This chart is entirely misleading. In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas. That's it, it has not grown nor shrunk.
Reason for increase in population shown here is H1B renewals. Normally the way this works is H1Bs convert to permanent residents, but due to the country caps, Indian/Chinese H1B holders keep renewing their visas contributing to this increase. Again these are people who are already here and got their approval sometime in the past, so its not like in 2022, companies collectively hired 685,117 (which is also why you see the decrease in 2023 since due to covid, a very little bit of backlog for residency cleared).
(Not to mention the sentiment of comments here is entirely disappointing, but I guess that's the vibe these days)
I think every time the topic of H1B comes on HN, a lot of people have a lot of opinions, but don’t fully understand the immigration system. Like you correctly pointed out, the increase in H1Bs in the country is mostly contributed by the fact that country caps force some nationalities to permanently stay on H1B while others can naturalize faster. There are hundreds of thousands of people who come into the country every year through other visas (and also on H1B from other countries) and naturalize and take up jobs in the country. But that doesn’t matter because they are now US citizens.
If people from India/China were allowed to naturalize as fast as other countries, you’d not have the chart of number of H1Bs grow in the country.
if people from India and China were allowed to naturalize as fast things would spiral out of control. I know it's not a popular thing to say on this forum, but H1B visas are absolutely a wage control mechanism for US corporations even if that's not the spirit of the law. Note that I'm also an immigrant.
There’s a lot to be said about “spiraling out of control”. You could argue it’s fair for everyone. But you could also argue that a country like China which is as big as Europe gets the same amount of green cards as Luxembourg. You could argue there will be less diversity, but then you’d be arguing that the French and the Italian cultures are very different from each other, but people from NorthEast India are the same as people from South of India culturally and ethnically.
Anyway, if we are so concerned about “not letting things go out of control”. A simple solution is also to set those country caps on the H1B program. There can be other solutions and the conversation can be a lot more nuanced but HN is not the forum for it when it comes to the topic of H1B.
The problem would disappear, but they would disappear to India or one of the other offshoring countries. I however agree that the pay needs to be AT LEAST the median salary for the position to avoid abuse.
Tax the American companies that focus their hiring efforts abroad. Just another tariff. They will generate the people they need in this country by lunch time.
For companies like Google, H1B isn’t about bringing into US, it is just an expensive way to satisfy their US hiring hunger.
That difference can be understood by imagining that H1B isn’t foreign devs, instead it is devs grown in a jar by the State Department - Google would buy them the same.
Exactly. In liberal cities I have lived in, it is almost always the earlier immigrants that resent and denigrate the later immigrants. It's pure gatekeeping. Like "I suffered during the immigration process and therefore you have to suffer at least as much as I have, or it isn't fair." Or like "the recent immigrants aren't as hardworking as older ones and they don't deserve immigration."
I get that there are probably loopholes in the law. But then the solution is to fix the loopholes and tighten enforcement. Give DoL access to IRS data. Improve the definition of prevailing wages. A lot of things can be done to fix H1B so that it behaves like how it's intended.
DOL does have the data to determine prevailing wages. In fact the wages reported in the application for H1B is often lower than what the immigrant is getting paid because DOL does not accept bonuses and RSUs and other options as guaranTeed wage. So you could have an H1B petition with $200k but in reality they could be earning $300k+ with bonuses and RSUs.
Paying prevailing wage doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the salary a company would have paid/are paying to American workers in the same role. Three-fifths of h-1b jobs are certified at the two lowest prevailing wage levels and the median age of an h-1b beneficiary is 33 years old.
mariel boatlift study found that even with a 7% short-term supply shock to labor concentrated in only miami in only low wage work led to no disruption in either employment or wages: https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
lump of labor simply never happens. I know it's fashionable to say 'wage suppression' but wages mostly reflect productivity in competitive AND deregulated markets!
I feel like the situation for US citizens would improve if they were allowed to naturalize. Their wages would go up and companies wouldn’t have the relatively cheaper labor pool to constantly draw from.
This is another mistake what people make when describing H1Bs. Yes there are abuses where bad actors abuse the system and undercut the local wages. But a huge portion of the annual H1B allocation goes to people who are not the “cheaper labor pool”. They get paid the same wages AND the companies spend additional money to the order of thousands of dollars to sponsor the visa. Google is not hiring H1Bs on a cheaper rate. They still get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
But I do agree with the theory that allowing a lot of these H1Bs would be a net benefit for the economy. A lot of people who naturalize end up leaving jobs and starting businesses that employ more people. We should be encouraging that, but instead the system actively discourages that.
If they’re not a cheaper labor pool then the only reason companies wouldn’t hire them over citizens is because they are tied to the company. This would also be solved by naturalization.
Any iteration of this turns out to be better for US citizens if they’re are naturalized.
Not to mention that 50% of all unicorns in the US are started by immigrants, like 60% of those by specifically Indians.
>There are hundreds of thousands of people who come into the country every year through other visas (and also on H1B from other countries) and naturalize and take up jobs in the country. But that doesn’t matter because they are now US citizens.
What you seem to be saying is that the problem is worse than we think for natives because of these immigrants dropping off of stats after they become citizens. Of course I think this myself. It doesn't matter if you make these people citizens so much, the point is that their effect on the job market is independent of citizenship.
> In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas.
Minor nitpick, but if you get an H-1 visa to work at a university, it's not part of that 85K limit.
But yes, your point is valid. And the headline is editorialized - they cherry picked the year 2011, because it's the lowest. It was the lowest because we were knee deep in the financial crisis, and many companies suspended/reduced their reliance on foreign labor precisely because they'd have a hard time convincing the government that they couldn't find a qualified local.
What about cap-exempt H1Bs? There are tons of new companies which streamlined the process and which are offering "nearly-guaranteed H1B with no lottery"
A cap-exempt H-1B doesn't let you work for a "company".
Only universities, university-affiliated nonprofits, nonprofit research organizations, and government research organizations can sponsor one. Furthermore, even after you obtain a cap-exempt H-1B, you would be required to go through the lottery like anyone else if you want to work at an employer subject to the H-1B cap.
I understand there are some exceptions made for academic institutions so these companies employ people into a "participating university" for a token number of hours per month, person comes in and once they are in the country they can pursue different opportunities to get employed and change their status.
This cap-exempt H1B bypasses lottery, can be obtained in about 3 months any time during the year.
No, it's not. The limit of new is universally capped at 85k. They can request as many applications as they want. The lottery still only picks a total of 85k
They were not because in a layoff you cannot prefer a specific protected category like race, gender, age AND nationality.
The 9000 number is also a global number which includes layoffs in countries all over the world.
The argument “9000 US workers were fired and X visa applications were applied for” is also very reductive. The layoffs were in gaming, sales and other divisions, meanwhile the visa applications were for people who either already are on visas in other divisions like engineering and are continuing their status or for people in newer positions that have nothing to do with sales or gaming.
No, you're wrong too. The 20k is the Master's cap, only applicable to students who did a Master's or above in the US. Cap exempt refers to H1bs granted to US/State employers, who can get H1bs for employees without any cap whatsoever, and at any time of the year.
It's misleading because it says "The H-1B program grew...", which to many implies that it was doing more immigration. It wasn't. There was less naturalization.
I don't understand the point of this chart. It essentially shows linear growth -- all 65k H-1B visas were allocated every year, until the past two years where layoffs have started impacting this labor pool. The entire tech industry has expanded by far more than 65k FTEs/yr so unless the OP does the leg work to figure out whether a disproportionate fraction of new jobs are being given to immigrants vs eligible Americans I don't see how this is useful.
I think the point of this graph is to demonstrate that there is a large jumper of temporary workers and high unemployment.
The program was to address labor shortages, and if we don’t have a labor shortage, then we should be reducing our temporary worker pool, not US citizen pool.
There is an argument that the purpose of the program is to provide skilled labor which is beneficial to the economy, beyond just, but including the domestic employment rate.
I’m not sure that’s what the H-1B program is doing in practice here, it probably is replacing many skilled American born workers. But at least in theory it can both be true that domestic worker unemployment has gone up, but that contracting the program risks the global competitiveness of major US companies that net employ US workers. More analysis is probably warranted.
The purpose of this program has always been to provide cheaper labor for companies. We have never had a legitimate shortage of qualified software engineers.
I worked at BigTech, I don’t think I met a single coworker on H1B that was a “specialized top talent” whose job couldn’t go to an American citizen. I’m not saying any of my H1B visa coworkers were worse than American citizens, they weren’t better.
Now I also spent a long career in regular old enterprise dev before 2020. Definitely any halfway decent framework developer could have done the job as well as the ones who were here on H1B.
I can easily hold multiple thoughts at once.
1. As long as their unemployed qualified Americans for roles, we should reduce the new H1B visa applications dramatically.
2. I don’t begrudge anyone here on H1B and don’t support discriminating against them or cancelling their visa
3. I don’t agree with how once you get let go from a job, the clock starts ticking no matter how much money you have saved. When I was at Amazon and Amazon started Amazoning with me. I didn’t break a sweat when I was on “focus”. I played the game long enough to get through my next vest and then sat around and waited on my “get $40K+ severance offer and leave immediately or prostrate myself for a couple of more months and still be let go with 1/3 the severance amount”.
Of course I took the severance. My coworkers here on H1B were scared shitless and overworked themselves. Then again, it was my 8th job out of now 10 and I was already 49 at the time. I might have acted differently if I were younger.
All I see is an assertion that "often at the expense of recent American CS grads.", and while I do believe I saw reporting that new grads are facing higher unemployment, I didn't see anything related specifically to CS grads, and, further, I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs. At least my experience has been that H1B are often in more senior roles and entry level jobs that require advanced degrees.
