats pretty insulting to the amount of effort required to obtain a CS degree.
Yes I know every po dunk college up and down the country added CS to their collection (because all you need is a computer lab so it goes in with degrees like Math, Physics etc).
CS even at lesser colleges requires sustained discipline in the maths, sciences, logic theory, and much more depending on the university.
Liberal Arts is a very different animal and while it can also be a very rigorous program for committed students, it has a greater opportunity for students to slack off and still graduate. It is much harder to hide and get through a CS program with this mentality and so it deserves more respect than you are giving it.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed. Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.
There are a plethora of qualified Americans with CS degrees sitting unemployed.
There's also a plethora of people with CS degrees who can't even write FizzBuzz on their own, even given a warmed-up IDE and a partially filled out skeleton of the program. And no, this is not idle speculation, I've interviewed quite a few of these people. So I wouldn't personally put much stock in "has a CS degree" as a marker of qualification for any particular job. That applies, of course, regardless of nationality.
Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
Having worked with many Americans and many non-Americans over the last 35+ years, I'd say there's no general difference in ability that correlates to nationality. I've worked with dumb Americans and dumb non-Americans, and vice-versa.
> We have had the ability to recruit the top talent from around the world for generations.
Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.
Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.
I'm sorry but even as an immigrant in the USA this is bs. The h1b program brought a lot of great talent but also depressed employment rates for american graduates in computer science that's just a fact (please don't bother asking for a link google works as well for you as it does for me).
the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.
If there's any truth to what you say, then each of these immigrant workers receive a salary which is significantly higher than their US born colleagues. They are as you say "top talent from around the world". A person who is among the world's best certainly has at least double the salary, right?
As someone who interviews 10+ candidates per week for high-paying software engineering jobs, the US pool is not big enough to find qualified people. It feels like H1B shouldn't be needed. But empirically, we do need to invite talented people from other countries.
Saying the pool is too small or calling something a labor shortage is trimming away a bunch of relevant detail. There cannot be a shortage, only a shortage of people 1) qualified to do the work for 2) the compensation and 3) conditions you are offering. That's 3 levers to pull: Train more, pay more, offer better conditions (remote work). Particularly compensation, I have been told that's how supply and demand work.
Are you selecting based on a holistic view of merit (projects, personality, capacity to grow in a role) or are you gating based on the same-old LeetCode brain teaser exams? In the latter case there is no shortage of H1B grinders who’ve spent every day for the past 6 months memorizing the puzzles to pass your screens, even if they say nothing about raw ability.
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
So? At least they're grinding, and we as a nation used to have that American grit. Now everyone just sits on their asses and cry "unfair" when someone willing to grind gets better opportunities.
I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.
On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.
Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:
1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.
2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.
I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.
The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.
The reason why increasing wages for low-level jobs is so important is that it puts upwards pressure on all wages above them as well.
If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.
In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.
Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.
Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.
> That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.
I happen to agree with you that individual companies hoarding high-performers and keeping them useless is a dumb strategy and that it should have been targeted by anti-trust.
I was more pointing out that hoarding high-performers as a country is desirable since geopolitics prioritizes different outcomes than pure capitalism.
Optimally, the US would attract the cream of the crop, the top 5% of the world and let them roam freely inside of the American system with plenty of capital (both money and labor). I'd venture and point out that many of America's greatest technological leaps were a direct result of this kind of strategy (think WWII, the space program, computing, etc, etc).
This is a load of shit. There are millions of people out of work in the US and it's likely that tens of thousands of those are perfectly qualified developers. Assuming your expectations haven't been completely warped, your real problem is that modern hiring as a process is completely broken as a result of multiple factors.
Both could be true. Just because millions are out of work doesn’t mean every specialty has sufficient domestic talent pool. No one says we should recruit only domestic talent in sports.
Except this doesn’t make sense if the argument is that there are a ton of unemployed CS people sitting around. The labor market is like any other market.
There's never a labor shortage, only a compensation shortage.
If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.
Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.
And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.
I dunno, I don't work in Big Tech and I feel the commenter you're-replying-to's concerns. There is some sort of mismatch if my pipeline is this empty and this many qualified applicants are jobless and unhappy about it. Comp is fine and people can live wherever they want, but there is no way my team is going to meet its goal of doubling in size by the end of the year.
I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.
I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.
This is said all the time, and don't get me wrong, I like "compensation" as much as the other guy, but to me this just sounds like a race to the bottom (or sky) for companies.
It's great for those compensated for sure. But what happens once the companies with deepest pockets, FAANG and such, pay the most and drain the job market, what happens to all the other companies then? It raises the bar significantly for any new startup, makes it ever more impossible for any boring, middle-of-the-road company to find anyone remotely capable. Ultimately growth of the tech sector is limited by the number of people you have available, regardless of how much you pay for them. If anything, another country with more potential talent could even surpass the one playing alone in its own sandbox.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and maybe in an economic downturn it's even a good thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't come with no tradeoffs.
The solution is staring you right in the face: Move your business to a country where these "qualified people" live, hire there and serve that market instead.
I don't buy your claim of "high-paying". If you don't pay as per US resident and urban standards, good domestic candidates obviously won't bother applying.
Well, the program may be poorly executed, but don't ignore the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures. It does have that aspect to it.
But that raises the debate ... does the US really need to export MORE of its culture at taxpayer/citizens expect ? :|
As to the pause, repeal, destruction of this program, etc., however its characterized eventually, it seems to be inline with the idea of moving much of the manufacturing that left back home as well.
The psychology experts on youtube are all lamenting the disconnection of people and communities due to internet usage and less face time.
Framing that in terms of markets, the internet has empowered people to do more themselves, and rely on direct interaction with others less.
Economic shifts are behavioral shifts at the core, and in 2026 every programmer has a staff of 1,000+ unpaid AI agents at their disposal.
> the benefits of understanding and exchange between cultures
That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.
Anyone looking at the salaries in big tech will laugh you out of the room. You think the six figure salaries for writing shitty ass Go services is _wage suppression_ ?
When they're paying $125k instead of the market rate of $200k + equity, absolutely.
Six figures isn't what it used to be. I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Golly gee if only that was a sign that the market is being highly distorted by the high six figure salaries, therefore demonstrating that there's no wage suppression...
> I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Let's be very honest here: the only two in there that have massively increased are housing (due to the aforementioned non existent wage suppression) and healthcare (because america can't into healthcare). Families making 50k do more than fine when it comes to food and gasoline, merely because they don't have 4k of rent to pay.
If the "shitty ass Go service" is delivering the value that software typically does then yes. The whole reason the wages were so high to begin with compared to something like a gas station clerk is that the clerk is delivering value for at most one customer at one time.
Software allows a task that could only be done manually once at a time by one person to be infinitely replicated and scalable at speeds that no single human could do, and that value only requires one person to invest resources to develop it once. Afterwards you got that multiplier of value generated.
This should be obvious but im merely describing the miracle of computing.
So if that software is generating the multiplier of value it is entirely plausible that the company is not providing appropriate compensation to the person tasked with developing that multiplier.
Just because they are high doesn't mean they are high as they should be. Big tech companies were pulled into lawsuits several times over wage suppression tactics and ended up settling.
Which has an easy solution: you want to be part of the program, the state announces your opening nationally and internationally. That way the state knows exactly how many are applying and why
I prefer state over corporate all day of the week. I have legal pathways to force the state to do things... I do not have for corporate for the same thing.
There are valid criticisms to be made of the current immigration system but saying "this sucks" adds nothing and is of zero value. Here, let me help:
1. Doing layoffs at the same time as hiring temporary workers is antithetical. Which is it: you can't find someone to do a job or you have too many workers? Yes, jobs aren't completely interchangeable but large companies like Microsoft hire generic software engineers. Retrain;
2. the H1B->GC funnel where H1Bs have no pre-country quota but GCs do creates a massive backlog for India, in particular, and allows companies like Infosys and Tata to keep "temporary" workers in indentured servitude for decades;
3. Despite safeguards, it's clear that temporary workers get underpaid, particularly at the outsourcing companies, so visas are used to suppress labor costs for both citizens/residents and temporary workers.
In the UK, we simply removed that requirement, so company doesn't have to give evidence of shortage and also we set the wage limit to a quarter of median earning for given profession (Labour government increased it to just half now). This means corporations have no incentive to hire local workers as it is vastly cheaper to hire (and exploit) immigrants, as they don't have means to pick and choose once they are in the country. Meanwhile local people can't find work and have to battle increased rents and pressure for access to public services. All by corporations who are very shy when it comes to paying taxes.
oh and that entry level web developer on lowest band is actually a senior systems engineer? Worry not, Home Office don't check that.
They were also often doing basic stuff, like database programming. Even in AI, most of what they produce didn't have marketable value. So, I don't buy that they couldn't find or train anyone here to do the job.
In my experience finding good people is hard when the entire world is on the table. Limiting the pool based on stupid concepts like "nationality" is just a jobs program for the low quality people.
I live near Mt. Rushmore. When my mom was a kid, working there during tourist season was a very common summer job for high school kids. Now it's not, because now temporary foreign labor by means of seasonal visa programs, complete with housing, fills those jobs each summer instead. Are American high schoolers physically/mentally unable to do these jobs? Of course not—yet these job opportunities have been taken from them regardless, replaced with what is essentially seasonal foreign-labor indentured servitude.
Honestly, a lot fewer American teenagers want/are allowed summer jobs these days. They are all focused on doing enrichment activities that will look good on a college application, and low-wage menial jobs don't count for that.
I work in the public school system and I can definitely assure you that nowhere near “all” high school students are doing what you suppose they are doing.
Same words are said by hotel owners unable to find eg. cleaning ladies for hotels over here in my small country.... touristy area (=very few locals), relatively far away from larger towns with more local population, everything is expensive there (eg. lunch and parking), and they offer minimum wage and then complain.
For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.
The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.
Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.
Sure, but op wants 'good', how much are those people paid?
Also, how much does rent in a 20-minute-drive circle around microsoft cost? And proper health insurance?
I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back, because while earning less in numbers over here, they can get a normal 8 hour job (no overtime, no weekends), proper time off (25, 30 days per year, unlimited sick days of course), and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails, they'll have enough to live comfortably.
It’s not always about pay. In some special disciplines there are only a handful of people with sufficient training or talent. We don’t hire more Americans by cutting the candidate pool. We hire more by growing the economy with innovation, startup formation, academic research for basic concepts that aren’t commercially viable, government investment in core infrastructure and long horizon moon shots that aren’t commercially feasible.
There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that
To follow up on this, US PhD programs are not generally packed with US citizens, they're frequently the cream skimmed from the rest of the world. For many subspecialties, there's just not going to be enough US citizens to do all the cutting edge work that could/should be done.
We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.
Ok, but those people aren't H1B's. They were on O-1 visas.
These body shop firms are not hiring world-leading geniuses, they are getting mostly-okay Java devs who will do boring scutwork for the chance at life in America.
We could also try something that has not yet been attempted: investing heavily in developing people who show signs of talent at an early age and streaming ALL children's education according to their capabilities and interests at a young age, in order to eventually bolster the available pool of highly talented people without having to rely on poaching talent from elsewhere in the world (depriving those countries of an opportunity to benefit from the highly talented people that they sweated and paid to train).
But it is always the pay. Corporations could easily hire American interns and train them, for money. There's millions of people that would love to leave their retain jobs for an internship at a tech company, but there's no economic incentive for the mega corps to train these people.
Than $228k? That's what Microsoft pays an entry-level SWE right now. Where are all these qualified people for whom $228k out of college isn't enough money?
So the competitors also pay more. Existing workers get paid more (hurray). But it doesn't mean more domestic workers get jobs.
Instead work is either not done (less revenue for the company to expand), or is sent overseas. If management gets more comfortable with work going overseas it becomes a very big problem for domestic workers.
> Any company that does layoffs should immediately have all their visas revoked
This is dumb, but not directionally. Any company that has done a lay-off shouldn’t be allowed to apply for visas for 2 years, with a 5-year probationary period thereafter during which if they do layoffs again the penalty jumps to 5 years.
Seems like if you learn you have too many experts in X and instead need experts in Y you should be able to have layoffs for X but still hire for and get visas for Y.
I’m quite shocked that this was even open to abuse to begin with. Clearly, the US has very strict immigration and green card laws. So enforcement has been lax? Or were deals made under the table with these companies and previous administrations?
Visa programs have been widely abused for decades. This just addresses the PERM portion for a few companies. The abuses of the OPT, CPT programs are insidious and have resulted in a job market that completely disincentives the hiring of new grad Americans.
