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- Hacker News
- I feel like this is what the U.S. is not getting. If a company wants to hire a person, it will hire in or out of the country. They not allowing this form of *legal* immigration, is just making the country lose tax revenue and money circulating inside of the country...by 0xfacfac
- Nobody is willing to state this but it’s pretty clear if you look at the way officials behind the policy talk: they’re OK with this. They don’t mind economic harm. The purpose has nothing to do with protecting workers and everything to do with creating a more ethnically homogenous country.by emodendroket
- The ship sailed on this one a long time ago. The US is going to be more and more ethnically diverse regardless.by Cipater
- People state this constantly. It's a very effective distraction (a distraction based on reality, to be clear - there are plenty of plain old racists out there, of course).
- May I give a more balanced perspective here while acknowledging that there are bad actors with malign incentives on both sides of this debate?
I think we should all be able to agree that in the limit both sides of this debate are wrong, and therefore what we are arguing here is where the balance is whether this fee helps strike the right balance.
A nation cannot simply open its labour market up to the most qualified workers in the world and not have most of the best job openings going to foreigners. This is simply just a matter of numbers and probability. If you're very skilled already, then you may not see this as a problem, but if you're just coming out of education looking for a skilled job and must compete with the the entire world for a decent job in your own country, you might feel this isn't a great deal.
Similarly, a nation which does not accept any foreign talent, regardless of what those individuals can provide clearly harms that nation's own economic growth potential, and ultimately longer-term that costs everyone.
Maybe some people disagree, but it seems obvious to me that a nation somewhat owes its best jobs to its own citizens, and it should seek to have labour markets which are tight enough that employees will be occasionally incentivised to hire someone fresh out of education and train them up to be able to work high-skilled and well-paid jobs, rather than simply taking the easy option of hiring someone from abroad.
However, sometimes training someone isn't feasible. From time to time a company may really need talent and is simply unable to reasonably train or source that domestically regardless of the salary they might offer. If this is the case then they should of course be welcome to hire foreign workers, but there should be a financial disincentive to this so that companies are always incentivised to first look for workers domestically.
So I must admit I struggle a bit to understand the opposition to this $100k fee. If this causes talent to be lost then the assumption that they are extremely valuable surely must be wrong?
by kypro - I'm a former H1B visa holder and I feel very conflicted. My experience was a great one: I was hired by a startup on an H1B, successfully transferred to a different startup, then eventually went to work for a bigger company that sponsored my green card. I wasn't underpaid by those startups and I know this $100k fee means a similar company will never hire someone like me again.
But over the years I got to know many people on H1Bs who were indentured servants to their employers: once their green card application was in they were stuck. And if you're from a country like India that can take a decade or more. The whole thing feels like a scam and the $100k fee isn't going to deter those companies from doing it, it's still well worth the money to them.
I wish we saw sensible, well thought out reform here. Instead we get the Trump administration.
by afavour - well said, thanks for sharing your perspective.by peezd
- I worked with and hired tons of H1Bs (and non) over the years and the idea that they earn this visa with exceptional talent is a farce. I work in bog standard web services. We fill seats with H1Bs to write ho-hum crud apps and do UX testing work. Some have been great! Others terrible.
Could be wildly different for someone in a very high-tech org or medical field, but at places I worked it was used as a convenience, but not necessary.
by Hippocrates - The point of the these visas is to hire outside talent which cannot be found in the US and qualifies as the "best and brightest" and specialized "talent" that is beyond outstanding. Everyone knows this has been heavily abused for years.
Now the word "talent" has lost its meaning or most commonly means "anyone" for cheap even though the employer knows that they are unqualified and hires them anyway for cheap labor to reduce their operating costs (expensive US employees).
You can't say "we are hiring the best and brightest" and then decide to then go for those who are unqualified. Now this $100K fee is pointless when AI agents, and data centers (homes for the AI agents) are getting hired over both US employees and off-shored employees.