I'm not saying that it's not the case that there is a misalignment with the number of H1Bs and the current employment situation, but there doesn't seem to be enough data here to fully flesh out this argument without some fairly major assumptions being applied.
> For computer science and computer engineering, the unemployment rate in those fields was 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively — notably higher than the national average.
> By comparison, the unemployment rate for art history majors was 3%, and for nutritional sciences, the unemployment rate was just 0.4%, the New York Fed found. The New York Fed’s report was based on Census data from 2023 and unemployment rates of recent college graduates.
> I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs
Foreign new grads start their career on the OTP visa, which allows them to work for 2 years after they graduate. So you are correct, foreign students use OTP, not h1b to apply for entry level jobs.
Yes. As a US citizen, I, and many of my college cohort, spent many years unemployed during that time period, despite applying to thousands of positions.
The reality is that businesses hire attorneys to create a legal fiction that I and my peers are unqualified so that businesses that desire it can hire H-1B employees.
Shortages are, always and everywhere, a pricing phenomenon.
I agree with the above comment. During that time period was the height of my tech career. The remarkable number of open positions didn't lead to the kinds of wage increases one might expect, perhaps some, but what I mostly encountered was a lot of highly specialized roles that I wasn't qualified for because everything has to be "just so" in order to be hired on because companies refuse to train or allot time for training, just brief "ramp up" periods that are do or die.
Nowadays, since I'm in my 50s, I'm disqualified from being able to work in tech completely. Mind you, the age discrimination is hidden behind me not being perfectly qualified for whatever role due to not checking some technical skillset. Never mind that I am still sharp, have a great deal of experience, and can do whatever is asked given a decent target to aim for. None of it seems to matter, it's purely ageism eliminating me from getting interviews now.
I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event.
The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
> I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event.
>
> The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
Why do you think H1-Bs are to blame over AI hype coupled with Section 174 tax changes[^1]? H1-Bs have been around for a long time, so I doubt it's the culprit for layoffs and lower hiring since 2023.
Do you think it's possible you were overestimating the skills in your particular cohort?
Being more senior, my world of coworker and colleagues has been a mix of highly skilled people, largely in the AI/ML space. There are many H1Bs among them, but there has been no difference in the ability of the US citizen subset and the H1B subset in getting jobs.
Even closer to the entry level, the H1B pool all came from very competitive and elite universities, and all of them also had advanced degrees.
I do believe the market for fresh out of college software engineers without much specialization is tight, but I also don't see many H1Bs in that category either (but again, that could just be because of my own cohort I'm surrounded by). A PhD from NYU/Harvard/MIT with an undergrad at a place like IIT or Tsinghua is not in the same talent pool as newly graduated undergrad students from a standard US university.
So you're saying all a CS grad has to do is go back in time and get a degree from MIT and they're golden, right?
Let me explain something: When I graduated from High School in Upstate NY in 1991, 3 of my fellow grads got accepted into MIT that year. From that one school! The odds of such an event taking place in the 2020s has to be vanishingly small to impossible. The high-end schools like MIT have not scaled up to match the enormously scaled up demand for education, not to mention how expensive the tuition has become. So it is simply impossible for everyone who wants to be engineers or computer scientists to attend some elite school nowadays. The competition for seats must have increased 100 fold since the early 1990s!
During this period, many job opportunities went to h1b candidates, resulting in teams at FANGA companies with all 1 nationality.
It would be fair to say that they couldn't find any american talent and thus needed to hire h1b workers, but that wouldn't explain how they got monoculture teams.
This is a touchy subject for sure, but yes, I have witnessed this firsthand at two different Fortune 10 companies. Reverse racism against caucasians was on full display and you damn well best not mention it at all. The managers saw it as building their power base using fungible assets--they kn3w, from a purely cultural standpoint, who is going to kill themselves to meet deadlines and not argue.
> whether a disproportionate fraction of new jobs are being given to immigrants vs eligible Americans I don't see how this is useful.
This is bound to happen as you run out of people in the US. I don't think it's useful to prove a problem unless top US graduates start losing jobs to immigrants that outcompete them for lower salaries that they can live on because of lower educational debt.
nobody honest can say we ran out of US citizens that can work the type of jobs H1B do. Unemployment in the industry is not zero. Top graduates from MIT and Stanford? Sure, they can't make enough of them, but as a whole the industry is using H1B to lower cost of labor, not to fill a hole that simply doesn't exist.
I'm all for importing top talent to work at American companies. In fact, I think H1-Bs should be allowed to start businesses and move from job to job like anyone else. If it's about innovation, why force them to stay in one job while they're here?
When Microsoft does layoffs and then mass H1-Bs, is that shedding low-skill Americans for top Indian talent, or just labor arbitrage? Is a country of 340 million really lacking talent, or do we just want cheaper and controllable labor?
If they wanted cheap labour, they would outsource. H1Bs are an important source of talent. That does not mean it is abused by outsourcing companies to bring cheap talent to America and profit from the arbitrage.
>That does not mean it is abused by outsourcing companies to bring cheap talent to America and profit from the arbitrage.
It doesn't have to follow directly; the problem is often indirect. H1Bs are much better behaved for employers because they are nearly powerless to say no, and can be slow-walked for raises, promotions and squeezed for high hours worked to reduce effective wages. There's also cultural migration issues - India is 70%+ of the H1B program. Does India have a monopoloy on top global talent, or is it just a process vulnerable to political capture and top execs' whims?
Talent exists everywhere, but when one country absolutely dominates a process, it suggests the process has been captured.
>Big tech is not the one abusing this program.
Did they promise that in a press release or something? Compared to Microsoft, TCS and Infosys are bottom tier tech, but the H1B program in general is sketchy based on the accusations the biggest players have had over the last decade.
Not the H1Bs at Amazon who were paid less and guilted into working weekends. Not my Mexican girlfriend who works for $50k as an oil rig chemical engineer in Houston at a company that only hires visa workers on the cheap. Not my Indian neighbors I befriended making $60k in software at Chase bank in Houston on their all-visa teams.
SLB is a good example, where I met my girlfriend. Entry level American chemical engineer: $120-150k. Visa chemical engineer imported to work on the same team in the same position: $50k. Guess which part of the pie chart grew while I worked there.
But I'm not supposed to notice any of this. And until very, very recently it was a faux pas to mention it at all.
If we're going to give anecdotal data, when I lived in NYC I was hired as an H1B, and every single other H1B I knew was paid way more than the median wage. But these were companies not trying to abuse the system. I do not doubt that there are bad actors.
I do agree that there should be minima to prevent abuse. I do not agree that every H1B hire was to abuse the system.
In the early 2010s there were hiring shortages, the startup that hired me would have probably preferred saving on the attorney fees and the 6+ months it took between the offer and the start date. For a new H1B you have to prepare the paperwork in March at the latest, apply the first week of April, for a start date of October 1st. And not only that, but with the quotas and the lottery you're absolutely not guaranteed that your hire is going to make it. All things being equal without a shortage or the ability to underpay, it is not an attractive solution.
H1Bs do push salaries down, because there is more "supply" of workers, so it should probably only be used for hiring for areas with shortages, but even then you can have downturn like what we're having in tech, and some companies may keep their H1Bs over FTE because they are less of a flight risk and can't negotiate their salaries as well. Even with a shortage, this means that employees with that specific skill will be paid less, now it's more of a matter of which one is better for the economy/society.
It's basic economics that more workers with fewer rights lower wages across the board. "They make what Americans do" when there is a continuous flow of competing labor. Sure. What would companies pay if they didn't have these exploitable workers? Would the companies have opened new office closer to where Americans are educated? Certainly, one of those two would happen.
But this is why the government should enforce existing laws and include provisions like must pay x above median average salary for the role to discourage fraud.
But it does negate the claim that H-1Bs are paid the same wage.
If your claim only applies to a subset of visa workers in a subset of companies, then refine the claim to use a word like "some", and it will be a trivial claim that I agree with.
> If it's top talent, then they should be forced to pay them the wage of a US worker, if not more.
They are forced to do that, and they in fact do that.
Source: I was hired by one big tech company as an H-1B worker (I was a new grad) over a decade ago (2012), my salary was ~15% higher than what the chart says for "class of 2014".
I will go a step further and suggest that you, an HNer, were probably even a world class talent back then who mogged your US cohort so badly they offered you 15% more to snap you up.
It's just evident that's not what's happening across all H-1B positions in the US, and those are the ones worth talking about here.
For every one example of "you" I have seen 100 or even 1000 of the other kind of "warm body" type of example. 2012 is already a long time ago. What has happened since is that the US reached some kind of critical mass situation where the number of those "warm bodies" brought in to do cheap work has finally killed the golden goose and now not only is it nearly impossible to find a job, the cost of living has also skyrocketed! We're closing in on the endgame here, mark my words. It will be ugly before it gets sorted out somehow.
I worked for a couple of very "household name" big companies as a tech lead. I trained probably dozens of H1Bs over the past 15 or so years. I've seen it all. I decided that I would help anyone who wanted to improve their skills regardless of their origin or employment status, and that's what I did. I got mistreated terrible at times, in particular by a Venezuelan woman, but generally speaking, I helped raise the bar for a lot of people who maybe otherwise would have been ignored because big companies don't care about training people at all. As I look back on what my career was, I think that all the informal mentoring I did was probably my biggest contribution. I just wish it had turned out better for everyone involved. I saw a lot of absolutely heartbreaking situations arise over the years. And now my situation is kind of heartbreaking as well. We were all in this together, but nobody spent a single second thinking about that.
as an American who worked in Silicon Valley for years, but is not from there, i'd say it's also "captive real estate customers" created by H1-B people.
I once asked an (American) director where i worked just this question.
He said what you surmised: while there are plenty of qualified American engineers in the United States, citing Motorola headcount reductions as an example, it was a challenge to convince them to move to California's cost of living.