It's not uncommon to find job postings that are "H1B only". Companies won't even consider citizens. H1B, H4 EAD have become a way for ethnic nepotism and kickback programs to operate without consequences and get American companies to fire Americans in favor of foreign workers.
This is just the smallest step in the right direction.
Hmm? Green card fraud is pretty easy and very common. You put out an ad for the job role. Then you sort the fake resumes to the top and fail them in the interview.
I don't think you meant to write 'green card' there? At least, what you've written makes absolutely no sense as a description of how a green card might fraudulently be obtained.
An individual immigrant violating US immigration law is dealt with very strictly.
A money-making interest violating US immigration law is a completely different matter, because capital loves nothing more than cheap labor and is willing to subject labor to the ordeal of being the individual immigrant dealing with US immigration law, so long as they don't cost as much as Americans.
It's part of the same system. The system is a largely fraudulent one throughout. Doesn't matter if you're applying for an initial H1B or a PERM.
This system is ostensibly there so that we can draw that skilled 10X engineer or brilliant researcher in India, UK, Romania, Australia, whatever, to America - to boost our companies and get his/her productivity into our GDP instead of some other country's companies and GDP. If used that way, I am all for it. Most of us have met many non-citizens who are very obviously a net benefit to our country due to their talent and ambition.
But this system is used in practice to depress all of our wages, to knock out rungs on the career ladder for new graduates, and to create a semi-indentured workforce more tolerant of low pay and poor working conditions, by bringing over completely average developers of the variety that you could just as easily get by putting up a table at your local college's career day.
I don't blame the workers who accept this offer, as being paid on the low end of our scale here is obviously an upgrade or they wouldn't take it. But it's a betrayal of our domestic workers. A financial hit for some of us, and for those earlier in their career, a major blocker to them getting jobs in the first place.
As a percent of the population we have as many foreign born residents as we did in the 1800s and more than we ever did in the 1900s. In fact, some stats even show we have more foreign born residents as a percent than we’ve ever had and it could be even higher than reported given how many folks are here illegally.
People forget that we shut down immigration for a few decades in the 1900s to let people assimilate.
We’ve overdone it, we need to slow the influx again.
> “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”
> ... Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.
I'm glad someone is finally taking this more seriously. There are a lot of big tech teams where you can't even get a job there unless you're Indian. H1B's should be for unique, foreign talent, not senior software engineers.
> Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling added that some of the largest IT firms in the world would also be suspended from that program, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini.
> "We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies," Sonderling said.
2. I'm kinda surprised those firms were even trying to get green cards for their employees. I thought their whole model was to rotate offshore people into the US for temporary assignments on H1-Bs.
> Under the PERM process, employers seek certification from the Department of Labor that there is no qualified, willing or available US worker for a specific job. It's a step required before filing petitions for most employment-based green cards.
3. That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B. Delaying it actually made me pretty sympathetic to the attempts to game the system to prevent and American from getting the job. Even if H1-Bs were technically for temporary workers, everyone saw them as a step on the way to permanent residency.
4. So have they done anything about offshoring yet? Because focusing on H1-Bs and green cards is focusing on the problems of 20+ years ago.
It's probably been 15 years since my employer sponsored any significant numbers of employees for H1-Bs, it's all offshore hiring in Asia to company offices in Asia now.
> That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B.
It actually is a required step for the H1-B. I've heard it's more relaxed than the green card check, though.
> 2. I'm kinda surprised those firms were even trying to get green cards for their employees. I thought their whole model was to rotate offshore people into the US for temporary assignments on H1-Bs.
Certainly not at Microsoft.
> 3. That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B. Delaying it actually made me pretty sympathetic to the attempts to game the system to prevent and American from getting the job.
I was specifically responding to the list I quoted, which did not list Microsoft and was mostly Indian consulting firms.
> There's a similar evaluation done for H1B.
If so, they should tighten that up then (if they haven't already) so it can't be gamed, then drop it from the PERM evaluation if it's already been done.
Private Businesses should not be able to offer citizenship as a side payment to their employees, they should stick to offering cash. If you are the french foreign legion and you want to reward military recruits with citizenship, then at least it's a government that is receiving the benefit and selling the citizenship, but private business should not be able to sell citizenship, or an easier way to get citizenship, to anyone. It's not a resource that belongs to them.
I understand this is a politically charged topic, and every comment is going to be a flame war nonetheless, so here we go.
No matter your political inclination, overabusing green cards to import cheap labor in detriment of the American wage is not even a secret: everybody does it. So the claim is, at least, correct in its formulation.
However:
- It doesn't include Amazon, the biggest offender by far?
- Suspends green cards but not H1Bs? so what the point is exactly?
replacing cheap labor, for a potential revolving door of cheap labor?
make sure cheap labor is never guaranteed to stay, so they don't dare to think about not being cheap anymore?
- People really thought that Microsoft was different to Tata in methodology and discipline? Did you really have to interact with people in either company? I did, and let me tell you, "highly skilled" or even "skilled at all" is nothing short of an exaggeration.
Hopefully H1B is next, or at the very least capped so there can only be a certain number at a time, and if someone wants to get another h1b visa they need to ensure that someone who is here currently is gone before it's issued. Too many "temporary" workers who come into the country, work "temporarily" then end up moving here. Ask yourself how many people from Indian origin own houses in San Francisco and the surrounding area? Are we sure they aren't putting pressure on housing for Americans? How can they prove that, until they can prove they don't impact citizens in any way, they shouldn't be here.
Its easy to take a telescope to a fruit bearing tree, point at the roots and say look its sucking out all the nutrients from the soil.
I do not condone abuse of any system, including visa/gc system, it should only go to those that truly are builders and contribute to growth of the overall system and not act as parasites, but that's a trait not exclusive to just the people (some targeting is probably legit) you're targeting.
H1B is explicitly a dual-purpose visa (e.g. temporary and permanent immigration).
When I was in the US on one myself, my company kept pushing me to go for a green card, but I never intended to stay permanently, which made things a little awkward... I remember basically ghosting the immigration firm they assigned to me.
All sorts of good and interesting arguments ITT, but at the end of the day it's all academic; companies are going to compensate by offshoring. I doubt this nets us more citizen-jobs, pressures salaries to increase, or provides any benefit other than the messaging to the base.
Generally I would rather them offshore talent than bring in foreign workers to our soil. I would make an exception for the actual exceptional people we need for jobs but not for the run of the mill developers or whatever we seem to be bringing in by the truckload.
I entirely agree. They are looking at many countries like those in Latin America, to hire cheaper labor there either vis local subsidiaries or local outsourcing/consulting firms
I worked at MS Vancouver office in 2019, majority was people with visa issues to US. Even I was Canadian from Ontario who ended up there because I couldn't get visa to move to SF
The language is confusing for folks who haven’t experienced or researched the US immigration scheme. A few terms first:
* H1B visas are work permits issued to foreign-born workers sponsored by a company to work in the USA. These visas are bound to a specific employer with limited ability to transfer elsewhere, and on their own have ZERO ability to convert to a Green Card
* Green Card is Legal Permanent Residency (LPR), the first real step towards Naturalization. It lets you live and work anywhere in the USA, provided you generally contribute more than you receive in benefits (though this is very fungible depending on political incentives). Obtaining a Green Card is incredibly hard to do outside of family, with employer sponsorship being one of the few other viable routes.
So what seems to be happening here is that the regime wants to block Microsoft et al for applying for Green Cards for workers currently on H1B visas - not unheard of, but a rarity among the hordes of H1Bs employed yearly by technical firms. I suspect the goal is to discourage workers abroad from applying for H1Bs since employer green card sponsorship is off the table, but it won’t necessarily stop green cards via other routes (like marriage). It also doesn’t address the real grievances around H1Bs themselves, like how it coerces labor into taking more toxic or abusive working environments and lower wages while also robbing domestic workers of opportunities.
In other words, and assuming I’m understanding this messaging correctly (a big if), this is a nothingburger. It doesn’t stop H1B abuse, it doesn’t help American workers, and it punishes the handful of folks who deserve the Green Card conversion from their employers. It’s a packet of lies and misdirection meant to look bigger than it actually is.
#1. Young, eager tech employee from India enrolls in Masters program at US mid-tier university.
#2. Completes course work with 90% other students from India in Florida, Texas, or California.
#3. Gets internship job as part of OPT. (Optional Practical Training)
#4. After 1 (or 2 years for STEM), employer puts in for H1B.
#5. After a round or two of H1B, employer starts the PERM process for a green card.(Tough journey for someone from India... I agree)
Young techie is now 32 years old. Perhaps they marry a US Citizen, and a different pathway opens up. Perhaps they transition to a "genius visa" and then have a different pathway. Perhaps the US government changes policy. It takes a long time but you are living and working in the US during the whole experience.
Stopping this path breaks the chain. If there is no path to citizenship, even a long one, then H1B will stop being so attractive.
Note the pathway for foreign students has been closed. Check on the MS program enrollments at most mid tier schools. Down 50%, 70%, 95%....
> If there is no path to citizenship, even a long one, then H1B will stop being so attractive.
Not really, the backlog for a greencard is so huge that no one seriously plans for one when they go for a H1-B. They can hope of course, but the other pathways you mentioned are more likely at this point.
---
H1-B demand will remain high since people here in india that aren't able to land a target job with high salary use US employment as a resume patching tool. It just happens that the masters is the safest path to that employment. And then they return and become an engineering manager at some company here, as an "ex-MTS 3, Nutanix" demanding a salary that they never would have been able to demand with their pre-US resume.
> Down 50%, 70%, 95%....
Many other factors, one of which is that target companies across the comp band now hire much more in india. More quants/big tech, as well as more mid-comp GCCs. For example, walmart's tech team pays 35L INR to my friend in a city where this salary lands an extremely comfy life. This did not exist even 10 years ago and my friend's resume would have necessitated migrating to the US to get the same QoL. Of course, at the extreme top end people keep going e.g bay area founders/AI unicorns. But that was always a minority. So unless you are aiming for and have a good chance at a unicorn/FAANG-level payout, OR on the other of the spectrum you want resume-patching, there is no reason to migrate anymore.
For reference, at 0YE quant TCs reach 2cr in the top colleges, and stripe/databricks almost 1cr. At a tier-2 university, local unicorns like zomato pay 60L. The former is slightly lesser than a bay area salary and the latter two are europe-level salaries even without any PPP adjustment, so you can imagine why there is less migration.
Green card backlog is so big for indians that this makes no difference. Except for one thing: this program apart from putting you on the green card waiting list, extends your H1-B beyond the initial phase, and also lets you change employers without restarting the whole process. Now that you can't change employers, the effect on employer leverage and salaries just worsens the existing situation w.r.t the stated goal of the government.
Note that this appears to be about green cards/permanent residency rather than h1b.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said other companies that would be suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE. He said there were multiple active federal investigations ongoing into the matter.
It is an open secret that consulting companies (Tata, Infosys, Capgemini, etc.) are abusing the employee sponsored green cards.
But I'm surprised that Microsoft is accused doing it. I was under the impression that Microsoft will sponsor your green card but is still very strict about whom they hire and retain, regardless of immigration status. But maybe that has changed?
Tata, Infosys, HCL, and similar body shops are definitely a different story.
If you’re laying off employees en masse and still processing green cards that in itself is a red flag.
Companies have usually gotten around it saying we r laying off in 1 division but hiring in another. Maybe that hand waving can’t be swept under the rug anymore.
That doesn't feel accurate to me. If you're laying off employees en masse while getting new h1b visas, maybe - but everybody I know who's gotten a green card from tech employment was employed and working for a long time before that process even started.
How is it hand waving? It's literally true a large corporation can fire a customer support agent while sponsoring a software engineer, it is not interchangeable talent
I've worked with several excellent people in my career who progressed from customer support to QA to QA engineer to software engineer.
It's not common though, and I don't think it's a case of "training". Some people have the drive to figure that path out, and those people should be encouraged and supported.
Not everyone is interested in programing. Some people are amazing at customer support and super extroverted and seek out jobs where they interact with customers and would be miserable looking at code all day. The opportunity should be there, but some people are just never going to be engineers. Management quality can't fix that.
I'm sorry but this is just absurd. Not everyone has the same aptitude for every job. For a company or country to function you have to acknowledge this and put people in jobs suited to their natural talents.
I doubt that's the argument they're making. They're saying they are laying of a software engineer in one org, and hiring another software engineer in a different org. Not cross functional roles.
Talent can be trained, less across jobs (although it's often what public services ask to entrepreneurs in some European countries), much more across departments.