One more thing. The big question is who would you rather trust to hire to not create a disaster like in [0][1] (Human or AI agent, hint one of them cannot be held accountable.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061682
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
by rvz - Wow. This will affect universities and negatively impact the US in the coming years.
How many of the talent from frontier labs is immigrant?
by superjose - 50% of US unicorns are immigrant founded.by dyauspitr
- I think its more of equal counter force
as other commenter pointing out, those visas is for high skill job that lacks candidate on US soil
but company uses that for hiring Immigrant so they can underpaid them effectively reduce US born origin competitiveness
by tonyhart7 - That's an insufficiently granular question. How much of the talent in frontier labs has an H1B rather than an O visa? Out of the people who have an H1B, how many employers would be willing to eat the $100k fee because those employees are so valuable?by rayiner
- It won’t because universities, national labs and non profits are exempt from the fee.
Under the proposed rule, the additional fee would not apply to H-1B petitions that are not subject to the cap, such as petitions filed by certain nonprofit research organizations, governmental research organizations, and institutions of higher education. https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-proposes-ad...
I do believe it’s going to push a lot of jobs offshore though. I have already seen it at my job.
by tquinn35 - Good, H1B is just modern servitude. But there should be an incentive to hire local workers instead of just hiring foreigners in their own country.
- Thet should pay into a tax fund that is applied toward student loans of American grads who are unemployed.by gosub100
- I think this will go hand in hand with tech compensation and jobs falling off a cliff. In the AI world too, we can't have our cake and eat it.by unified101
- Yeah, fine. Honestly I think most of us have been overpaid our entire career. But I'm not sure I see it necessarily. Take these stats, which can cut either way on this topic:
In USA there are more software engineers than all other engineers combined.
There are 10x more software engineers than the next highest engineering discipline.
If you could subdivide s/w engs into 10 equal categories ("I'm not just a run of the mill s/w eng"), each of those would be the top engineering employment category.
The top 10% of software engineers outnumber the next highest engineer class.
At 10% unemployment, there are more unemployed software engineers than the next highest employed engineer category.
by jvanderbot - So it was never about the talent, but just about cost?by mvdwoord
- Seems like, if the $100k fee is too high a barrier to clear for talent they claim they cannot find domestically.by stego-tech
- First time? meme here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49540700 (citations)
(was always about cost, the US produces ~2M more college graduates per year than it needs, the system wants a labor surplus to contain labor costs)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378010 (citations)
by toomuchtodo - It's funny how quickly tech employees turn MAGA when it comes to qualified immigration. Bad zero-sum intuitions about work abound across all strata of society, it seems.by Sol-
- all H1B posts turn into Klan rallies.by sunshowers
- "Middle America hates immigrants because they are racists. I don't want H1-Bs because companies use them as cheaper labor, undercutting my value."
Absolute peak "lost in the political sauce". Most people aren't aware that Bernie Sanders has historically been very anti-immigration, before just becoming an old guy who echos whatever the current young people vibe is.
by WarmWash - So if you're not pro social dumping you're anti immigration? Weird when both are about chauvinism against foreigners.by tokai
- It is pretty interesting to watch. "I'm pro immigration EXCEPT specifically the kind that directly affects me"by tekla
- If you believe that the market sets prices via supply and demand in general, do you believe this is true for the labor market as well? If not, why?
- Its time to have a politics which puts the workers needs at its center. I can confidently say that the current system harms both workers and immigrants.by cheney_2004
- This isn't a MAGA thing. H1-B is a bad program.
I have no problem with someone getting a green card, citizenship, TPS, etc in the US. I think there should be a lot faster routes for that. Let the software devs come in and become citizens or permanent residents, I don't care about that.
What I do care about is the fact that H1-B locks immigrants to a company and tie their residence in the us to their employment. That means they'll accept lower wages and worse working conditions as they can't simply quit and switch jobs. The entire thing is designed to suppress wages in general.
by cogman10 - Not surprising, H1B for my entire career was a cost cutting measure.
Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B.
Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.
I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.
by bearjaws