Seriously. All I needed to do to be filthy rich was move to Silicon Valley back in '97 when I got my MS, then eventually have bought a house or two out there. That's it.
To recap:
1. Move to the Bay Area circa 1997
2. Buy houses
3. Profit enormously in the 2020s
Yup, if you take the restrictions off, none of these companies would want them. They love the restrictions. Americans can just up and quit on them, but not temporary workers.
How would you prevent people from getting an H1-B visa for a job just for the sake of moving to a different job in a sector that doesn't need a lot of workers? And if they are going to start a business, they could start a business in tech that is actually successful, and then fill a few extra positions with friends/family/contacts/people willing to pay, and then those people could move on to other jobs for which they are more suited.
Fact is, immigration systems in all of the richest countries are already bursting with abuse from certain countries with very ingenious schemes and you gotta have some ways to protect it unless you want a free-for-all.
I would encourage you to actually read up about the hoops that people with H-1Bs have to jump through just to stay in the country. It is a demeaning and abusive process, and not usually one that people engage in frivolously.
Additionally, you can already today legally switch jobs as an H-1B, but it is a process that gives undue amounts of power to the employer, which makes switching difficult. Finally, regarding switching fields, it's not that easy. You have to show that your new field is related to your degree and experience.
So please, instead of making up imaginary bogeymen, learn more about the immigration system.
I never said it should be as difficult as it is, which you seem to imply that I did. I only said meant to say the system shouldn't be too easy, either.
You know the answer! It's veritable slave labor is why. I've seen it a thousands times at major US companies and how it plays out. It is a horrible form of leverage they have over their "assets."
But if it's a replacement for supporting domestic education and a source of cheap skilled labor, no thanks.
If FAANG were screaming at Congress about their inability to hire and the solution was better primary and secondary education programs for people at home to create that skilled workforce, we probably wouldn't have such an aggressive urban/rural political divide in this country.
The fix may take a long time, but the bigger problem is there are no workable ideas for a fix. It's not like better education hasn't been thought of, attempted, and tons of money dumped into it. Results have been mixed at best.
If you want the British to take back control of the USA so that the British can enforce the superior* British education system onto the USA, that would be very very funny to watch, but I don't think it would be "easy" — especially when people realise it means no guns in schools or anywhere else.
* The British system may not be superior, I left uni in 2006 and the UK in 2018, and UK politicians have been fiddling with education seemingly forever.
But that just means you should substitute whichever country is doing education best at the moment; the point is, even obviously correct things are still hard in the world of politics.
I used to be but that's not how any of these immigration programs are used. Often they've been used to crush domestic workers and even change demographics and voting patterns.
At this point it doesn't look like allowing anything other than net emigration is practical. You just can't trust the people involved to do anything else.
That's a great point: immigrants are great for the existing voting populace. They count for the census, but if you keep them on a program like H-1B, they'll live their whole lives without being able to vote. The existing voters have their votes count more and more with H-1B population growth. A great gig when you've got something like Prop 13 making sure the newcomers pay most of the taxes too. What a racket!
I'm not so cold hearted or extreme to say 'shut it all down tomorrow', but it feels like at the very very least, in this job climate, we could suspend new entries?
But it just keeps humming along like everything is rosy.
I’ve followed this issue for a long time, the thing is at the end of the day the average American just doesn’t care very much what happens to tech workers.
There’s an underlying attitude of “serves those entitled nerds right” on both the political left and the right.
I feel that 2 simple rules would capture all the value of H1-Bs but naturally limit their abuses:
1. H-1Bs applications are ranked by total comp. 2 years of that comp is unconditional (no PIPs, no performance management, no excuses). I can see an argument to bucket this by industry.
2. Only job codes where the YoY median pay and total employment are currently at a 3 year high are eligible to receive H-1Bs.
The comp requirements would devastate the body farms. The unconditional comp will put major pressure on the system of working H1-Bs to the bone, and not thoroughly vetting those hires. Companies that layoff in the thousands, or layoff their highest paid (oldest) employees are simply poisoning the H-1B well for that industry. Deep cuts can't be made up with H1-Bs for 3 years or until all the layoffs have been recouped industry-wide.
No, companies which are ready to pay high (above median) salaries would be able to hire H1Bs. No matter where the office is. Even now many companies offer compensation without regard to geography, when the compensation is high enough; if you live in Alabama but still qualify, the better to you.
That's not actually all that unreasonable, despite how it sounds on the surface. High COL areas are high COL because people working there are more productive. If it's worth it to import an H1-B worker even in the high COL area, they're contributing that much more to the economy than someone in a low COL area.
If this still sounds crazy, I think your objection is more to there being a cap at all. If there is going to be a cap, it makes sense to order it by total comp even notwithstanding the COL.
H-1Bs are rare at bootstrapped companies , rare outside major tech centers, and basically non-existent in bootstrapped companies in LCoL areas. It is a benefit that almost entirely accrues to big corporations with legal teams. It is big corporate welfare.
This is false for H-1B - there is no "labor market test". Such a test is required for the PERM process in which an H-1B visa holder would seek a green card through their employer, although the definition of "prove" is up for debate [2].
H1-B applications must have a Labor Condition Application which requires a prevailing wage assessment and that hiring a foreign worker won't adversely affect US workers.
It is true that the LCA (and PERM!) processes are have grave flaws that leave them open to abuse.
Several FANGa companies have gotten in trouble for advertising in uncommon places like newspapers for jobs that also aren’t listed on their careers page in order to avoid qualified American applicants from applying in order to get approval for green cards or H1b
Very loose definition of "prove". I would guess that there are many on HN who are overqualified for any H1B job and would take it for the right money. The talent is here, they just want to pay less.
I agree. The cap should be adjusted to unemployment surveys by sector. If there's high unemployment in tech at the moment there should be simply no quota to hire from foreign countries until the labor market recovers.
Generally speaking, the economy is not a zero sum game (by definition), or we would never have made it past the first 50 people in New Amsterdam. Every person here on a visa interacts with the economy (needs to buy groceries, etc). Presumably they create more wealth for the economy than they cost, or it would not be worth it for a company to hire them.
I think a more interesting question would be if, for the particular occupation (say software engineer), a person on an H1-B visa adds more than one jobs worth of demand for more software engineers. Even if they benefit the economy as a whole, it is still possible that a subset of the labor force sees extra competition. That opens up the question of is it better to suspend the program to protect a subgroup, or is it better to expand the economy as a whole.
In order for such a statistic to be useful, you'd not only have to demonstrate it, but also demonstrate evidence that companies they start add more non-H-1B jobs to the market than they add more H-1B jobs to the market.
Serious question: can the case really be made that American CS grads (and other entry-level tech folks) are clearly inferior to the potential pool of H-1B applicants?
If the answer is in the affirmative then we need to study and address why that is.
If not, then I'm curious how many qualified Americans are being pushed out of (ore prevented from entering) the high tech job market by H-1B applicants.
Ive been directly exposed to the H1B candidate pool. The answer is no. It's 90% candidates with very similar sounding resumes. It's unnerving how templated all the resumes are.
You really have to have solid, engaged recruiting and screening processes in place to filter the wheat from the chaff with H1B's.
I would interview 10 H1B's, and then one domestic candidate, and the domestic candidate would outperform every time.
This is obv anecdotal, but I would not be surprised if this pattern exists across the entire H1B pool.
We do hire some H1B's, and there are some incredibly talented candidates, but only after great expense and time invested in screening and interviewing.
A lot of virtual interviews are rigged in various ways. I did 100s of tech interviews for one company in particular and even had guys who were lip-syncing for someone else who actually spoke English who was looped in to the call off-screen. The level of fraud in interviews has reached all new levels with AI tools now.
I never asked about visa status during interviews as that was purely an HR issue or something the hiring manager needed to deal with. My job was to assess people purely on technical ability and to a lesser degree, ability to communicate effectively (in English). We never really even bothered with cultural fit--if the person seemed decent, we gave good feedback on them. There was so much fraud to wade through, however. I got so that I could spot those "templated" resumes very quickly. It's kind of a tell when someone has worked say, five different 6-month contracts in five geographically dispersed US cities! That would be ridiculously expensive to keep bopping around the US like that! If their skillset and work was any good, they would either get renewed or find another gig in the same locale.
What do you count as American CS grads? A lot of H-1B holders have a degree from an American school. (Edit) If you hold an American CS degree, aren't you an American CS grad?
If you close that pipeline, you'll lose those students, and then you have to find more funding, because international students usually subsidize local students.
It wasn't until recently that I found out 40% of students at top colleges were not even American! I'm not specifically against foreign students, but 40%?
That and the H1B issue and American's not having jobs at American companies. Something isn't right.
That comes with the territory of have the vast majority of the top universities in the world. One of the things that has kept the US as the global hegemon for the last 100 years is the fact that every other country sends their best and brightest to study here, and a significant fraction of those people stay here to work.
I agree the US could do more to take advantage of its position to benefit the average American, but torching exactly what put the country in that position is short-sighted at best, categorically stupid at worst.
Colleges and Universities charge the non-local rate for international students which is considerably higher than the domestic rate (example from Georgia Tech:
In state $30,154
Out of state $53,638
International $54,814
This incentivizes them to keep more slots open for those high dollar students making it even tougher to develop a domestic workforce.
Another way of looking at those numbers is that the out of state / international students are subsidizing the education of the locals. AS long as local governments keep up pressure on the universities to not go 100% out of state, then it's by and large a win-win.
I'm all for doing anything funding-wise that brings higher ed back to some kind of reality, even if we have to burn it all down to get there. The cost of education is outrageous and grads are not benefitting from their degrees the same way I was able to (at far less cost). We're at the inflection point there.