I mean in the LLM era you need fewer employees and you need them to be very good to not become 10x bad engineers, so you could be processing green cards for your super stars while having to do layoffs
In a lot of cases they are claiming that the layoffs are not based on performance. The government's argument is that if there are high-performing American nationals or green card holders that are being laid off, then there is no point in giving more green cards, or H1Bs.
That's the playbook Microsoft has been accused of running in various tech press for years, and is backed up by the fact that all of their products are going to shit. Azure, Exchange, XBox & first-party titles, just to name a few of the things I've seen takedown posts about how the departments are staffed exclusively with inexperienced devs overseen by burnt-out seniors, using Copilot to duct tape shit into a somewhat-working state.
I remember not to long ago we got a service impact email from Microsoft saying they expected exchange services to resume normal operation in a sodding WEEK. Completely unacceptable for a provider my company, a smaller one, pays six figures per year for services.
For one thing, if you get laid off you only have two weeks to find another job or you need to leave the country. This balance of power is lop sided so the employer can get away with abusing the employee unreported.
No, green cards actually remove that constraint. You are a permanent resident, and you’re allowed to live in the US permanently. Irrespective of employment.
not true, you can only "dangle" the PERM which gives you an I-140 petition. PERM is usually approved within 12-24 months. That's it. You cant dangle anything and cant force a bona fide employee to be a "subservient slave labor" like some people would imagine this process.
Once the I-140 petition is approved (14 days), and I-485 is pending for 180+ days, and employee can easily leave to another employer, it only takes them to file couple forms like transfer of H1B and transfer of I-140.
So the most you can keep the employee on a leash is ~2-3 years which happens to be median tenure at tech.
the immigration discourse is filled with false information, and for this reason I prefer only immigration attorneys discuss the matter as they are the most qualified of all the quirks and nuances of the US immigration law.
OK,got this part - this is referring to abusing the employees.
I read the former comment like that they are abusing/missusing the "technical Greencard mechanics" to get their employees past some checks/approvals/permissions/whatever or acquire whatever "special benefits" by working around whatever rules
It's pretty simple: you work as much as we tell you or we fire you. And good luck finding another job super fast with another company willing to sponsor a visa. This is the abuse. Plus, I think the pay is also not that great compared to US counterparts.
not true, the tech is not a coal mine or a cotton farm. you cant whip your employees and keep them on a short leash.
please spare me stories of "abused tech workers" who have middle six figure comp, free lunches, unlimited PTO, bunch of perks, generous 401k matches and infinite matcha lattes.
The government will take action on this, but not cruise ship visas. This has nothing to do with "explotation" and everything to do with trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers.
> trying to end immigration, even of (or especially of) highly skilled workers
No, it's not.
I know plenty of of software engineers, good ones, who can't find work. Businesses which abuse the H1B and Green card programs to import cheaper workers when there is not a shortage of same here, are acting in bad faith and they know it. They are lying that the people they're bringing over are exceptionally skilled, and they are lying that they cannot find similar workers here at any price.
There's not a shortage of workers domestically anywhere in IT. Especially not now. There's a shortage of them willing to work for the shitty wages Amazon, Microsoft, etc. wants to pay those roles. So they hire companies like Infosys etc. to supply them, which they have done for decades by means of lies and fraud.
If they were bringing over truly exceptional individuals, that would be a different story.
To be clear none of this is even a knock on the skill and integrity of these workers they're bringing over. I'm just saying they are very similar to the tons of US-citizen engineers early in their careers who are out of work, and that if we were a real country, we'd prioritize citizens' need for a job above FAANG profits, by saying "Tough shit, pay more if you can't fill a position."
As discussed upthread, the PERM process is widely understood to be a farce, so it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if the government has evidence of a Microsoft executive who wrote down that they didn’t want to replace a senior developer with 6 years of tenure. Everyone including JD Vance knows that’s a dumb outcome, but under the PERM regulations, you can only get that guy a visa if you tried and failed to replace him first.
Agreed. It's a farce on all sides. Most companies abuse H1B and PERM. We could reform immigration, by A. only allowing visas for people demonstrably very talented, stealing star performers from other countries instead of just taking bulk new grads. And then B. allowing green cards just on the basis of them paying lots of taxes, advancing in their job, establishing a family, etc. Because yes! Of course it's good for the American company to keep the tenured developer who has established themselves here!
But of course Congress is inhabited by people with the maturity level of children, so one party wants us to admit anyone who doesn't like their home country, and the other party mainly just wants to impress Trump, so no one will work on or negotiate on serious policy proposals.
It's an open secret that the US administration uses regulatory system for bribes and kickbacks, and no one should take them seriously regarding any rationale.
Not surprising seeing those names, that list of companies are notorious for exploiting H1B too. The main reason it needs stronger enforcement and per country caps/ratios.
This is an open secret. My dad was an H visa (H1B didn’t exist yet) in an industry that uses a lot of H visas because the job involves recruiting public health experts for projects in foreign countries. He said that companies never advertise these jobs to Americans and will hide the posting in some obscure newspaper or whatever to bypass that requirement of the law.
As someone who had to interface with Cognizant,Infosys for many years while working for the US corporation - GOOD ! They should loose their privileges for H1B.
The green card process is not transferable. Once its started the applicant is stuck. I personally saw the company slow roll the process for one of my directs. I kept hassling them to move it along but to no avail. I saw this happen to colleagues at numerous companies.
Yup. I had a star developer on my team that we had been planning to sponsor but the company was being sold and our future was unclear. I had to advise her to go find a new job, because if she started the process with us and got laid off, even finding a new job willing to sponsor, she'd have to start over. She would run out of time on her existing visa and lose her legal status altogether.
Never heard of that. Apparently a lot of other people haven't either or consider it too risky as the government has to approve the transfer (as I found when searching for this now).
AC21 is the law that allows H1B to be renewed indefinitely with an approved I140.
It’s the reason Indians are allowed to stay in the U.S. whilst their Green Card is being processed. A bandaid on a completely broken system that caps Green Card allocation by country of birth.
Maybe a little hyperbolic, but the point is that it adds an additional significant shackle.
If I decide my company treats me like crap, I can apply to any* job in the US that I'm qualified for.
If an H1B feels the same way, they need to search within a smaller subset of jobs that are willing to do that paperwork. Last time I was hiring (2025) we were not open to sponsoring H1Bs or green cards. It's just a lot of extra work and legal expense, and frankly we found plenty of talented developers so we were right to not do it. Tons of employers don't deal with it.
* Note: Adjust this figure down somewhat to reflect the fake job postings that I never had a shot at, because the employer is just pretending to look for domestic candidates to satisfy H1B or PERM requirements.
Now, you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent as you make it clearer and clearer that you don't want them. This is the talent we want most.
Even if you're a laborer, it's quite hard to argue that the absolute pinnacle of the labor pool is dragging down your wages and not increasing total jobs.
If other countries are giving you better alternatives, why bring your talents to the US?
LOL. It's not "top talent" it's "cheap talent" or even just "more talent so the supply is larger and wages go down".
If you're EG a PhD+ and working in a frontier AI lab on cutting edge problems, then fair enough. If you're developer x of 100 writing Java CRUD apps in the finance department of some corporate, you are not.
> Now, you're going to continue attracting LESS of the top tier talent as you make it clearer and clearer that you don't want them. This is the talent we want most.
No. It’s not.
> other companies that would be suspended […] included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE.
Top talent exists domestically, this is to hold wages down. It’s fine to impair the import conveyor and see what happens. If and when there is a labor shortage or wages spike horrendously (highly unlikely), certainly, we can revisit.
Neoliberalism ignored domestic worker concerns for shareholder returns and corporatism, and an alternative was offered, here we are. It’s a natural experiment we might not otherwise had had the opportunity to run.
If the US can bully countries into releasing 100M barrels of their own petroleum reserves, what makes you think the US can’t solve for that too? Other countries!
Everyone has a leverage point, everyone has a point at which the pain is worse than the ask. Companies and executives are easy, and usually of weak constitution. They fold fast, based on the evidence so far. US Big Tech fell in line super fast, right? “Fall in line or else.” If trillions of dollars in enterprise value and the resources it commands won’t save you, I’m unsure if anything else would.
It’s not right or wrong, it just is. We are living through a “might makes right” era. It’s not the first, won’t be the last (if history is our guide). This too shall pass.
I’d be fine with it, but you’re always going to have some cohort arguing for importing labor under certain conditions so you have to cover it in the discussion. It’s always about tradeoffs.
Frankly talent doesn’t matter any more with AI - the skill floor for software has dropped to zero so an average dev now competes with the best devs. Marketing and capital matter way more.
It still matters a bit for architectural direction - but those roles are so few I wouldn’t be concerned as an American.
In a normal world, I would praise the government for taking a action to address issues with a program that has definitely been abused by major tech companies for a long time.
However, it's really hard to separate the message from the messenger here.
Beyond the fact that this is obviously a political stunt designed to make headlines just a few weeks before the mid-term elections, there is little reason to believe that this is being done in good faith targeting the worst offenders. The people who have been chosen to run the federal government are simply corrupt sociopaths who will do anything to promote their extreme ideological agenda and are not to be trusted in any way.
Until proven otherwise, I have to assume this effort has to do with kickbacks or political retribution mixed with blatant racism, rather than for any sort of public benefit. I doubt this will result in anything besides a larger donation to the Republican party - or direct payments to Trump family members - by the affected companies.
The AP blurb[0] has different quotes and includes an accusation of fraud that's missing from the Bloomberg article.
> Vance said Thursday, “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.” Vance spoke in a White House news conference announcing the decision.
Accepting Vance's premise, is he saying that the solution to replacing American workers with indentured servants is... removing the path out of indentured servitude? It sounds like they're not touching H1-B itself, just the path from H1-B to residency.
They've been limited in what changes to H1-b they can make without legislative support, so they will take any other option to make H1-b less desirable and harder.
>The report finds that a broad path to citizenship would stabilize jobs and prices across the construction, hospitality, and care industries that families depend on while raising wages for all American workers.
The article posted is about suspending a Tech company's use of h1-b. The report makes no mention of the Tech sector and all the purported gains are in low-income high-physical labor industries like construction and hospitality. The whole wage and cost of living stabilization they're saying is due to immigrant labor is due to the fact you can exploit them for lower wages.
It further argues that Citizenship, not temp work visas, is the correct path. All while calling out that Tech companies, like Microsoft, are the primary beneficiaries of the current system.
In that light, I don't think linking this report arguing what you think it does.
It's "funny" that organizations like the AP, NYT, etc, still quote Vance after that. He never really had credibility beforehand but any he may have had was lost, surely.
Is that 2 or 10 nom's of furry friends, the numbers look the same to my binary eyes, math is hard with an ai buddy?
This admin has demonstrated many times they will misuse Ai and blindly trust whatever it spits out. Would not be surprised in the slightest if that was the case here.
Thanks! Unfortunately archive.ph requires passing an impassible computational paywall for some browsers/ips/etc. Since the article is so short it seem fine to just quote it in full here,
"The Trump administration said Thursday that it would suspend an immigration program for multiple tech firms, including Microsoft Corp., alleging widespread abuse of a worker visa system. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vice President JD Vance said, during a briefing in Washington. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said other companies that would be suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE. He said there were multiple active federal investigations ongoing into the matter. The move is the latest by the Trump administration to crack down on legal and illegal pathways to migration. The program at issue allows US employers to help sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. “Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them, they do a lot of important things,” Vance said Thursday. “Our message to Microsoft is not that we want to harm your company. It’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans.” Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
This is about these companies having the ability to sponsor employees for green cards. They can still employ people on visas. It's more accurate to say the government wants to prevent these workers from eventually becoming American.
Some proof of work type thing to prevent bots by changing the economics, presumably. It's that "checking you are a human" thing without forcing you to click images
I think the problem is the opposite. “MAGA”, both the ideology and the workings of the administration, are largely internally self-contradictory and incoherent.
You might say “okay there’s still some corporate-cons who’ll take my money and do what I ask” but then there’s guys like Miller pulling the strings whose entire purpose is opposed to yours.
This might sound crazy, but maybe getting behind a stable and predictable gov't that has ensured corporate dominance for over a century would have been a smarter strategy? But hey what do I know…
But also maybe they got there by paying and lobbying previous admins to the detriment of the local workforce (though likely good fiscally for the orgs taking advantage of the program).
It is completely possible this is a legitimate issue, but the current administration has been so corrupt about everything else it is impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Even if the claim is valid I’m sure the enforcement is targeted.
You think they’d go after palintir or spacex for the same issues?