I feel for all human beings, but US education should be first and foremost directed towards helping US citizens. That's not racist, that's just common sense. We haven't even been doing that here! We're failing as a nation because shitty short-term profits always supersede the creation of long-term prosperity.
At one of my grad school classes, the prof could have taught the class in Chinese had it not been for me in there. And that was in the late 1990s.
While I disagree with GP’s premise, there’s no sense in which H1B visa holders are American. It’s a nonimmigrant visa. They are required to specifically disavow any intention of becoming Americans or else the visa can be revoked.
Yes and no. The H-1B visa is "dual intent" [1] and you are allowed to apply for and receive a green card (permanent resident card) while on an H-1B. After 5 years with permanent residence you can apply for citizenship. It is a common path, and the intention for the majority of people on an H-1B visa.
Let me stop you right there: "Qualified Americans" is a highly subjective phrase. If a young person did well in physics and math in High School, are they "qualified?" Or is it really some esoteric and hard to define set of tech skills that makes someone "qualified?" There are millions of Americans who could be trained to be excellent software engineers, but we don't bother doing that anymore, because companies like the sugar high they think they are getting by hiring semi-skilled foreigners. That's the truth.
I've been all over this issue over and over again at multiple different companies and it's always the same thing--the resume has to have X, Y, and Z or the person is overlooked, despite them being more than capable of becoming skilled at X, Y, Z, K, W, R, you name it. Time and time again! And it's even worse in 2025 because now every product has 2-3 other competing products that do the exact same thing and we're supposed to be experts at all of them!
At least from my experience it tends to be that outsourcing agencies who often supply H1B candidates are not finding the most experienced or talented people. i'm guessing that CS degrees are still better in the US on average.
One can trap an experienced seniour dev for a few years for a price of a fresh grad which may or may not turn out to be a valuable resource and which may leave at any moment. In this context quality of the grad is not much relevant.
Well, not clearly inferior but it’s a mathematical property that if A is a subset of B then max(A) <= max(B).
I’ve hired people for a decade in tech and through that period people have been bellyaching about this stuff throughout.
The absolute truth is that if you can’t hit $500k annual income in 5 years despite trying to do so, you’re not good enough.
The H-1B workers I know are making millions. If you’re getting pushed out by them it’s because American competitiveness is enabled by this. And I care a lot more about what’s good for America as a whole than trying to protect someone’s income.
> And I care a lot more about what’s good for America as a whole than trying to protect someone’s income.
Uncharitably, it sounds like you think of your nation as a generic economic zone whose growth you want to continually increase at all costs, regardless of the fate of its citizens. But what is a nation, if not the people that comprise it?
Sure, that's one way of looking at it. But the truth is that there is only one force for civilization in the World today and that is America. The end of USAID illustrated something: America stands alone against the entropy of nature. She is humanity's only vanguard against ruin. The Chinese are dedicated to their own advancement, the Indians are currently bootstrapping out of poverty, the Europeans are primarily concerned with wine, cheese, and luxury goods. Fair play to all of them - may they live in peace.
But one nation, alone, fights Humanity's cause. Trump et al have cast off the mantle, but it's only another 3.5 years and we have a shot at donning it again. The nation is not for the people - or we would simply rapaciously consume its resources to feed the present. The people of the nation are not for the nation or we would consume them to fuel the engine. The nation and the people are both there to advance the principles of the group into the future. And I believe America's principles deserve to exist into perpetuity so long as they adapt to meet shifting weather.
Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
Europe (as a whole) gives more money absolutely and multiples more in proportion to national income than the US. The US does (or did) have very good distribution networks, and that’s not liquid in a monetary sense.
I would encourage you to examine your statements on rapacious consumption of resources and people as well.
All USAID showed was now the grift machine works--most of that aid money was getting kicked back to corrupt politicians to pay for campaigns. Other monies were being siphoned off in the corrupt nations that accepted the funds. Those NGOs advertising for more "migration" were doing on the US taxpayer's own dime! So I don't know if we can draw many conclusions from it other than it created some money velocity in various forms.
America's cost of living crisis is in large part due to the huge carrying cost of all that graft--it wasn't illegal, mind you, just unethical.
Sorry, but I don't care about the self-interest of my nation in any matters that don't concern the self-interest of her citizens, much less any matters that work directly against the self-interest of her citizens—and no amount of rhetoric is going to convince me that I should think otherwise.
This phenomenon really frustrates me on behalf of my peers. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but anecdotally I've observed many others struggle to get their first jobs in tech, while, meanwhile, I am mostly being assigned to interview people who require visa sponsorship. Most of my referrals for my low YOE peers are rejected before the recruiter call. I have observed this at both very-big tech and my current medium-sized tech company.
I have also observed that on my team, more than half of the people are either currently on immigrant visas or were previously on immigrant visas. Just to be absolutely clear—these people are great, and I don't fault them or hold any ill will for them having coming here to work.
At the same time, it seems that most hiring is done at the mid and senior level. If we only hire senior talent and rely on immigrant visa labor to fill these ranks, where exactly is each subsequent generation of seniors supposed to come from? I feel there should be some requirements in place to ensure that companies aren't perpetuating this shortage by hiring very few domestic workers at the entry level.
This is the critical "inflection point" that I've been posting about--we've lost the pipeline of novice -> senior and it's going to blow up in our faces.
For perspective, in the same time period, The number of employees at Google multiplied by five. I wouldn't be surprised if the growth of the software industry, at least, actually outpaced the increase in H-1B visas.
This is the classic problem with american policy, well known to be abused and terribly implemented but too politically difficult to change.
You could easily move from a lottery to a total comp auction process. IMO if your company does layoffs it should automatically void your ability to participate for 5 years. It's pretty gross to see tech CEOs whining about how they can't get the talent they need on a Monday and then mass laying off on a Tuesday.
To hear Elon tell it, the only way forward is to keep raping the US citizen workforce by flooding the market with cheap talent from overseas. Hey, as long he is still on course for becoming the first USD Trillionaire, it's all good, right?
Does this conflate the number of new visas issued to new workers, with the existing visas renewed by already settled-in-US workers (that must be renewed every 3 years)?
Because due to the GC backlog, the existing visas do not go down for 2 major contributing countries.
I don’t think these workers are competing directly with 100% of the population. How many unemployed Americans could be employed right now if there was less temporary workers?
I personally believe we hit some kind of inflection point recently with whatever secondary effects all the importation of cheap labor has caused. The chickens finally came home to roost right around 2023. It's now a full blown crisis.
It's very difficult to tell. Employment isn't a finite thing, especially in white collar jobs. High quality workers will generate economic activity which generates new jobs. For ex: imagine a Chinese AI engineer working at OpenAI develops a new tool that generates enough $$ to support a whole team.
How much of that is reality or how much is is suppresses wages will always be hard to pin down.
A basic starting point would be cracking down on H1B mills that explicitly do wage suppression + more scrutiny on big companies like Amazon using it. There's some big H1B consultancies designed to undercut gov contract tending who are much more blatant despite hard rules in H1B meant to stop it. Biden admin passed some new policies to help combat it but enforcement has always been problem #1, not a lack of rules meant to protect American workers.
> For ex: imagine a Chinese AI engineer working at OpenAI develops a new tool that generates enough $$ to support a whole team.
Whose to say an American, given the same opportunities, couldn't do this as well? If you look at where the top AI companies are, only 1 is in China.
I don't think h1b mills impact tech workers as much. Most of those cases seem to be in the healthcare space or in low end tech jobs that Americans probably don't want anyways...
Asians are 7% of the US population and above 30% of the engineering workforce at most tech companies. So either Asians are just extremely genetically/culturally superior somehow (which seems unlikely given the state of the software industry in most of their countries) or something is going on.
Many things could be going on. You should propose a concrete explanation instead of some vague "something is going on" placeholder which could uncharitably be described as dog-whistling.
For example, consider that leaving one's country is difficult and, so, the distribution is skewed towards individuals with higher skill and talent.
I'm not saying that is the only effect at play here. My point is there are many effects and a lazy "something is going on" statement does nothing to understand that complexity.
You pretty clearly don't want to hear my concrete explanation. I'm not sure yours fully accounts for what's happening there. It's pretty extreme especially when there's a large pool of unemployed talent in the US.
Oddly, over a 25 year period, I worked with far fewer Asians than I did Indians. India has to be the #1 supplier of H1Bs to the US, hands down. I'm not sure I can assess how the average Asian software developer did compared to Indian ones since the sample size was so skewed for me. Maybe on the coasts it was different? I look at Japan as a nation that has its crap together, but they also have terrible work/life balance that has now led to massive depopulation. It's like every race has its own particular blind spots.
That's ~6% of the 9M. Not nothing but not a glaring amount. I'm seeing that there are 1.7M total SWEs in the US, which would bring the H1B % to 30%, assuming all are SWEs. This would make it a significant amount, not sure if it's enough to suppress wages / pass on US persons if they attempted it.
One look at the top H1B employers should stop this narrative however, because those companies do not pay near peanuts.
For perspective, in the same time period, The number of employees at Google multiplied by five. It seems likely that the number of highly educated positions, in general, increased by quite a bit during that time.
curious how much of the growth is solely due to renewals since the cap on first time H1-Bs has stayed the same at 85k per year.
the green card queue is severely backlogged for India (and to some extent China, Mexico). this causes people who would usually get a green card after 3-5 years be on a continuous H1-B renewal cycle every 3 years.
As someone currently on the H1B program, and working in tech for the past 10 years, how do I navigate the current climate in the US? Especially when sentiment around H1B workers is at an all time low - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606374 ?
I love working in the cutting edge of tech, but no other part of the world has been able to replicate this model the way Bay Area, SF, Seattle, and now NYC has. Great companies, ambitious people, new emerging tech, and large compensation.
Are there other countries where YC sees companies originate from and they prove with a path to citizenship for software engineers?
Demand a competitive salary. If you stay in the US, your pay is a logistic curve that tops out when you reach your late 30s. You will start to feel the pressure of not keeping up wage-wise in your 40s, and you will be completely excluded from being able to work at all sometime in your 50s. That's the reality.
What is stopping American management to continue hiring American professionals instead of others or to look at it another way, what is stopping them to rise through the ranks and keep the employment number balanced amongst American and h1b holders?
What if there were tariffs applied to importing laborer or using offshore contractors?
That wouldn't do anything to address any supply shortages of workers for certain skills but would at least level the playing field for citizens looking to get into fields like tech, nursing, medicine, and more.
And then large companies can just set up entire offices overseas - all of the large tech companies already have large offices and subsidiaries overseas.
One major firm I worked at built a giant campus in Mumbai, I believe it was. The huge office building here in the US was sold off and was just recently torn down to make way for I don't know what--a whole lot of lower paying jobs, if anything. Their footprint here in the states is now laughably small. It's beyond ridiculous that such a stable employer for decades would now look like this.
A better approach would be to implement a significant application fee, less than the $5 million Trump implemented, but indexed to a multiple of the median wage, which would prove an employer's genuine need for talent not found in the U.S. In exchange for this premium, the employee should receive a green card, granting them the freedom to switch employers.
This would create a more honest system, ensuring these highly sought-after professionals are paid competitive market wages and the company has to pay a large premium to hire the foreign worker. Not engage in this fictional market studies to prove they can’t find people to find the role. Make them pay a premium and don’t lock them into the employer.
Further there should be a separate program for graduates of US universities and us university graduates shouldn’t be competing against Tata gaming the system. People invested in the USA that we’ve invested in should get a preference over random people from a consulting company.
In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens or green card holders with bachelor's or master's degrees in computer science. That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That's equal to 82% of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma.
I’d like to see percentage of tech workers in SV that were American citizens then vs now. Regardless of whatever cap we talk about - it’s quite obvious that this has changed dramatically over the last 20 years for those under 40.
We are in an absolute crisis at both ends of the wage scale--there's no entry level, and over-50s are being deleted from the workforce in huge numbers, never to see the same level of pay ever again.
This chart is entirely misleading. In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas. That's it, it has not grown nor shrunk.
Reason for increase in population shown here is H1B renewals. Normally the way this works is H1Bs convert to permanent residents, but due to the country caps, Indian/Chinese H1B holders keep renewing their visas contributing to this increase. Again these are people who are already here and got their approval sometime in the past, so its not like in 2022, companies collectively hired 685,117 (which is also why you see the decrease in 2023 since due to covid, a very little bit of backlog for residency cleared).
(Not to mention the sentiment of comments here is entirely disappointing, but I guess that's the vibe these days)
I think every time the topic of H1B comes on HN, a lot of people have a lot of opinions, but don’t fully understand the immigration system. Like you correctly pointed out, the increase in H1Bs in the country is mostly contributed by the fact that country caps force some nationalities to permanently stay on H1B while others can naturalize faster. There are hundreds of thousands of people who come into the country every year through other visas (and also on H1B from other countries) and naturalize and take up jobs in the country. But that doesn’t matter because they are now US citizens.
If people from India/China were allowed to naturalize as fast as other countries, you’d not have the chart of number of H1Bs grow in the country.
if people from India and China were allowed to naturalize as fast things would spiral out of control. I know it's not a popular thing to say on this forum, but H1B visas are absolutely a wage control mechanism for US corporations even if that's not the spirit of the law. Note that I'm also an immigrant.
There’s a lot to be said about “spiraling out of control”. You could argue it’s fair for everyone. But you could also argue that a country like China which is as big as Europe gets the same amount of green cards as Luxembourg. You could argue there will be less diversity, but then you’d be arguing that the French and the Italian cultures are very different from each other, but people from NorthEast India are the same as people from South of India culturally and ethnically.
Anyway, if we are so concerned about “not letting things go out of control”. A simple solution is also to set those country caps on the H1B program. There can be other solutions and the conversation can be a lot more nuanced but HN is not the forum for it when it comes to the topic of H1B.
The H1B “problem” would disappear if companies were required to pay 50% more than the median salary for the position for one.
The problem would disappear, but they would disappear to India or one of the other offshoring countries. I however agree that the pay needs to be AT LEAST the median salary for the position to avoid abuse.
Tax the American companies that focus their hiring efforts abroad. Just another tariff. They will generate the people they need in this country by lunch time.
Google would be required to pay 900K instead of 600K. You think that would stop Google?
Or they would just move some of their development departments to another country. Google doesn’t need to bring developers into the US at all.
It still wouldn’t help.
For companies like Google, H1B isn’t about bringing into US, it is just an expensive way to satisfy their US hiring hunger.
That difference can be understood by imagining that H1B isn’t foreign devs, instead it is devs grown in a jar by the State Department - Google would buy them the same.
"Note that I'm also an immigrant."
This sentence doesn't really help your statement, it just makes you a gatekeeper.
Exactly. In liberal cities I have lived in, it is almost always the earlier immigrants that resent and denigrate the later immigrants. It's pure gatekeeping. Like "I suffered during the immigration process and therefore you have to suffer at least as much as I have, or it isn't fair." Or like "the recent immigrants aren't as hardworking as older ones and they don't deserve immigration."
The so-called wage control mechanism is never the intention of H1B. Workers with H1Bs have to meet prevailing wage standards before the H1B is approved: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/wages
I get that there are probably loopholes in the law. But then the solution is to fix the loopholes and tighten enforcement. Give DoL access to IRS data. Improve the definition of prevailing wages. A lot of things can be done to fix H1B so that it behaves like how it's intended.
DOL does have the data to determine prevailing wages. In fact the wages reported in the application for H1B is often lower than what the immigrant is getting paid because DOL does not accept bonuses and RSUs and other options as guaranTeed wage. So you could have an H1B petition with $200k but in reality they could be earning $300k+ with bonuses and RSUs.
Paying prevailing wage doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the salary a company would have paid/are paying to American workers in the same role. Three-fifths of h-1b jobs are certified at the two lowest prevailing wage levels and the median age of an h-1b beneficiary is 33 years old.
> Paying prevailing wage doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the salary a company would have paid/are paying to American workers in the same role.
That's part of the fix I'm proposing. Improve the definition of prevailing wage.
mariel boatlift study found that even with a 7% short-term supply shock to labor concentrated in only miami in only low wage work led to no disruption in either employment or wages: https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
lump of labor simply never happens. I know it's fashionable to say 'wage suppression' but wages mostly reflect productivity in competitive AND deregulated markets!
I feel like the situation for US citizens would improve if they were allowed to naturalize. Their wages would go up and companies wouldn’t have the relatively cheaper labor pool to constantly draw from.
This is another mistake what people make when describing H1Bs. Yes there are abuses where bad actors abuse the system and undercut the local wages. But a huge portion of the annual H1B allocation goes to people who are not the “cheaper labor pool”. They get paid the same wages AND the companies spend additional money to the order of thousands of dollars to sponsor the visa. Google is not hiring H1Bs on a cheaper rate. They still get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
But I do agree with the theory that allowing a lot of these H1Bs would be a net benefit for the economy. A lot of people who naturalize end up leaving jobs and starting businesses that employ more people. We should be encouraging that, but instead the system actively discourages that.
If they’re not a cheaper labor pool then the only reason companies wouldn’t hire them over citizens is because they are tied to the company. This would also be solved by naturalization.
Any iteration of this turns out to be better for US citizens if they’re are naturalized.
Not to mention that 50% of all unicorns in the US are started by immigrants, like 60% of those by specifically Indians.
>There are hundreds of thousands of people who come into the country every year through other visas (and also on H1B from other countries) and naturalize and take up jobs in the country. But that doesn’t matter because they are now US citizens.
What you seem to be saying is that the problem is worse than we think for natives because of these immigrants dropping off of stats after they become citizens. Of course I think this myself. It doesn't matter if you make these people citizens so much, the point is that their effect on the job market is independent of citizenship.
> In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas.
Minor nitpick, but if you get an H-1 visa to work at a university, it's not part of that 85K limit.
But yes, your point is valid. And the headline is editorialized - they cherry picked the year 2011, because it's the lowest. It was the lowest because we were knee deep in the financial crisis, and many companies suspended/reduced their reliance on foreign labor precisely because they'd have a hard time convincing the government that they couldn't find a qualified local.
What about cap-exempt H1Bs? There are tons of new companies which streamlined the process and which are offering "nearly-guaranteed H1B with no lottery"
There is no such thing for tech companies. Not sure where you heard about it.
Only non-profits are allowed to skip the lotteries. I've seen it apply to universities and hospitals, but never to a for-profit tech company,
A cap-exempt H-1B doesn't let you work for a "company".
Only universities, university-affiliated nonprofits, nonprofit research organizations, and government research organizations can sponsor one. Furthermore, even after you obtain a cap-exempt H-1B, you would be required to go through the lottery like anyone else if you want to work at an employer subject to the H-1B cap.
How can _anyone_ bypass lottery when that's a USCIS process?
I understand there are some exceptions made for academic institutions so these companies employ people into a "participating university" for a token number of hours per month, person comes in and once they are in the country they can pursue different opportunities to get employed and change their status.
This cap-exempt H1B bypasses lottery, can be obtained in about 3 months any time during the year.
Yes - When Microsoft requests 14,000 H-1Bs after laying off 9,000 American workers, it's above and beyond the 85k cap.
No, it's not. The limit of new is universally capped at 85k. They can request as many applications as they want. The lottery still only picks a total of 85k
All the Microsoft layoffs were US citizens? Do you have a source for this?