There is a likelihood of some targeting though this isn’t the only admin to do that. Remember when the IRS was directed to audit conservative organizations (you know maybe they had a higher likely hood of fraud, maybe, but that was not proven)
That said, it seems this is targeting body farms. Firms that specialize in corrupting the process. Yes some people they bring over have unique talents, but a lot of them are run of the mill folks looking to become “manager” so they can attract a mate back home.
> Remember when the IRS was directed to audit conservative organizations
It was directed to audit them less, because they were complaining about being audited as much as other organizations. Yet another case where conservatives make themselves victims out of nowhere, to get preferential treatment and then continue pretend they were victims after proven wrong.
Citizens United means unlimited money in politics is free speech, they can always give more. Often, non-monetary tributes to king midus, praise or peace prizes, go much further.
The corporate-government corruption is out of hand and I am glad more people are making it a top political issue. I have my doubts this latest from the admin will make a positive difference. It's primarily performative politics for the base with zero consideration for secondary effects or real causes.
The US has been the beneficiary of the world's brain drain for the last...what, 50 years? 80 years?
They start the most businesses, they staff specialty roles like doctors, nurses, researchers, engineers. They put down roots and innovate. After 2-3 generations of course their kids are the same as every other American.
But first and second generation immigrants are far more driven and that shows up. They'll do the dirty jobs if they don't have an education, and if they do have an education they're going to be going for high impact roles.
Since we're going nativist long term I expect we're going to see innovation and productivity drop. It's not a one year change, but over generations we can expect to see the impact. Additionally immigration has been helping stave off our demographic rollover since our birth rate is relatively low. Without immigration which both increase working age population and tend to have more kids per capita than the native born Americans, we can expect the same demographic problems other countries are already dealing with.
How will we manage our giant deficit as growth slows? What if it stops? We can't rely on international integration that has given our giant companies worldwide profits given the way we've shattered the global order.
95% of the world ain't complaining at all if things slightly tilt towards more fair situation globally.
Frankly thanx to open hostility of recent governments towards anybody from outside I am surprised so many talented folks still desperately try to get there. As if greed for more money at almost all costs overshadowed general quality of life, happiness, time for an actual life and so on... life doesn't happen during comfy retirement, best of life happens when one is young or youngish. Especially if one burns themselves to the ground with endless work, what good are money on accounts then
This is how I can tell you aren’t an immigrant. Neither am I.
The money is what matters since it gives you resources you don’t have access to elsewhere. And it’s worth burning yourself out on because the situation is still better than the situation you left behind.
Happiness? Fulfillment? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Fixing the visa program is a thing that can be done to improve things across the board. Punishing individual companies that the executive "arbitrarily" chooses is dictator shit.
You can be a democratically elected dictator. A dictator is defined by the powers they possess, not by the process by which they obtained power.
There is an ongoing argument in the US that a person was elected, therefore everything they do after that has the blessing of the electorate. Funny thing though, the people don’t really have a crystal ball to see into the future how their elected official will decide betray the country in the name of a “mandate”.
Marketing for people still in the reality distortion field where these policies are coherent, constructive, or ultimately beneficial to our country.
These policies are cargo cult echos of what would have worked in the 1990's. Perot was right. But you can't simply put the toothpaste back in the tube, right? In the reality of the 2020's, these policies merely bring economic destruction and subsequent consolidation. It's the same exact class that ran the "free trade" con of the past thirty years, now on to their next ruse.
There is a reason Grump is called "nation builder" in China - that is where the creative part of creative destruction is happening.
Maybe you think Trump (34 counts of felony fraud for the purpose of concealing another crime, attempted election fraud, rampant insider trading, using the powers of his office to persecute political enemies, creating a secret police force to provoke riots, deploying the military against US cities, aggressive attempts to consolidate power in the executive, etc) is just a man of the people but clearly the CEOs didn’t think so or they wouldn’t have done all that embarrassing groveling at the whitehouse.
Several notable dictators came to power through elections or through the existing legal appointment process. Of course it's more common for a dictator to come to power through a revolution, military coup, or civil war, but the way a political figure originally came to hold their political position is not really relevant to determining whether they are a dictator.
> the way a political figure originally came to hold their political position is not really relevant to determining whether they are a dictator
True, but Trump is a dictator because why? Because you disagree with the 77,304,296 people who elected him? Because he cracks unfunny jokes about running for re-election? Because he's corrupt? We've had corrupt Presidents before, but a dictator to me is someone who won't leave office. We do have a precedent of, despite the Jan. 6 looney toons (that he encouraged) trying to stop it, and despite all his dumb baseless lawsuits, Trump hopping on the helicopter and handing over power as scheduled. To me, that's the clear dividing line between an egomaniacal clown and a dictator.
I don't agree with a LOT of his 'policies,' (honestly sometimes describing his whims as policies is overstating it) but I would say the specific one being discussed here is not one of those open-and-shut dumb ideas. There are plenty of unemployed software engineers right here in the U.S. right now, and any US businesses saying they need H1Bs for most of those roles are full of crap.
Trump is not really a dictator due to constraints outside his control, but he certainly behaves as if he wants to be one, and this is the result: it's hard for people to believe that policy moves (or whatever you want to call it) like this are being motivated by a real concern for American workers rather than personal pique or corruption, because not only have so many of his moves been transparently motivated by personal pique and/or corruption, but he's also been restructuring the government in plain view to enable his personal pique and corrupt interests to dictate policy.
The Anthropic thing is the same: we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether the designation as a supply chain risk is legitimate based on Anthropic's policies and actions, but Hegseth is such a vain, insecure clown that any decision like this is suspect.
In short, Trump may not have achieved his dream of dictatorship, but he runs the parts of the government he has control of like a dictator would, and this has done terrible damage to the federal government's legitimacy.
I mean that, you're either saying he wasn't democratically elected, or that this move doesn't help domestic labor. The first is objectively false, and the second is covered in the most basic college economics courses.
Immigrants spend money and grow the market for goods produced by native-born Americans.
All these things are good for domestic labor. There is no reason to believe immigration is bad for American workers. Not everything is zero-sum, and that's basic economics.
>> Democratically elected officials acting in the interest of domestic labor
> Can you really say this with a straight face about trump?
On this particular issue? Yes. On immigration and trade specially, Trump seems to be genuinely far more in tune with domestic labor than any president since Carter. It's a big reason why he was elected.
Since Reagan until Trump, the political class of both parties seemed quite happy to aggressively ignore the interests of domestic labor, in favor of ideology peddled by capital-aligned economists.
Has Microsoft done much toadying? I don't recall seeing their name appear in many of the articles about tech CEOs and companies debasing themselves at Trump's feet. I've seen plenty about brown-nosing from Apple and Facebook and Amazon and obviously Musk, but I don't remember seeing much about Microsoft. I wonder if that lack of ingratiation is part of why MS is being targeted here but the other large tech companies aren't? Or maybe I just missed it.
When you think about it, they're just dictators of their own companies. They're used to everyone doing as they say with little resistance. And of course, the first set of interests they're incentivized to look out for is their own through share grants.
They thought "hiring" a guy like them to be President would mean having a sympathetic ear for all sorts of issues that keep them from "unlocking value for shareholders", but forgot that sympathy has no place in business.
As for H1B, it's been abused and can be used to make the people in the US on that visa an indentured servant. There's definitely reforms that need to be made, and an interest in hiring people from the US that needs to be taken up, but as with all things, the guy doing it is too contemptible of a leader to look past.
You think tech ceos care? Come on, this is a great way to weaken labor across the industry. Threaten current immigrants with literal concentration camps, threaten Americans by condemning them to homelessness + death while massive attacks to welfare programs continue unabated.
What do you think happens when you lose your ability to provide for shelter or healthcare for yourself? Go talk to people that are now homeless because they lost their jobs.
Lay offs are a potential death sentence, there is a very real reason why suicides increases track nearly 1-to-1 with unemployment rates.
That's the dice roll you have in this country as a worker.
I'm not tracking how you think getting of this particular visa program "weakens labor" when what it will actually do is strengthen labor by decreasing labor supply and increasing individual bargaining power of workers.
It's not just about who they hire, it's about who is brought into the country, which is much more under the purview of the federal government than traditional hiring decisions. They can hire anybody they want, but they'll have to keep them remote.
Saying that labor in America doesn't have a right to protect itself from undercutting by foreign labor pools is classist and eliteist.
Don't you want working Americans to be able to afford the cost of living without having their employment/wages undercut by programs designed to benefit big business?
It's like you've never been introduced to the concept of a scapegoat before.
Or the fact that historically speaking, immigrants have always been scapegoated.
Are you willing to at least consider the fact that wages and cost of living might both be headed in the wrong direction due to some other factors beyond immigration such as economic policy or geopolitical conflicts driving up energy costs or changes in market power between labor and capital or general debt levels?
My people are not native americans. They immigrated like most other ancestors of present day americans. Denying foreign labor immigration would amount to me pulling the ladder up behind me. Likely true for most other people, there are very few actual native americans.
Immigration makes the whole country wealthier. An immigrant's success doesn't harm you. Making America an undesirable country to work in harms you. A rising tide raises all boats.
Americans should understand their own immigration system before making these claims. Look at the numbers and the dynamics, and H1Bs aren't a threat to you:
- The number of new H1Bs issued per year is 85,000, capped by law.
- The total number of H1B holders today is around ~500,000, per USCIS and DHS.[0]
- H1Bs require bachelor degrees minimum to be granted a visa, which means they only compete for white-collar jobs. Let's assume all these H1Bs are software engineers, for sake of argument, and not university professors.
- The total labour pool for tech is around 6.7 _million_ per the Bureau of Labour Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm, look at computing and mathematical operations section)
This works out to about ~7 percent of the total labor force consisting of H1Bs today. At 85k per year, it would take about five years to double that population to about 1 million. In that same time span, the US is expected to add 4 or 5 million in population growth alone - I don't know how you want to assume the tech labor pool grows, but I think it is silly to claim the population of H1Bs is a threat to the country's domestic labor pool.
You specifically talk about undercutting wages. H1Bs are supposed to be paid fair wages for their roles as everyone else per wage parity rules, precisely because they're not supposed to be preyed on or represent a displacement to Americans through cheap labor. Companies that attempt to skirt these rules use two techniques: deliberate underlevelling, so that highly qualified folks are categorized as lower-tier workers in occupations / categories other than their actual expertise so that companies can claim a lower wage, and contracting them to other employers at those wage rates. Meanwhile, the H1Bs for those companies can't actually enjoy job portability and escaping these constraints because switching jobs requires a transfer petition and risk, nor can they report their employer because getting fired means deportation. That is how H1Bs end up undercutting wages: not by design, but by abuse and captivity.
I have little patience for this sort of hand-wringing because the ire tends to be pointed and directed at H1B holders for simply existing - not at the institutions that game immigration law, not at a system that stifles legal immigration and blocks other pathways, not at a system that is too busy making the lives of immigrants harder than actually holding abusive actors accountable. There'a a perfectly reasonable system of reform that targets abuse and benefits everyone, but nativists don't want to exist with "foreigners", so they choose to punch down instead of up and claim self-defense. Such reasoning is, frankly, puerile.
I read through every comment in this thread. As of 12:21 EDT I can’t find a single racist comment. It’s not racist to oppose visa work programs. It certainly can be, but that depends on their arguments.
Given the stigma, someone won't give arguments that sounds racist.
What's racist? All visa programs are racist. Keep the border entirely close or let anyone who is not factually a criminal in.
Quota. It's racism.
We have eligibility even just for tourism based level of income. Some nations are exempt, some are not. That's perhaps even worse than racism. Lazy law enforcement, disguised as border control for safety.
If your argument is that people who oppose broad work visa programs are secretly racist but won’t admit it, that’s unfalsifiable.
When a country has far more people seeking visas than it’s willing to admit, it needs some mechanism for deciding who gets in, whether that’s a lottery, eligibility requirements, or some combination. None of those is inherently racist. You seem to be arguing for a radical open borders policy that I doubt many people would support, in just about every country.
What do ya'll think about the conjecture that the elites in the USA want to destroy the actual economy while keeping their world of financial bullshit going?
The current K shaped economy being just the beginning. The elites realised that making more money wont change much for them, but they can make everyone else poor and then live as feudal lords.
Yeah they don't want to destroy everything, they want to own everything, and shrink the costs of ownership by any means necessary. Labor costs are one of the more untolerable aspects of ownership of entire industries.
This only works if they are able to detach wealth from the cost of labor (ie. AI for service jobs robots for physical jobs). At that point the populace will have no way to generate value so the elites dont need them anymore. It remains to be seen if this comes to pass. My daily AI screwups need to be fixed if we are to even consider this.
I haven't seem much evidence of them wanting to destroy the economy. Trump may do some damage with his trade war everyone and run up the debt policy but I think he wants America to do well even if the policies are kind of dumb? (Brit here - I may be quite wrong).
A lot of these comments I find so tone deaf. Are any of you recruiters?
You say hire Americans, as if Americans are more qualified than another higher-qualified foreigner.
You don’t just hire someone because they watched the same kids show and basketball match as you, you hire for talent. The majority of the brightest people I’ve worked with at my time during many FAANGS have all been foreigners.
My knee jerk response to this is short term, more offshore and vendor hiring while companies pivot. Long term, more US firms will set up global offices to spread out their concentration to make onboarding easier.
In the best case we could hope this will lead to increased wages to American citizens, but realistically I think the most likely impact is it pisses a lot of people off, causes a lot of headaches for a lot of people, and has no real impact for most.
Edit: Would love to hear a coherent argument as to why my comment is off topic and deserving of downvotes but I'm sure that won't happen.
I hope it causes some people to return to Europe and do some good work over here.
I'm never sure how to feel about this kind of thing. On one hand, it's kind of interesting to see the self-destruction, and having qualified people return to Europe can only be a good thing for Europe. OTOH, it's scary to see, and I'm unsure whether I prefer a world where China gains much more power.
This ruling is not targeted towards Europeans. I doubt this will significantly affect European workers in the US. The reality is there aren't that many European immigrants in the US and not many at all on H1-Bs. The vast majority of immigrants are from the Americas (with over 22% from Mexico), India and China. European migrants as of ~2023 total around 10% and have been slowly decreasing over the past few years. Bear in mind a lot of people are still here from the post-WW2 period when immigration was much more liberal.
Anecdotally from the people I've met, the majority of Europeans are here for academia on F/J/O, entertainment, are spouses of US citizens or get temporary transfer visas like the L1. Those who go to the US because of high salaries can afford to figure out employment based green cards and they don't have multiple year waiting periods. Otherwise it's a huge pain to get permanent residency or even a normal work visa compared to the EU, but qualified Europeans generally don't have much trouble.
I think there are plenty of qualified and hard-working people in China, I'm not sure this change would increase the number of people there the same way it might in places like Europe or India.
For about 5-6 decades all the qualified and hard-working people in China came to the U.S, because they could enjoy more freedom, fewer arbitrary government dictates, and better economic opportunities. This brain drain was a huge factor in U.S. global dominance.
That conveyor has now reversed, because all of the drivers have reversed as well. China will be fine; it's the U.S. I'm concerned about.
So the US underinvested in the native workforce and now the chinese have gone back there's a big gap that a native workforce would have filled if they hadn't been temporarily replaced by chinese? Seems terrible short sighted.
The U.S. will always dominate because they consume everything and make really nothing. The second people in U.S. stop consuming everyone else pays the price.
While true, the question should be: is each European nation/the EU collectively doing those restrictions sensibly, or poorly?
If done in a similar fashion as the US has chosen, i.e. due to incoherent populism, it would limit the number of competent e.g. Americas, Canadians, South Africans etc. from joining the European workforce.
If done in a sensible fashion, it would only exclude the would-be migrants from those (or other) countries who have shown a wanton disregard for democracy and other constitutionally required values.
A nitpick here, but "visa" gets tossed around a lot. A visa is a document which allows you to request permission to enter a country for some purpose. To work in a country you need a work and/or residency permit. Even in the US, there are situations where you can work with a an expired visa, provided your other immigration documents are current. But if you leave, you need a new one. Similarly UK citizens can still work in some European countries without a visa, because there is no requirement for them to enter with one (but the officer at the border might still refuse entry).
Fewer people means less qualified applicants for the same jobs, which means wages go up. Maybe companies like Microsoft have enough dead weight that they will just absorb the losses in growth but most companies don't have that luxury and this is hitting staff aug body shops so it will hit mid market and small employers as well unless it gets overturned.
so these are just indian companies and microsoft which is lead by an indian guy? is the government signaling something here? i know amazon, meta, google are all doing the same thing- but amazon and meta are licking the ass.
giving the same excuse of "oh these companies post jobs where they are not seen" is the lamest excuse you can give. are you saying this government is so poor and incompetent that it cannot verify where the job was posted? how many people saw the jobs, how many clicked and applied?? are you really saying that the most power country, with SI is not able to do this basic check??
It makes me wonder why there aren't more American young adults taking these jobs. I think it would be great fun to live at the beach for the summer. Maybe the wages are too low, or American kids are focused on internships? Or maybe the European workers are better employees? I don't know.
A) How long you have been working as an H1B in the united states (say 10 years).
B) How much you have paid in taxes (say 1 million).
Whenever either of the above has occured, you take some citizenship test, and then you have a green card. Nothing to do with your employer dangling something for you, literally a measure of your employment history and/or taxable income.
I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.
But a nation couldn't ask more than a working age adult where you invested zero in education and health for 20 years and suddenly pay taxes with none of almost no benefits.
In the UK, which I raised numbers due to the discussion going on in there, visa workers generated yearly 12 to 20 Billions in direct taxes and fees and they use 4B in health (which technically they paid in fees a combined value of 6B upfront If my numbers are right)
But the real numbers lies on what other revenue they generate. It is estimated in my calculations that +50B-70B pounds are from immigrants on UK with a working visa.
That's no amount to shy considering about it is 8M people in that specific situation. And remember that none of them had to have their education covered by the government.
Someone in the other comment said that 8M British people would generate more taxes than that, but I did not find evidence of that. According to the public consultation documents UK gov released about immigration a couple of years ago, about 10% of the immigrants are responsible for more than 35% of the taxes collected. Hence the suggestion on curb immigration considering the salary range which might make sense or not depending on where you stand on the topic. I have no horses on this race and my impression as an outsider who just likes analysing data is that it seems as much of a claim as saying that EU took more money from UK than what it put in which turned out to be mostly incorrect.
I think the "chud" immigration logic is rather, take whatever win you can get in the general direction of restriction, because you've been losing every single battle for 5+ decades.
they will dangle visa renewal for ppl to get to that time then.
but I agree that it would be nice to have a less fraught/complicated path to permanent residency.
And this is hardly new. Ross Perot was opposing H1B when he was running for President in the 1990s.
The biggest one is the program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job.
What you’re saying gets repeated a lot, but I’ve never seen it to be true. Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level. I just don’t believe that it’s happening on the scale that people make it out to be.
Also, I don’t want to get too into it unless people are interested, but at least at the companies I’ve been at, the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty wrong with these programs and I’m glad to see reform, but I don’t believe the underpaying thing is happening nearly as much as people claim it does.
Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.
The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.
Maybe in real tech companies its a different story.
it's been true 100% of the places I've worked. I can't name names on the internet.
I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.
Abuse of the H1-B program isn't just about hiring people for less money right now. It's about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline.
You're so close to getting it... keep going...
At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).
Idk if people don't realize you can look this up? Pay doesn't look suppressed to me....
where is this data coming from? Engineers frequently move between Amazon/Meta/Google/Microsoft, even on H1B.
MSFT has always been one of the higher paying tech companies out there: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/job-lists/highest-payi...
That isnt true. A SWE engineer working at the same level at Redmond gets paid the same band irrespective of visa status.
why is it racist to find workers willing to accept a lower wage to do the same quality work?
Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?
Employers who really need employees for high-skilled work would thus get visas. Employers who want to underpay their foreign labor will not.
Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.
The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).
I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.
One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.
The chances that this lasts for even a few months beyond the midterms is zero.
Also why are you singling out Indians? Are you racist against other nations?
Bingo.
This is a pre-midterm messaging move aimed at shoring up support with young men who voted for Trump in ‘24. The chances that the policy even lasts more than a few months is slim.
(In the economical sense, not in the political sense)
Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/ussuspends-micro...
I’m a fan of the YIMBY types but we aren’t building enough annd, until we are, it’s a problem to put more people where we already have little housing!
Offshoring to, say Poland or Portugal on the other hand...
For example see https://theenterpriseworld.com/offshore-development-centers/ where they are listing well established locations for (US) offshoring.
I haven't been on a job market for a long time, but this is what I hear from people around me.
For the first time in my life I'm seeing high-income earners as a big drag on society.
You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.
As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.
Who is in the mansion and who is in the slum?
The government exists for the general welfare and and economic system that subsidizes idleness because the disingenuous say "look over there, its a net positive" while ignoring the externalized cost borne by the taxpayer is just theft from the taxpayer.
The scarcity issue is valid when the resource is limited. In case of US, I was not aware of food scarcity. Even housing is more due to policies than actual land scarcity.
Economic activity does have positive feeback. Yes, some people get unfairly rich - but the solution is not to stop the activity, instead try to get the rich pay their fair share of contribution to the country.
Is it meant as rhetorical reply to the officials as in "aha, but Microsoft will prevail and make it even worse for you, American workers" or as a reply to the workers: "don't fret, move back to your country and work the same job anyway". Or was it meant as a hint for the officials "don't forget to close that loophole as well"?
I mean, we don't really need that west coast comp either? If I was pulling my old FAANG comp here in Spain, I'd be in the top 0.1% of earners...
As for non-protected roles, global market participation has ups and downs.
Compared to having someone move to the US, does hiring a remote worker help or hinder the US economy?
Of course "the economy" is a vague, undefined term. But it's easy to think of various specific measures like median household income or the unemployment rate that capture this dynamic.
So regarding your final sentiment, I think that often "the economy" and "the people" are the same thing. If something raises the unemployment rate, that will bad for "the economy" and also "the people."
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/05/12/g-s1-12...
1. Remote within the US. You still need valid work authorization;
2. Remote outside the US. This is just offshoring and if it really worked, every tech jobs would be offshored. Companies have been trying to do this for decades. Companies would love nothing more than to offshore every white collar job. They would if they could.
If a company hires an engineer in India, instead of Seattle, how does America (and workers) benefit? Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains, its just a hiring decision.
The question is whether these restrictions increase American employment or just accelerate the exodus of jobs while making the US a less attractive place for talented people.
There are many negative externalities of mass migration that are borne by the locals while benefits mostly accrue to a handful of... shysters.
I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.
If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).
Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.
Obviously supply matters most but that doesnt mean demand isnt still a significant factor.
What are some of the other "many negative externalities" you mention?
I feel like we could have the best of everything if you we just built more housing to keep up with demand.
A benefactor decided to solve the housing crisis, created a development company. Gave up 2 years later. Stating the legal burden to get permits was the biggest financial obstacle. We are ready to build from the start, 2 years later we still couldn't build and spend most of our capital in lawyers in hope to get any approval.
Its Azure Hardware division that manages its first party silicon and its deployment has a huge hardware and electrical engineering presence. These fields don't have as many people in America in them, because Software has paid so much more for the last two decades, why would anyone go EE when they could go CS and make 2-3x more. In other countries, these degrees were paid similar so there is a larger pool to pull from then in America.
You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer
And they are good at it.
Remote work makes that easier now, but with silicon / EE its not always the most optimal way to work.
Middle America EE is also not building data center class chips or infrastructure most of the time, would it be easier to get one of them up to speed, yes. But it's the equivalent of throwing a front-end engineer into C or embedded programming or vice versa.
My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.
H1B and offshore jobs can be beneficial to America though, and that was why the program started. Sufficient guardrails just never went up and now there is opportunity for some abuse. But that abuse isn't across the board, there is still beneficial H1B and offshoring going on mixed in with abuse.
But but but I was told that unions will force employers to retrain folks instead of laying them off.
From the company’s perspective it is great, you can pay them less and artificially suppress wages.
From society’s perspective… well 30% of young people are unemployed despite record low numbers of young people. No births and no jobs! It’s genius!
I have one of the worst passports in the world. It was already difficult to travel to many places, and now more and more countries are soft-banning everyone from here.
The reason being that whenever a country makes their tourism visas more accessible, people from my country known as "labor exporters" or "visa brokers" apply for visas for hundreds of people.
In the age of AI coding, what is the point of outsourcing your programming to TCS, Wipro, et al? These consultancies are not building groundbreaking innovative stuff, they're building the drudgery enterprise software to handle taxes or business intelligence tools. Things that are perfect for AI (don't get me wrong, AI is perfect for a lot of other types of coding too).
Or is it that outsourcing is cheaper than AI tokens?
Ironic phrasing, as in my experience the steelman argument in favor of these companies is "The customer is really bad at thinking through their own requirements."
That is an ideological creed, not a fact. It might be true, but you're just smuggling in your priors with no evidence.
I guess it’s the least worst option we’ve found. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need any guardrails at all though.