They were not because in a layoff you cannot prefer a specific protected category like race, gender, age AND nationality.
The 9000 number is also a global number which includes layoffs in countries all over the world.
The argument “9000 US workers were fired and X visa applications were applied for” is also very reductive. The layoffs were in gaming, sales and other divisions, meanwhile the visa applications were for people who either already are on visas in other divisions like engineering and are continuing their status or for people in newer positions that have nothing to do with sales or gaming.
Source: I made it up
i think you're mistaken. The H1B cap is 65K. Cap-exempts are capped at 20K. Thus total cap is 85K. No above and beyond of that number.
Speaking about original post US tech industry is 16M people. So 600K+ of H1Bs, suppose they all in tech, is 4%. Blip on a radar.
No, you're wrong too. The 20k is the Master's cap, only applicable to students who did a Master's or above in the US. Cap exempt refers to H1bs granted to US/State employers, who can get H1bs for employees without any cap whatsoever, and at any time of the year.
This. Cap exempts are usually PHDs and literal medical doctors.
thanks, i see. So, MS can't get them really.
https://www.nafsa.org/professional-resources/browse-by-inter...
"AC21 [codified at INA § 214(g)(5)(A)-(B)] exempts the following petitioners from the H-1B cap:
Institutions of higher education
Nonprofit entities related to or affiliated with an institution of higher education
Nonprofit research organizations
Governmental research organizations
I don't think it's misleading. It's clearly a population chart, not a count of newly issued visas.
It's misleading because it says "The H-1B program grew...", which to many implies that it was doing more immigration. It wasn't. There was less naturalization.
Only if there is another line of "new green card holder previously holding H1B visa" which is expected to show exactly the opposite trend.
You still don't understand the problem here.
No it isn’t. It’s more like a rolling cumulative chart of all the prior years’ H1Bs combined.
[dead]
I don't understand the point of this chart. It essentially shows linear growth -- all 65k H-1B visas were allocated every year, until the past two years where layoffs have started impacting this labor pool. The entire tech industry has expanded by far more than 65k FTEs/yr so unless the OP does the leg work to figure out whether a disproportionate fraction of new jobs are being given to immigrants vs eligible Americans I don't see how this is useful.
I think the point of this graph is to demonstrate that there is a large jumper of temporary workers and high unemployment.
The program was to address labor shortages, and if we don’t have a labor shortage, then we should be reducing our temporary worker pool, not US citizen pool.
There is an argument that the purpose of the program is to provide skilled labor which is beneficial to the economy, beyond just, but including the domestic employment rate.
I’m not sure that’s what the H-1B program is doing in practice here, it probably is replacing many skilled American born workers. But at least in theory it can both be true that domestic worker unemployment has gone up, but that contracting the program risks the global competitiveness of major US companies that net employ US workers. More analysis is probably warranted.
The purpose of this program has always been to provide cheaper labor for companies. We have never had a legitimate shortage of qualified software engineers.
We definitely did have a shortage until about 2021. Code camps wouldn't exist if companies couldn't hire from a more qualified candidate pool.
I worked at BigTech, I don’t think I met a single coworker on H1B that was a “specialized top talent” whose job couldn’t go to an American citizen. I’m not saying any of my H1B visa coworkers were worse than American citizens, they weren’t better.
Now I also spent a long career in regular old enterprise dev before 2020. Definitely any halfway decent framework developer could have done the job as well as the ones who were here on H1B.
I can easily hold multiple thoughts at once.
1. As long as their unemployed qualified Americans for roles, we should reduce the new H1B visa applications dramatically.
2. I don’t begrudge anyone here on H1B and don’t support discriminating against them or cancelling their visa
3. I don’t agree with how once you get let go from a job, the clock starts ticking no matter how much money you have saved. When I was at Amazon and Amazon started Amazoning with me. I didn’t break a sweat when I was on “focus”. I played the game long enough to get through my next vest and then sat around and waited on my “get $40K+ severance offer and leave immediately or prostrate myself for a couple of more months and still be let go with 1/3 the severance amount”.
Of course I took the severance. My coworkers here on H1B were scared shitless and overworked themselves. Then again, it was my 8th job out of now 10 and I was already 49 at the time. I might have acted differently if I were younger.
> and high unemployment.
I didn't see where that was shown in the chart.
All I see is an assertion that "often at the expense of recent American CS grads.", and while I do believe I saw reporting that new grads are facing higher unemployment, I didn't see anything related specifically to CS grads, and, further, I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs. At least my experience has been that H1B are often in more senior roles and entry level jobs that require advanced degrees.
I'm not saying that it's not the case that there is a misalignment with the number of H1Bs and the current employment situation, but there doesn't seem to be enough data here to fully flesh out this argument without some fairly major assumptions being applied.
> For computer science and computer engineering, the unemployment rate in those fields was 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively — notably higher than the national average.
> By comparison, the unemployment rate for art history majors was 3%, and for nutritional sciences, the unemployment rate was just 0.4%, the New York Fed found. The New York Fed’s report was based on Census data from 2023 and unemployment rates of recent college graduates.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/college-majors-with-the-best...
> I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs
Foreign new grads start their career on the OTP visa, which allows them to work for 2 years after they graduate. So you are correct, foreign students use OTP, not h1b to apply for entry level jobs.
You seriously think that in the period of 2011 to, say 2021, there wasn't a massive labour shortage in tech hiring?
Yes. As a US citizen, I, and many of my college cohort, spent many years unemployed during that time period, despite applying to thousands of positions.
The reality is that businesses hire attorneys to create a legal fiction that I and my peers are unqualified so that businesses that desire it can hire H-1B employees.
Shortages are, always and everywhere, a pricing phenomenon.
I agree with the above comment. During that time period was the height of my tech career. The remarkable number of open positions didn't lead to the kinds of wage increases one might expect, perhaps some, but what I mostly encountered was a lot of highly specialized roles that I wasn't qualified for because everything has to be "just so" in order to be hired on because companies refuse to train or allot time for training, just brief "ramp up" periods that are do or die.
Nowadays, since I'm in my 50s, I'm disqualified from being able to work in tech completely. Mind you, the age discrimination is hidden behind me not being perfectly qualified for whatever role due to not checking some technical skillset. Never mind that I am still sharp, have a great deal of experience, and can do whatever is asked given a decent target to aim for. None of it seems to matter, it's purely ageism eliminating me from getting interviews now.
I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event.
The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
> I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event. > > The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
Why do you think H1-Bs are to blame over AI hype coupled with Section 174 tax changes[^1]? H1-Bs have been around for a long time, so I doubt it's the culprit for layoffs and lower hiring since 2023.
^1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
Do you think it's possible you were overestimating the skills in your particular cohort?
Being more senior, my world of coworker and colleagues has been a mix of highly skilled people, largely in the AI/ML space. There are many H1Bs among them, but there has been no difference in the ability of the US citizen subset and the H1B subset in getting jobs.
Even closer to the entry level, the H1B pool all came from very competitive and elite universities, and all of them also had advanced degrees.
I do believe the market for fresh out of college software engineers without much specialization is tight, but I also don't see many H1Bs in that category either (but again, that could just be because of my own cohort I'm surrounded by). A PhD from NYU/Harvard/MIT with an undergrad at a place like IIT or Tsinghua is not in the same talent pool as newly graduated undergrad students from a standard US university.
So you're saying all a CS grad has to do is go back in time and get a degree from MIT and they're golden, right?
Let me explain something: When I graduated from High School in Upstate NY in 1991, 3 of my fellow grads got accepted into MIT that year. From that one school! The odds of such an event taking place in the 2020s has to be vanishingly small to impossible. The high-end schools like MIT have not scaled up to match the enormously scaled up demand for education, not to mention how expensive the tuition has become. So it is simply impossible for everyone who wants to be engineers or computer scientists to attend some elite school nowadays. The competition for seats must have increased 100 fold since the early 1990s!
I think you're conflating visas. The PhD would use the OTP and O-1 visas, not the h1b.
The h1b candidate pool would be mostly undergrad and masters students.
It is not that easy. OPT only works for a few years, and you are not immediately eligible for an O-1
This is also what I suspect. It is very different how many CS majors in the US enter the job market with just a bachelor’s degree.
During this period, many job opportunities went to h1b candidates, resulting in teams at FANGA companies with all 1 nationality.
It would be fair to say that they couldn't find any american talent and thus needed to hire h1b workers, but that wouldn't explain how they got monoculture teams.
The issue is endemic and I've seen it at companies I've worked at. Indian hiring managers have distinct obvious biases to only hire other Indians.
This is blindingly obvious if you look at the share of h1b visas that indians account for (a vast majority).
This is a touchy subject for sure, but yes, I have witnessed this firsthand at two different Fortune 10 companies. Reverse racism against caucasians was on full display and you damn well best not mention it at all. The managers saw it as building their power base using fungible assets--they kn3w, from a purely cultural standpoint, who is going to kill themselves to meet deadlines and not argue.
> whether a disproportionate fraction of new jobs are being given to immigrants vs eligible Americans I don't see how this is useful.
This is bound to happen as you run out of people in the US. I don't think it's useful to prove a problem unless top US graduates start losing jobs to immigrants that outcompete them for lower salaries that they can live on because of lower educational debt.
Start? It's been going strongly for at least 20 years! We're now in the endgame of it.
nobody honest can say we ran out of US citizens that can work the type of jobs H1B do. Unemployment in the industry is not zero. Top graduates from MIT and Stanford? Sure, they can't make enough of them, but as a whole the industry is using H1B to lower cost of labor, not to fill a hole that simply doesn't exist.
I'm all for importing top talent to work at American companies. In fact, I think H1-Bs should be allowed to start businesses and move from job to job like anyone else. If it's about innovation, why force them to stay in one job while they're here?