Late stage capitalism is a scourge for humanity.
But if you’ve ever worked with the public, you know there is almost no cultural onus on nontechnical people to properly hire or contract technical people for technical tasks.
So…no: The market isn’t very good at this - yet.
This stuff is all contracted or subcontracted to these sorts of companies. You don’t need technical geniuses. You need good enough at the lowest cost.
What was it good for? Well, often it was prompting a person in a low-cost location what code to write. He would pick it up in his timezone and implement it overnight, and present findings/questions as a response.
The problem is, coding has made implementation super cheap. It is now so cheap you have to compare it to the cost of dealing with someone in another timezone, who does not have the same cultural context on the problem. They also can't ask you clarifying questions while you're asleep. AI wins against the offshore guy, on both money and context.
Who does it help? Amazingly, the experienced onshore dev who thought he was going to be unemployed past 40. This person is now able to implement several things concurrently, has experience in making technical decisions, and has local cultural context.
2. Circular agreements - you get them to sell your goods/services in the region of their home country
3. These count as "Services" on the P&L and provide massive tax advantages to the company because these aren't treated as labor costs.
This may be from an old context in my brain since I worked with some of those companies, so those reasons may have changed or impact may have with various regulations, etc.
Good luck trying to get a 6 person shop with a full calendar of other-customer work to suddenly prioritize a show-stopping bug that's only affecting you.
So - definitely agree with your general thesis.
This is a pretty stupid thing to do, btw, as whatever isn’t AI will just be offshored, which reduces government and social security revenue and closes a pipeline to get smart immigrants, who tend to vote Republican.
At the time we all saw the H1B1 program as a way for companies to hire cheaper labor that they can treat poorly.
> President Donald Trump’s administration is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using H-1B visas
Everything described in the article, is about H1-B. So yes, the action is preventing greencard applications for those H1-B visas, but that is functionally the same as restricting Microsoft's access to H1-Bs since a future green card sponsorship is the reason many are there working for them on that visa.
Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
US was investing in AI powered self-driving tech, China was investing in new EV motor and battery tech with advanced manufacturing automation to cut costs, EU makers were just reselling diesel engines with fancy badges hoping the EV and self-driving fad will pass. EU car industry went from decades of being the global trend setter in terms of designs and technology, to being the follower, at least in technology.
Also, a lot of the manufacturing costs in EU not just for the auto sector, is now majority made of taxes, compliance, bureaucracy and labor's cost of housing. If you import workers they'll be under the same high compliance rules, and same expensive housing pressures, unless you bet they'll accept to live in slum-like conditions in order to undercut the locals, in which case you might as well cut the facade and just advocate for return to slavery.
European carmakers are where they are because electromobility reset their legacy advantages (a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages); now the same dollar amount gets them less R&D output than in China, because engineers are more expensive, and production itself is difficult to keep competitive for the exact same reason (also why a lot of car production has shifted east into lower wage European countries long before Chinese cars became competitive).
If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well (I'm not saying that would be desirable, just that it's a given).
Wrong, auto-sector wages back then were much higher in regards to local purchasing power (especially on the housing front) and also unions were much stronger. Now they're already lower class jobs. A VW factory worker could buy a house and take his family on vacation with a stay at home wife. Good luck with that today when you see how much housing prices have outpaced wage growth since then.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor and less regulations. As do Japan's car makers.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
> just that it's a given
Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
The west's industry marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market. If your western cars aren't cutting edge and innovative you failed. And they aren't cutting edge and innovative because you didn't invest enough in R&D at the right time, because you valued short term shareholder returns, basically the plague of most western corporation.
Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers. Not saying this is bad, but makes it harder to compete.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would have internationally competitive cotton.
The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
> The west marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market.
This is an overgeneralization. E.g. Several of the most successful German companies are grocery retailers (as boring and low-tech as it gets).
> Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
I'm not saying you can't pay out globally uncompetitive wages as long as you're sitting on an R&D advantage, but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them (just consider the Japanese electronics industry in the 80s/90s for example; people said the exact same shit back then until they no longer could).
Not true anymore.
>The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
Because of imported cheap labor or because of automation at scale no country can match?
>but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them
Only if you make poor deals where you voluntarily give them all your hard earned technology for free in exchange for access to their market. Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers it all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
That's a (citation needed) right there.
The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16736/w167...
Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."
What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.
Immigration adds to both supply and demand. It’s not at all clear that the effect should be suppressed wages.
I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.
Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?
I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.
Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.
Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".
Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.
Yes I know every po dunk college up and down the country added CS to their collection (because all you need is a computer lab so it goes in with degrees like Math, Physics etc).
CS even at lesser colleges requires sustained discipline in the maths, sciences, logic theory, and much more depending on the university.
Liberal Arts is a very different animal and while it can also be a very rigorous program for committed students, it has a greater opportunity for students to slack off and still graduate. It is much harder to hide and get through a CS program with this mentality and so it deserves more respect than you are giving it.
The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.
There's also a plethora of people with CS degrees who can't even write FizzBuzz on their own, even given a warmed-up IDE and a partially filled out skeleton of the program. And no, this is not idle speculation, I've interviewed quite a few of these people. So I wouldn't personally put much stock in "has a CS degree" as a marker of qualification for any particular job. That applies, of course, regardless of nationality.
Having worked with a lot of foreign tech workers - I’d take the Americans any day.
Having worked with many Americans and many non-Americans over the last 35+ years, I'd say there's no general difference in ability that correlates to nationality. I've worked with dumb Americans and dumb non-Americans, and vice-versa.
Where are all these people? Every time I post a job, I get thousands of garbage resumes.
Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.
Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.
the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.
By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!
I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.
On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.
Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:
1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.
2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.
I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.
The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.
If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.
In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.
Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.
Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.
That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.
And now it has predictably blown up in our faces.
I was more pointing out that hoarding high-performers as a country is desirable since geopolitics prioritizes different outcomes than pure capitalism.
Optimally, the US would attract the cream of the crop, the top 5% of the world and let them roam freely inside of the American system with plenty of capital (both money and labor). I'd venture and point out that many of America's greatest technological leaps were a direct result of this kind of strategy (think WWII, the space program, computing, etc, etc).
Ok you said it. Where's your empirical evidence?
If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.
Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.
And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.
I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.
I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.
This is said all the time, and don't get me wrong, I like "compensation" as much as the other guy, but to me this just sounds like a race to the bottom (or sky) for companies.
It's great for those compensated for sure. But what happens once the companies with deepest pockets, FAANG and such, pay the most and drain the job market, what happens to all the other companies then? It raises the bar significantly for any new startup, makes it ever more impossible for any boring, middle-of-the-road company to find anyone remotely capable. Ultimately growth of the tech sector is limited by the number of people you have available, regardless of how much you pay for them. If anything, another country with more potential talent could even surpass the one playing alone in its own sandbox.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and maybe in an economic downturn it's even a good thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't come with no tradeoffs.
But that raises the debate ... does the US really need to export MORE of its culture at taxpayer/citizens expect ? :|
As to the pause, repeal, destruction of this program, etc., however its characterized eventually, it seems to be inline with the idea of moving much of the manufacturing that left back home as well.
The psychology experts on youtube are all lamenting the disconnection of people and communities due to internet usage and less face time.
Framing that in terms of markets, the internet has empowered people to do more themselves, and rely on direct interaction with others less.
Economic shifts are behavioral shifts at the core, and in 2026 every programmer has a staff of 1,000+ unpaid AI agents at their disposal.
We can all just download programmers now. :|
That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.
We can count how many people are truly lamenting its loss, and follow the money.
Anyone looking at the salaries in big tech will laugh you out of the room. You think the six figure salaries for writing shitty ass Go services is _wage suppression_ ?
Six figures isn't what it used to be. I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
> I know families making low six figures who are struggling financially because the cost of living is so high now, especially food, gasoline, healthcare, and housing.
Let's be very honest here: the only two in there that have massively increased are housing (due to the aforementioned non existent wage suppression) and healthcare (because america can't into healthcare). Families making 50k do more than fine when it comes to food and gasoline, merely because they don't have 4k of rent to pay.
Software allows a task that could only be done manually once at a time by one person to be infinitely replicated and scalable at speeds that no single human could do, and that value only requires one person to invest resources to develop it once. Afterwards you got that multiplier of value generated.
This should be obvious but im merely describing the miracle of computing.
So if that software is generating the multiplier of value it is entirely plausible that the company is not providing appropriate compensation to the person tasked with developing that multiplier.
We should all bear in mind, every government program is a market price distortion, and the workers are going to keep working.
Who they work for is all that has changed.
1. Doing layoffs at the same time as hiring temporary workers is antithetical. Which is it: you can't find someone to do a job or you have too many workers? Yes, jobs aren't completely interchangeable but large companies like Microsoft hire generic software engineers. Retrain;
2. the H1B->GC funnel where H1Bs have no pre-country quota but GCs do creates a massive backlog for India, in particular, and allows companies like Infosys and Tata to keep "temporary" workers in indentured servitude for decades;
3. Despite safeguards, it's clear that temporary workers get underpaid, particularly at the outsourcing companies, so visas are used to suppress labor costs for both citizens/residents and temporary workers.
Try saying something like that.
oh and that entry level web developer on lowest band is actually a senior systems engineer? Worry not, Home Office don't check that.
Department budget doesn't allow for a new Desktop PC ? Call it a "data collection terminal."
Just change the words to the ones you like, and cash those checks, easy as flying a kite ! :D
My own PERM would have had no chance of passing certification.
I actually think it's a great thing to let young people from around the world have working holidays in America https://www.usit.ie/experiences/working-holidays/j1-usa/
For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.
The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.
Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.
Microsoft pays new grad SWEs close to a quarter million dollars. Plenty of citizens would gladly take that money if they could land the job.
Also, how much does rent in a 20-minute-drive circle around microsoft cost? And proper health insurance?
I live in a small european country and i know quite a few people who went this route (usually it's google), and after two-three years of burnout, those people come back, because while earning less in numbers over here, they can get a normal 8 hour job (no overtime, no weekends), proper time off (25, 30 days per year, unlimited sick days of course), and still save enough that even if the social pension system fails, they'll have enough to live comfortably.
There is only one Einstein and he wasn’t motivated by money. He was attracted to what America stood for. We are losing that
We should clip a green card to every PhD we grant.
These body shop firms are not hiring world-leading geniuses, they are getting mostly-okay Java devs who will do boring scutwork for the chance at life in America.
H1B is for cheap java devs.
Remember how competition was supposed to work? (psst https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall... )
Instead work is either not done (less revenue for the company to expand), or is sent overseas. If management gets more comfortable with work going overseas it becomes a very big problem for domestic workers.
This is dumb, but not directionally. Any company that has done a lay-off shouldn’t be allowed to apply for visas for 2 years, with a 5-year probationary period thereafter during which if they do layoffs again the penalty jumps to 5 years.
And structurally advantageous to incumbent firms with access to easy capital with which to ride downturns.
Boom, perm green card. Every big company does it.
Effectively you put the persons role up as a job ad, then fail a few people in the interview and that’s all it takes for PERM.
They weren’t real interviews. The job postings wasn’t real. I interviewed people so someone on the team already could get a PERM.
A money-making interest violating US immigration law is a completely different matter, because capital loves nothing more than cheap labor and is willing to subject labor to the ordeal of being the individual immigrant dealing with US immigration law, so long as they don't cost as much as Americans.
This system is ostensibly there so that we can draw that skilled 10X engineer or brilliant researcher in India, UK, Romania, Australia, whatever, to America - to boost our companies and get his/her productivity into our GDP instead of some other country's companies and GDP. If used that way, I am all for it. Most of us have met many non-citizens who are very obviously a net benefit to our country due to their talent and ambition.
But this system is used in practice to depress all of our wages, to knock out rungs on the career ladder for new graduates, and to create a semi-indentured workforce more tolerant of low pay and poor working conditions, by bringing over completely average developers of the variety that you could just as easily get by putting up a table at your local college's career day.
I don't blame the workers who accept this offer, as being paid on the low end of our scale here is obviously an upgrade or they wouldn't take it. But it's a betrayal of our domestic workers. A financial hit for some of us, and for those earlier in their career, a major blocker to them getting jobs in the first place.
People forget that we shut down immigration for a few decades in the 1900s to let people assimilate.
We’ve overdone it, we need to slow the influx again.
> ... Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.
I'm glad someone is finally taking this more seriously. There are a lot of big tech teams where you can't even get a job there unless you're Indian. H1B's should be for unique, foreign talent, not senior software engineers.
> Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling added that some of the largest IT firms in the world would also be suspended from that program, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini.
> "We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies," Sonderling said.
2. I'm kinda surprised those firms were even trying to get green cards for their employees. I thought their whole model was to rotate offshore people into the US for temporary assignments on H1-Bs.
> Under the PERM process, employers seek certification from the Department of Labor that there is no qualified, willing or available US worker for a specific job. It's a step required before filing petitions for most employment-based green cards.
3. That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B. Delaying it actually made me pretty sympathetic to the attempts to game the system to prevent and American from getting the job. Even if H1-Bs were technically for temporary workers, everyone saw them as a step on the way to permanent residency.
4. So have they done anything about offshoring yet? Because focusing on H1-Bs and green cards is focusing on the problems of 20+ years ago.
It's probably been 15 years since my employer sponsored any significant numbers of employees for H1-Bs, it's all offshore hiring in Asia to company offices in Asia now.
It actually is a required step for the H1-B. I've heard it's more relaxed than the green card check, though.
Certainly not at Microsoft.
> 3. That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B. Delaying it actually made me pretty sympathetic to the attempts to game the system to prevent and American from getting the job.
There's a similar evaluation done for H1B.
I was specifically responding to the list I quoted, which did not list Microsoft and was mostly Indian consulting firms.
> There's a similar evaluation done for H1B.
If so, they should tighten that up then (if they haven't already) so it can't be gamed, then drop it from the PERM evaluation if it's already been done.
I don't like nationalism, but I see no way out of it.
Private Businesses should not be able to offer citizenship as a side payment to their employees, they should stick to offering cash. If you are the french foreign legion and you want to reward military recruits with citizenship, then at least it's a government that is receiving the benefit and selling the citizenship, but private business should not be able to sell citizenship, or an easier way to get citizenship, to anyone. It's not a resource that belongs to them.
No matter your political inclination, overabusing green cards to import cheap labor in detriment of the American wage is not even a secret: everybody does it. So the claim is, at least, correct in its formulation.
However:
- It doesn't include Amazon, the biggest offender by far?
- Suspends green cards but not H1Bs? so what the point is exactly? replacing cheap labor, for a potential revolving door of cheap labor? make sure cheap labor is never guaranteed to stay, so they don't dare to think about not being cheap anymore?
- People really thought that Microsoft was different to Tata in methodology and discipline? Did you really have to interact with people in either company? I did, and let me tell you, "highly skilled" or even "skilled at all" is nothing short of an exaggeration.
I do not condone abuse of any system, including visa/gc system, it should only go to those that truly are builders and contribute to growth of the overall system and not act as parasites, but that's a trait not exclusive to just the people (some targeting is probably legit) you're targeting.
But, can we say that H1B and immigration is what fueled the current boom. Or maybe it just went along for the ride.
When I was in the US on one myself, my company kept pushing me to go for a green card, but I never intended to stay permanently, which made things a little awkward... I remember basically ghosting the immigration firm they assigned to me.
Full disclosure: long MSFT.
Yup.
* H1B visas are work permits issued to foreign-born workers sponsored by a company to work in the USA. These visas are bound to a specific employer with limited ability to transfer elsewhere, and on their own have ZERO ability to convert to a Green Card
* Green Card is Legal Permanent Residency (LPR), the first real step towards Naturalization. It lets you live and work anywhere in the USA, provided you generally contribute more than you receive in benefits (though this is very fungible depending on political incentives). Obtaining a Green Card is incredibly hard to do outside of family, with employer sponsorship being one of the few other viable routes.
So what seems to be happening here is that the regime wants to block Microsoft et al for applying for Green Cards for workers currently on H1B visas - not unheard of, but a rarity among the hordes of H1Bs employed yearly by technical firms. I suspect the goal is to discourage workers abroad from applying for H1Bs since employer green card sponsorship is off the table, but it won’t necessarily stop green cards via other routes (like marriage). It also doesn’t address the real grievances around H1Bs themselves, like how it coerces labor into taking more toxic or abusive working environments and lower wages while also robbing domestic workers of opportunities.
In other words, and assuming I’m understanding this messaging correctly (a big if), this is a nothingburger. It doesn’t stop H1B abuse, it doesn’t help American workers, and it punishes the handful of folks who deserve the Green Card conversion from their employers. It’s a packet of lies and misdirection meant to look bigger than it actually is.
#1. Young, eager tech employee from India enrolls in Masters program at US mid-tier university.
#2. Completes course work with 90% other students from India in Florida, Texas, or California.
#3. Gets internship job as part of OPT. (Optional Practical Training)
#4. After 1 (or 2 years for STEM), employer puts in for H1B.
#5. After a round or two of H1B, employer starts the PERM process for a green card.(Tough journey for someone from India... I agree)
Young techie is now 32 years old. Perhaps they marry a US Citizen, and a different pathway opens up. Perhaps they transition to a "genius visa" and then have a different pathway. Perhaps the US government changes policy. It takes a long time but you are living and working in the US during the whole experience.
Stopping this path breaks the chain. If there is no path to citizenship, even a long one, then H1B will stop being so attractive.
Note the pathway for foreign students has been closed. Check on the MS program enrollments at most mid tier schools. Down 50%, 70%, 95%....
Not really, the backlog for a greencard is so huge that no one seriously plans for one when they go for a H1-B. They can hope of course, but the other pathways you mentioned are more likely at this point.
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H1-B demand will remain high since people here in india that aren't able to land a target job with high salary use US employment as a resume patching tool. It just happens that the masters is the safest path to that employment. And then they return and become an engineering manager at some company here, as an "ex-MTS 3, Nutanix" demanding a salary that they never would have been able to demand with their pre-US resume.
> Down 50%, 70%, 95%....
Many other factors, one of which is that target companies across the comp band now hire much more in india. More quants/big tech, as well as more mid-comp GCCs. For example, walmart's tech team pays 35L INR to my friend in a city where this salary lands an extremely comfy life. This did not exist even 10 years ago and my friend's resume would have necessitated migrating to the US to get the same QoL. Of course, at the extreme top end people keep going e.g bay area founders/AI unicorns. But that was always a minority. So unless you are aiming for and have a good chance at a unicorn/FAANG-level payout, OR on the other of the spectrum you want resume-patching, there is no reason to migrate anymore.
For reference, at 0YE quant TCs reach 2cr in the top colleges, and stripe/databricks almost 1cr. At a tier-2 university, local unicorns like zomato pay 60L. The former is slightly lesser than a bay area salary and the latter two are europe-level salaries even without any PPP adjustment, so you can imagine why there is less migration.
But I'm surprised that Microsoft is accused doing it. I was under the impression that Microsoft will sponsor your green card but is still very strict about whom they hire and retain, regardless of immigration status. But maybe that has changed?
Tata, Infosys, HCL, and similar body shops are definitely a different story.
Companies have usually gotten around it saying we r laying off in 1 division but hiring in another. Maybe that hand waving can’t be swept under the rug anymore.
I truly believe that software would be improved immensely if all developers spent a few years doing tech support for the elderly.
This, to my knowledge, very rarely works.
> software would be improved immensely if all developers spent a few years doing tech support for the elderly
This, on the other hand, absolutely does.
It's not common though, and I don't think it's a case of "training". Some people have the drive to figure that path out, and those people should be encouraged and supported.
Totally agree. I don’t think that means institutionalizing that pipeline is likely to yield those folks. They’re rare.
Strictly a function of management quality and experience.
I remember not to long ago we got a service impact email from Microsoft saying they expected exchange services to resume normal operation in a sodding WEEK. Completely unacceptable for a provider my company, a smaller one, pays six figures per year for services.
As a foreigner: How does this work and what do they do?
And depending on where you are in the green card process, you might have to start all over again if you change employers.
Once the I-140 petition is approved (14 days), and I-485 is pending for 180+ days, and employee can easily leave to another employer, it only takes them to file couple forms like transfer of H1B and transfer of I-140.
So the most you can keep the employee on a leash is ~2-3 years which happens to be median tenure at tech.
the immigration discourse is filled with false information, and for this reason I prefer only immigration attorneys discuss the matter as they are the most qualified of all the quirks and nuances of the US immigration law.
I read the former comment like that they are abusing/missusing the "technical Greencard mechanics" to get their employees past some checks/approvals/permissions/whatever or acquire whatever "special benefits" by working around whatever rules
please spare me stories of "abused tech workers" who have middle six figure comp, free lunches, unlimited PTO, bunch of perks, generous 401k matches and infinite matcha lattes.
absolutely delusional discourse.
No, it's not.
I know plenty of of software engineers, good ones, who can't find work. Businesses which abuse the H1B and Green card programs to import cheaper workers when there is not a shortage of same here, are acting in bad faith and they know it. They are lying that the people they're bringing over are exceptionally skilled, and they are lying that they cannot find similar workers here at any price.
There's not a shortage of workers domestically anywhere in IT. Especially not now. There's a shortage of them willing to work for the shitty wages Amazon, Microsoft, etc. wants to pay those roles. So they hire companies like Infosys etc. to supply them, which they have done for decades by means of lies and fraud.
If they were bringing over truly exceptional individuals, that would be a different story.
To be clear none of this is even a knock on the skill and integrity of these workers they're bringing over. I'm just saying they are very similar to the tons of US-citizen engineers early in their careers who are out of work, and that if we were a real country, we'd prioritize citizens' need for a job above FAANG profits, by saying "Tough shit, pay more if you can't fill a position."
But of course Congress is inhabited by people with the maturity level of children, so one party wants us to admit anyone who doesn't like their home country, and the other party mainly just wants to impress Trump, so no one will work on or negotiate on serious policy proposals.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5cfecbba-69ed-42d0-98fd-3ae019144...
The situation could be easier, make approved I140s portable and issue an EAD, but you aren't trapped with an employer.
It’s the reason Indians are allowed to stay in the U.S. whilst their Green Card is being processed. A bandaid on a completely broken system that caps Green Card allocation by country of birth.
Absolutely
> that caps Green Card allocation by country of birth
?????
If I decide my company treats me like crap, I can apply to any* job in the US that I'm qualified for.
If an H1B feels the same way, they need to search within a smaller subset of jobs that are willing to do that paperwork. Last time I was hiring (2025) we were not open to sponsoring H1Bs or green cards. It's just a lot of extra work and legal expense, and frankly we found plenty of talented developers so we were right to not do it. Tons of employers don't deal with it.
* Note: Adjust this figure down somewhat to reflect the fake job postings that I never had a shot at, because the employer is just pretending to look for domestic candidates to satisfy H1B or PERM requirements.
Even if you're a laborer, it's quite hard to argue that the absolute pinnacle of the labor pool is dragging down your wages and not increasing total jobs.
If other countries are giving you better alternatives, why bring your talents to the US?
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5cfecbba-69ed-42d0-98fd-3ae019144...
You can't be saying this in seriousness
Just hire them remote overseas. One of the competitive advantages of hybrid organizations is they natively support international teams.
If you're EG a PhD+ and working in a frontier AI lab on cutting edge problems, then fair enough. If you're developer x of 100 writing Java CRUD apps in the finance department of some corporate, you are not.
No. It’s not.
> other companies that would be suspended […] included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE.
These companies are D tier talent, at best.
Neoliberalism ignored domestic worker concerns for shareholder returns and corporatism, and an alternative was offered, here we are. It’s a natural experiment we might not otherwise had had the opportunity to run.
It also exists non-domestically...
Everyone has a leverage point, everyone has a point at which the pain is worse than the ask. Companies and executives are easy, and usually of weak constitution. They fold fast, based on the evidence so far. US Big Tech fell in line super fast, right? “Fall in line or else.” If trillions of dollars in enterprise value and the resources it commands won’t save you, I’m unsure if anything else would.
It’s not right or wrong, it just is. We are living through a “might makes right” era. It’s not the first, won’t be the last (if history is our guide). This too shall pass.
Anything but that!
It still matters a bit for architectural direction - but those roles are so few I wouldn’t be concerned as an American.
However, it's really hard to separate the message from the messenger here.
Beyond the fact that this is obviously a political stunt designed to make headlines just a few weeks before the mid-term elections, there is little reason to believe that this is being done in good faith targeting the worst offenders. The people who have been chosen to run the federal government are simply corrupt sociopaths who will do anything to promote their extreme ideological agenda and are not to be trusted in any way.
Until proven otherwise, I have to assume this effort has to do with kickbacks or political retribution mixed with blatant racism, rather than for any sort of public benefit. I doubt this will result in anything besides a larger donation to the Republican party - or direct payments to Trump family members - by the affected companies.
not much in there beyond the headline but quotes from the admin
> Vance said Thursday, “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.” Vance spoke in a White House news conference announcing the decision.