When Microsoft does layoffs and then mass H1-Bs, is that shedding low-skill Americans for top Indian talent, or just labor arbitrage? Is a country of 340 million really lacking talent, or do we just want cheaper and controllable labor?
https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-h1b-visa-applicat...
Companies always want the lucrative American businesses and consumers as customers, all the while wanting to shed expensive American workers.
If they wanted cheap labour, they would outsource. H1Bs are an important source of talent. That does not mean it is abused by outsourcing companies to bring cheap talent to America and profit from the arbitrage.
Big tech is not the one abusing this program.
>That does not mean it is abused by outsourcing companies to bring cheap talent to America and profit from the arbitrage.
It doesn't have to follow directly; the problem is often indirect. H1Bs are much better behaved for employers because they are nearly powerless to say no, and can be slow-walked for raises, promotions and squeezed for high hours worked to reduce effective wages. There's also cultural migration issues - India is 70%+ of the H1B program. Does India have a monopoloy on top global talent, or is it just a process vulnerable to political capture and top execs' whims?
Talent exists everywhere, but when one country absolutely dominates a process, it suggests the process has been captured.
>Big tech is not the one abusing this program.
Did they promise that in a press release or something? Compared to Microsoft, TCS and Infosys are bottom tier tech, but the H1B program in general is sketchy based on the accusations the biggest players have had over the last decade.
If it's top talent, then they should be forced to pay them the wage of a US worker, if not more.
Instead, you end up competing against the whole world on salary and servitude hours for a local job.
They already are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application
I've yet to see that once.
Not the H1Bs at Amazon who were paid less and guilted into working weekends. Not my Mexican girlfriend who works for $50k as an oil rig chemical engineer in Houston at a company that only hires visa workers on the cheap. Not my Indian neighbors I befriended making $60k in software at Chase bank in Houston on their all-visa teams.
SLB is a good example, where I met my girlfriend. Entry level American chemical engineer: $120-150k. Visa chemical engineer imported to work on the same team in the same position: $50k. Guess which part of the pie chart grew while I worked there.
But I'm not supposed to notice any of this. And until very, very recently it was a faux pas to mention it at all.
If we're going to give anecdotal data, when I lived in NYC I was hired as an H1B, and every single other H1B I knew was paid way more than the median wage. But these were companies not trying to abuse the system. I do not doubt that there are bad actors.
I do agree that there should be minima to prevent abuse. I do not agree that every H1B hire was to abuse the system.
In the early 2010s there were hiring shortages, the startup that hired me would have probably preferred saving on the attorney fees and the 6+ months it took between the offer and the start date. For a new H1B you have to prepare the paperwork in March at the latest, apply the first week of April, for a start date of October 1st. And not only that, but with the quotas and the lottery you're absolutely not guaranteed that your hire is going to make it. All things being equal without a shortage or the ability to underpay, it is not an attractive solution.
H1Bs do push salaries down, because there is more "supply" of workers, so it should probably only be used for hiring for areas with shortages, but even then you can have downturn like what we're having in tech, and some companies may keep their H1Bs over FTE because they are less of a flight risk and can't negotiate their salaries as well. Even with a shortage, this means that employees with that specific skill will be paid less, now it's more of a matter of which one is better for the economy/society.
Yeah, nobody is supposed to mention it at all. It's just a race to the bottom, though. Good news: The bottom approaches.
your personal anecdotes doesnt negate the actual data
It's basic economics that more workers with fewer rights lower wages across the board. "They make what Americans do" when there is a continuous flow of competing labor. Sure. What would companies pay if they didn't have these exploitable workers? Would the companies have opened new office closer to where Americans are educated? Certainly, one of those two would happen.
But this is why the government should enforce existing laws and include provisions like must pay x above median average salary for the role to discourage fraud.
They do that already. H1b has a minimum salary requirement. I agree it should be higher but it exists. The median H1B is 130k.
But it does negate the claim that H-1Bs are paid the same wage.
If your claim only applies to a subset of visa workers in a subset of companies, then refine the claim to use a word like "some", and it will be a trivial claim that I agree with.
> If it's top talent, then they should be forced to pay them the wage of a US worker, if not more.
They are forced to do that, and they in fact do that.
Source: I was hired by one big tech company as an H-1B worker (I was a new grad) over a decade ago (2012), my salary was ~15% higher than what the chart says for "class of 2014".
I will go a step further and suggest that you, an HNer, were probably even a world class talent back then who mogged your US cohort so badly they offered you 15% more to snap you up.
It's just evident that's not what's happening across all H-1B positions in the US, and those are the ones worth talking about here.
For every one example of "you" I have seen 100 or even 1000 of the other kind of "warm body" type of example. 2012 is already a long time ago. What has happened since is that the US reached some kind of critical mass situation where the number of those "warm bodies" brought in to do cheap work has finally killed the golden goose and now not only is it nearly impossible to find a job, the cost of living has also skyrocketed! We're closing in on the endgame here, mark my words. It will be ugly before it gets sorted out somehow.
Indentured servitude to depress domestic wages.
I worked for a couple of very "household name" big companies as a tech lead. I trained probably dozens of H1Bs over the past 15 or so years. I've seen it all. I decided that I would help anyone who wanted to improve their skills regardless of their origin or employment status, and that's what I did. I got mistreated terrible at times, in particular by a Venezuelan woman, but generally speaking, I helped raise the bar for a lot of people who maybe otherwise would have been ignored because big companies don't care about training people at all. As I look back on what my career was, I think that all the informal mentoring I did was probably my biggest contribution. I just wish it had turned out better for everyone involved. I saw a lot of absolutely heartbreaking situations arise over the years. And now my situation is kind of heartbreaking as well. We were all in this together, but nobody spent a single second thinking about that.
as an American who worked in Silicon Valley for years, but is not from there, i'd say it's also "captive real estate customers" created by H1-B people.
Can you clarify this? You saying non H1B's would not pay the crazy high rents of SV's housing?
I once asked an (American) director where i worked just this question.
He said what you surmised: while there are plenty of qualified American engineers in the United States, citing Motorola headcount reductions as an example, it was a challenge to convince them to move to California's cost of living.
Seriously. All I needed to do to be filthy rich was move to Silicon Valley back in '97 when I got my MS, then eventually have bought a house or two out there. That's it.
To recap: 1. Move to the Bay Area circa 1997 2. Buy houses 3. Profit enormously in the 2020s
Mind you, I had no idea...
The median H1B engineering salary is 120k. There is no top talent working for that salary.
Well, surprise, H1B visas are issued to more than software engineers. For biomedical engineers, 120k is a very decent salary.
You don't know what you are talking about.
P.S. you probably want to provide a source for that number.
> H1B visas are issued to more than software engineers
Not really. More than 70% of all H1Bs are going to software positions. Biomedical engineers are less than 1%, so a rounding error
> you probably want to provide a source for that number
Just google it yourself.
Yup, if you take the restrictions off, none of these companies would want them. They love the restrictions. Americans can just up and quit on them, but not temporary workers.
How would you prevent people from getting an H1-B visa for a job just for the sake of moving to a different job in a sector that doesn't need a lot of workers? And if they are going to start a business, they could start a business in tech that is actually successful, and then fill a few extra positions with friends/family/contacts/people willing to pay, and then those people could move on to other jobs for which they are more suited.
Fact is, immigration systems in all of the richest countries are already bursting with abuse from certain countries with very ingenious schemes and you gotta have some ways to protect it unless you want a free-for-all.
I would encourage you to actually read up about the hoops that people with H-1Bs have to jump through just to stay in the country. It is a demeaning and abusive process, and not usually one that people engage in frivolously.
Additionally, you can already today legally switch jobs as an H-1B, but it is a process that gives undue amounts of power to the employer, which makes switching difficult. Finally, regarding switching fields, it's not that easy. You have to show that your new field is related to your degree and experience.
So please, instead of making up imaginary bogeymen, learn more about the immigration system.
I never said it should be as difficult as it is, which you seem to imply that I did. I only said meant to say the system shouldn't be too easy, either.
You know the answer! It's veritable slave labor is why. I've seen it a thousands times at major US companies and how it plays out. It is a horrible form of leverage they have over their "assets."
If it's actually top talent, sure.
But if it's a replacement for supporting domestic education and a source of cheap skilled labor, no thanks.
If FAANG were screaming at Congress about their inability to hire and the solution was better primary and secondary education programs for people at home to create that skilled workforce, we probably wouldn't have such an aggressive urban/rural political divide in this country.
It takes ~22 years to train up a native. Election cycles are on a 2-4 years basis and corporate profit reporting is on a 3 month scale.
The fix may take a long time, but the bigger problem is there are no workable ideas for a fix. It's not like better education hasn't been thought of, attempted, and tons of money dumped into it. Results have been mixed at best.
Better education works elsewhere, so it's probably not where the problem is.
US education is broken because so much of the $ gets soaked up to pay pensions.
Ok, so let's just do that then, sounds easy.
If you want the British to take back control of the USA so that the British can enforce the superior* British education system onto the USA, that would be very very funny to watch, but I don't think it would be "easy" — especially when people realise it means no guns in schools or anywhere else.
* The British system may not be superior, I left uni in 2006 and the UK in 2018, and UK politicians have been fiddling with education seemingly forever.
But that just means you should substitute whichever country is doing education best at the moment; the point is, even obviously correct things are still hard in the world of politics.
> so it's probably not where the problem is.
Did I give the impression that better education is sufficient to solve the problem?
All true, but now the endgame is just about here. Those chickens be clucking!
I used to be but that's not how any of these immigration programs are used. Often they've been used to crush domestic workers and even change demographics and voting patterns.