[0] https://apnews.com/live/trump-midterm-elections-news-updates...
Speaking personally, my Dad put me in a university in Canada instead of USA since the path to permanent immigration was so much smoother.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...
The article posted is about suspending a Tech company's use of h1-b. The report makes no mention of the Tech sector and all the purported gains are in low-income high-physical labor industries like construction and hospitality. The whole wage and cost of living stabilization they're saying is due to immigrant labor is due to the fact you can exploit them for lower wages.
It further argues that Citizenship, not temp work visas, is the correct path. All while calling out that Tech companies, like Microsoft, are the primary beneficiaries of the current system.
In that light, I don't think linking this report arguing what you think it does.
gotta love our post-truth world...
This admin has demonstrated many times they will misuse Ai and blindly trust whatever it spits out. Would not be surprised in the slightest if that was the case here.
"The Trump administration said Thursday that it would suspend an immigration program for multiple tech firms, including Microsoft Corp., alleging widespread abuse of a worker visa system. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vice President JD Vance said, during a briefing in Washington. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said other companies that would be suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE. He said there were multiple active federal investigations ongoing into the matter. The move is the latest by the Trump administration to crack down on legal and illegal pathways to migration. The program at issue allows US employers to help sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. “Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them, they do a lot of important things,” Vance said Thursday. “Our message to Microsoft is not that we want to harm your company. It’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans.” Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
You might say “okay there’s still some corporate-cons who’ll take my money and do what I ask” but then there’s guys like Miller pulling the strings whose entire purpose is opposed to yours.
This might sound crazy, but maybe getting behind a stable and predictable gov't that has ensured corporate dominance for over a century would have been a smarter strategy? But hey what do I know…
Even if the claim is valid I’m sure the enforcement is targeted.
You think they’d go after palintir or spacex for the same issues?
That said, it seems this is targeting body farms. Firms that specialize in corrupting the process. Yes some people they bring over have unique talents, but a lot of them are run of the mill folks looking to become “manager” so they can attract a mate back home.
It was directed to audit them less, because they were complaining about being audited as much as other organizations. Yet another case where conservatives make themselves victims out of nowhere, to get preferential treatment and then continue pretend they were victims after proven wrong.
Will they learn their lesson? Find out next time!
Citizens United means unlimited money in politics is free speech, they can always give more. Often, non-monetary tributes to king midus, praise or peace prizes, go much further.
The corporate-government corruption is out of hand and I am glad more people are making it a top political issue. I have my doubts this latest from the admin will make a positive difference. It's primarily performative politics for the base with zero consideration for secondary effects or real causes.
They start the most businesses, they staff specialty roles like doctors, nurses, researchers, engineers. They put down roots and innovate. After 2-3 generations of course their kids are the same as every other American.
But first and second generation immigrants are far more driven and that shows up. They'll do the dirty jobs if they don't have an education, and if they do have an education they're going to be going for high impact roles.
Since we're going nativist long term I expect we're going to see innovation and productivity drop. It's not a one year change, but over generations we can expect to see the impact. Additionally immigration has been helping stave off our demographic rollover since our birth rate is relatively low. Without immigration which both increase working age population and tend to have more kids per capita than the native born Americans, we can expect the same demographic problems other countries are already dealing with.
How will we manage our giant deficit as growth slows? What if it stops? We can't rely on international integration that has given our giant companies worldwide profits given the way we've shattered the global order.
Frankly thanx to open hostility of recent governments towards anybody from outside I am surprised so many talented folks still desperately try to get there. As if greed for more money at almost all costs overshadowed general quality of life, happiness, time for an actual life and so on... life doesn't happen during comfy retirement, best of life happens when one is young or youngish. Especially if one burns themselves to the ground with endless work, what good are money on accounts then
The money is what matters since it gives you resources you don’t have access to elsewhere. And it’s worth burning yourself out on because the situation is still better than the situation you left behind.
Happiness? Fulfillment? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
That’s for their kids or their grandkids.
There is an ongoing argument in the US that a person was elected, therefore everything they do after that has the blessing of the electorate. Funny thing though, the people don’t really have a crystal ball to see into the future how their elected official will decide betray the country in the name of a “mandate”.
These policies are cargo cult echos of what would have worked in the 1990's. Perot was right. But you can't simply put the toothpaste back in the tube, right? In the reality of the 2020's, these policies merely bring economic destruction and subsequent consolidation. It's the same exact class that ran the "free trade" con of the past thirty years, now on to their next ruse.
There is a reason Grump is called "nation builder" in China - that is where the creative part of creative destruction is happening.
True, but Trump is a dictator because why? Because you disagree with the 77,304,296 people who elected him? Because he cracks unfunny jokes about running for re-election? Because he's corrupt? We've had corrupt Presidents before, but a dictator to me is someone who won't leave office. We do have a precedent of, despite the Jan. 6 looney toons (that he encouraged) trying to stop it, and despite all his dumb baseless lawsuits, Trump hopping on the helicopter and handing over power as scheduled. To me, that's the clear dividing line between an egomaniacal clown and a dictator.
I don't agree with a LOT of his 'policies,' (honestly sometimes describing his whims as policies is overstating it) but I would say the specific one being discussed here is not one of those open-and-shut dumb ideas. There are plenty of unemployed software engineers right here in the U.S. right now, and any US businesses saying they need H1Bs for most of those roles are full of crap.
The Anthropic thing is the same: we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether the designation as a supply chain risk is legitimate based on Anthropic's policies and actions, but Hegseth is such a vain, insecure clown that any decision like this is suspect.
In short, Trump may not have achieved his dream of dictatorship, but he runs the parts of the government he has control of like a dictator would, and this has done terrible damage to the federal government's legitimacy.
I mean that, you're either saying he wasn't democratically elected, or that this move doesn't help domestic labor. The first is objectively false, and the second is covered in the most basic college economics courses.
You realize the courses don't stop at basic, right?
It is well-established that immigration (legal and otherwise) is good for the economy overall. Skilled immigrants are good for US businesses.
https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/permanent-residency-rule...
Immigrants start businesses at twice the rate of native-born Americans.
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116727/documents/... (page 1, though the citation has gone down the memory hole)
Some immigrants are complementary to native-born American workers rather than being in competition.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...
Immigrants spend money and grow the market for goods produced by native-born Americans.
All these things are good for domestic labor. There is no reason to believe immigration is bad for American workers. Not everything is zero-sum, and that's basic economics.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/10/30/kamala-har...
Corporate political donations and opinions should be outlawed
> Can you really say this with a straight face about trump?
On this particular issue? Yes. On immigration and trade specially, Trump seems to be genuinely far more in tune with domestic labor than any president since Carter. It's a big reason why he was elected.
Since Reagan until Trump, the political class of both parties seemed quite happy to aggressively ignore the interests of domestic labor, in favor of ideology peddled by capital-aligned economists.
They thought "hiring" a guy like them to be President would mean having a sympathetic ear for all sorts of issues that keep them from "unlocking value for shareholders", but forgot that sympathy has no place in business.
As for H1B, it's been abused and can be used to make the people in the US on that visa an indentured servant. There's definitely reforms that need to be made, and an interest in hiring people from the US that needs to be taken up, but as with all things, the guy doing it is too contemptible of a leader to look past.
The only ones who lose are the workers.
Lay offs are a potential death sentence, there is a very real reason why suicides increases track nearly 1-to-1 with unemployment rates.
That's the dice roll you have in this country as a worker.
Don't you want working Americans to be able to afford the cost of living without having their employment/wages undercut by programs designed to benefit big business?
YOU should look in the mirror.
Or the fact that historically speaking, immigrants have always been scapegoated.
Are you willing to at least consider the fact that wages and cost of living might both be headed in the wrong direction due to some other factors beyond immigration such as economic policy or geopolitical conflicts driving up energy costs or changes in market power between labor and capital or general debt levels?
- The number of new H1Bs issued per year is 85,000, capped by law.
- The total number of H1B holders today is around ~500,000, per USCIS and DHS.[0]
- H1Bs require bachelor degrees minimum to be granted a visa, which means they only compete for white-collar jobs. Let's assume all these H1Bs are software engineers, for sake of argument, and not university professors.
- The total labour pool for tech is around 6.7 _million_ per the Bureau of Labour Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm, look at computing and mathematical operations section)
This works out to about ~7 percent of the total labor force consisting of H1Bs today. At 85k per year, it would take about five years to double that population to about 1 million. In that same time span, the US is expected to add 4 or 5 million in population growth alone - I don't know how you want to assume the tech labor pool grows, but I think it is silly to claim the population of H1Bs is a threat to the country's domestic labor pool.
You specifically talk about undercutting wages. H1Bs are supposed to be paid fair wages for their roles as everyone else per wage parity rules, precisely because they're not supposed to be preyed on or represent a displacement to Americans through cheap labor. Companies that attempt to skirt these rules use two techniques: deliberate underlevelling, so that highly qualified folks are categorized as lower-tier workers in occupations / categories other than their actual expertise so that companies can claim a lower wage, and contracting them to other employers at those wage rates. Meanwhile, the H1Bs for those companies can't actually enjoy job portability and escaping these constraints because switching jobs requires a transfer petition and risk, nor can they report their employer because getting fired means deportation. That is how H1Bs end up undercutting wages: not by design, but by abuse and captivity.
I have little patience for this sort of hand-wringing because the ire tends to be pointed and directed at H1B holders for simply existing - not at the institutions that game immigration law, not at a system that stifles legal immigration and blocks other pathways, not at a system that is too busy making the lives of immigrants harder than actually holding abusive actors accountable. There'a a perfectly reasonable system of reform that targets abuse and benefits everyone, but nativists don't want to exist with "foreigners", so they choose to punch down instead of up and claim self-defense. Such reasoning is, frankly, puerile.
What's racist? All visa programs are racist. Keep the border entirely close or let anyone who is not factually a criminal in.
Quota. It's racism.
We have eligibility even just for tourism based level of income. Some nations are exempt, some are not. That's perhaps even worse than racism. Lazy law enforcement, disguised as border control for safety.
When a country has far more people seeking visas than it’s willing to admit, it needs some mechanism for deciding who gets in, whether that’s a lottery, eligibility requirements, or some combination. None of those is inherently racist. You seem to be arguing for a radical open borders policy that I doubt many people would support, in just about every country.
PS. it would be funny if the same "social media management" organization that is hired by one side was also randomly hired by the other :)
ok mr CIA
The current K shaped economy being just the beginning. The elites realised that making more money wont change much for them, but they can make everyone else poor and then live as feudal lords.
You say hire Americans, as if Americans are more qualified than another higher-qualified foreigner.
You don’t just hire someone because they watched the same kids show and basketball match as you, you hire for talent. The majority of the brightest people I’ve worked with at my time during many FAANGS have all been foreigners.
My knee jerk response to this is short term, more offshore and vendor hiring while companies pivot. Long term, more US firms will set up global offices to spread out their concentration to make onboarding easier.
Edit: Would love to hear a coherent argument as to why my comment is off topic and deserving of downvotes but I'm sure that won't happen.
I'm never sure how to feel about this kind of thing. On one hand, it's kind of interesting to see the self-destruction, and having qualified people return to Europe can only be a good thing for Europe. OTOH, it's scary to see, and I'm unsure whether I prefer a world where China gains much more power.
Anecdotally from the people I've met, the majority of Europeans are here for academia on F/J/O, entertainment, are spouses of US citizens or get temporary transfer visas like the L1. Those who go to the US because of high salaries can afford to figure out employment based green cards and they don't have multiple year waiting periods. Otherwise it's a huge pain to get permanent residency or even a normal work visa compared to the EU, but qualified Europeans generally don't have much trouble.
That conveyor has now reversed, because all of the drivers have reversed as well. China will be fine; it's the U.S. I'm concerned about.
What's really interesting to see is your blindness to that self destruction.
If done in a similar fashion as the US has chosen, i.e. due to incoherent populism, it would limit the number of competent e.g. Americas, Canadians, South Africans etc. from joining the European workforce.
If done in a sensible fashion, it would only exclude the would-be migrants from those (or other) countries who have shown a wanton disregard for democracy and other constitutionally required values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odyssey_(2026_film)
The UK is considered non-EU so there would need to be a visa for a Brit working in the EU.
Microsoft and others are more focused on building data centers (homes for AI agents) than hiring humans at this point.
giving the same excuse of "oh these companies post jobs where they are not seen" is the lamest excuse you can give. are you saying this government is so poor and incompetent that it cannot verify where the job was posted? how many people saw the jobs, how many clicked and applied?? are you really saying that the most power country, with SI is not able to do this basic check??