At this point it doesn't look like allowing anything other than net emigration is practical. You just can't trust the people involved to do anything else.
That's a great point: immigrants are great for the existing voting populace. They count for the census, but if you keep them on a program like H-1B, they'll live their whole lives without being able to vote. The existing voters have their votes count more and more with H-1B population growth. A great gig when you've got something like Prop 13 making sure the newcomers pay most of the taxes too. What a racket!
> Often they've been used to crush domestic workers and even change demographics and voting patterns
Can you give an example where H1Bs changed voting patterns?
I meant immigration in general. Obviously people on H1B visas don't (or at least shouldn't) change voting patterns.
This is an absolute farce.
I'm not so cold hearted or extreme to say 'shut it all down tomorrow', but it feels like at the very very least, in this job climate, we could suspend new entries?
But it just keeps humming along like everything is rosy.
I’ve followed this issue for a long time, the thing is at the end of the day the average American just doesn’t care very much what happens to tech workers.
There’s an underlying attitude of “serves those entitled nerds right” on both the political left and the right.
They did nothing but push "STEM careers" as the way forward for 25 years! It's all been nothing but a lie the whole time!
I feel that 2 simple rules would capture all the value of H1-Bs but naturally limit their abuses:
1. H-1Bs applications are ranked by total comp. 2 years of that comp is unconditional (no PIPs, no performance management, no excuses). I can see an argument to bucket this by industry.
2. Only job codes where the YoY median pay and total employment are currently at a 3 year high are eligible to receive H-1Bs.
The comp requirements would devastate the body farms. The unconditional comp will put major pressure on the system of working H1-Bs to the bone, and not thoroughly vetting those hires. Companies that layoff in the thousands, or layoff their highest paid (oldest) employees are simply poisoning the H-1B well for that industry. Deep cuts can't be made up with H1-Bs for 3 years or until all the layoffs have been recouped industry-wide.
So only people who would work in high COL areas would be eligible?
No, companies which are ready to pay high (above median) salaries would be able to hire H1Bs. No matter where the office is. Even now many companies offer compensation without regard to geography, when the compensation is high enough; if you live in Alabama but still qualify, the better to you.
That's not actually all that unreasonable, despite how it sounds on the surface. High COL areas are high COL because people working there are more productive. If it's worth it to import an H1-B worker even in the high COL area, they're contributing that much more to the economy than someone in a low COL area.
If this still sounds crazy, I think your objection is more to there being a cap at all. If there is going to be a cap, it makes sense to order it by total comp even notwithstanding the COL.
So do you expect someone to boot strap in a LCoL area without H1Bs
H-1Bs are rare at bootstrapped companies , rare outside major tech centers, and basically non-existent in bootstrapped companies in LCoL areas. It is a benefit that almost entirely accrues to big corporations with legal teams. It is big corporate welfare.
Employers already need to prove that they can’t hire an American to do the job.
This is false for H-1B - there is no "labor market test". Such a test is required for the PERM process in which an H-1B visa holder would seek a green card through their employer, although the definition of "prove" is up for debate [2].
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit... [2] https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-immigration-h1b-vis...
H1-B applications must have a Labor Condition Application which requires a prevailing wage assessment and that hiring a foreign worker won't adversely affect US workers.
It is true that the LCA (and PERM!) processes are have grave flaws that leave them open to abuse.
Several FANGa companies have gotten in trouble for advertising in uncommon places like newspapers for jobs that also aren’t listed on their careers page in order to avoid qualified American applicants from applying in order to get approval for green cards or H1b
This is easily subverted when the "proof" is conducting a subjective interview.
Very loose definition of "prove". I would guess that there are many on HN who are overqualified for any H1B job and would take it for the right money. The talent is here, they just want to pay less.
they do all the time, with all kinds of tricks that misrepresent reality. the H1B system is a scam.
Clearly something has to be done here. It's going to all crash and burn pretty soon.
I agree. The cap should be adjusted to unemployment surveys by sector. If there's high unemployment in tech at the moment there should be simply no quota to hire from foreign countries until the labor market recovers.
You should probably do some research on how many of those ended up starting their own companies. And how many jobs they created.
After that you may want to rethink suspending new entries.
I have not. Feel free to educate me/post numbers or links.
How impactful would a say, 1 year pause be to that? Is the number of jobs created by H1B each year > the number of H1B entries each year?
(not the parent, I don't have a specific number)
Generally speaking, the economy is not a zero sum game (by definition), or we would never have made it past the first 50 people in New Amsterdam. Every person here on a visa interacts with the economy (needs to buy groceries, etc). Presumably they create more wealth for the economy than they cost, or it would not be worth it for a company to hire them.
I think a more interesting question would be if, for the particular occupation (say software engineer), a person on an H1-B visa adds more than one jobs worth of demand for more software engineers. Even if they benefit the economy as a whole, it is still possible that a subset of the labor force sees extra competition. That opens up the question of is it better to suspend the program to protect a subgroup, or is it better to expand the economy as a whole.
In order for such a statistic to be useful, you'd not only have to demonstrate it, but also demonstrate evidence that companies they start add more non-H-1B jobs to the market than they add more H-1B jobs to the market.
Serious question: can the case really be made that American CS grads (and other entry-level tech folks) are clearly inferior to the potential pool of H-1B applicants?
If the answer is in the affirmative then we need to study and address why that is.
If not, then I'm curious how many qualified Americans are being pushed out of (ore prevented from entering) the high tech job market by H-1B applicants.
Ive been directly exposed to the H1B candidate pool. The answer is no. It's 90% candidates with very similar sounding resumes. It's unnerving how templated all the resumes are.
You really have to have solid, engaged recruiting and screening processes in place to filter the wheat from the chaff with H1B's.
I would interview 10 H1B's, and then one domestic candidate, and the domestic candidate would outperform every time.
This is obv anecdotal, but I would not be surprised if this pattern exists across the entire H1B pool.
We do hire some H1B's, and there are some incredibly talented candidates, but only after great expense and time invested in screening and interviewing.
A lot of virtual interviews are rigged in various ways. I did 100s of tech interviews for one company in particular and even had guys who were lip-syncing for someone else who actually spoke English who was looped in to the call off-screen. The level of fraud in interviews has reached all new levels with AI tools now.
> I would interview 10 H1B's, and then one domestic candidate
Do you ask people their visa status during interview?
If you do not ask them about visa status, then how do you know they weren't a domestic candidate? Is it a judgement based on race/skin-color/accent?
If you do ask them this question, How do you keep that information from influencing your decision in the interview?
I never asked about visa status during interviews as that was purely an HR issue or something the hiring manager needed to deal with. My job was to assess people purely on technical ability and to a lesser degree, ability to communicate effectively (in English). We never really even bothered with cultural fit--if the person seemed decent, we gave good feedback on them. There was so much fraud to wade through, however. I got so that I could spot those "templated" resumes very quickly. It's kind of a tell when someone has worked say, five different 6-month contracts in five geographically dispersed US cities! That would be ridiculously expensive to keep bopping around the US like that! If their skillset and work was any good, they would either get renewed or find another gig in the same locale.
[dead]
What do you count as American CS grads? A lot of H-1B holders have a degree from an American school. (Edit) If you hold an American CS degree, aren't you an American CS grad?
If you close that pipeline, you'll lose those students, and then you have to find more funding, because international students usually subsidize local students.
It wasn't until recently that I found out 40% of students at top colleges were not even American! I'm not specifically against foreign students, but 40%?
That and the H1B issue and American's not having jobs at American companies. Something isn't right.
That comes with the territory of have the vast majority of the top universities in the world. One of the things that has kept the US as the global hegemon for the last 100 years is the fact that every other country sends their best and brightest to study here, and a significant fraction of those people stay here to work.
I agree the US could do more to take advantage of its position to benefit the average American, but torching exactly what put the country in that position is short-sighted at best, categorically stupid at worst.
Colleges and Universities charge the non-local rate for international students which is considerably higher than the domestic rate (example from Georgia Tech:
In state $30,154 Out of state $53,638 International $54,814
This incentivizes them to keep more slots open for those high dollar students making it even tougher to develop a domestic workforce.
Another way of looking at those numbers is that the out of state / international students are subsidizing the education of the locals. AS long as local governments keep up pressure on the universities to not go 100% out of state, then it's by and large a win-win.
That's great, but we're not doing enough for our own citizens at this point in time.
Yes that something is the rapidly vanishing government funding for public universities.
I'm all for doing anything funding-wise that brings higher ed back to some kind of reality, even if we have to burn it all down to get there. The cost of education is outrageous and grads are not benefitting from their degrees the same way I was able to (at far less cost). We're at the inflection point there.
I feel for all human beings, but US education should be first and foremost directed towards helping US citizens. That's not racist, that's just common sense. We haven't even been doing that here! We're failing as a nation because shitty short-term profits always supersede the creation of long-term prosperity.
At one of my grad school classes, the prof could have taught the class in Chinese had it not been for me in there. And that was in the late 1990s.
While I disagree with GP’s premise, there’s no sense in which H1B visa holders are American. It’s a nonimmigrant visa. They are required to specifically disavow any intention of becoming Americans or else the visa can be revoked.
Yes and no. The H-1B visa is "dual intent" [1] and you are allowed to apply for and receive a green card (permanent resident card) while on an H-1B. After 5 years with permanent residence you can apply for citizenship. It is a common path, and the intention for the majority of people on an H-1B visa.
[1]: https://isss.temple.edu/faculty-staff-and-researchers/intern...
Let me stop you right there: "Qualified Americans" is a highly subjective phrase. If a young person did well in physics and math in High School, are they "qualified?" Or is it really some esoteric and hard to define set of tech skills that makes someone "qualified?" There are millions of Americans who could be trained to be excellent software engineers, but we don't bother doing that anymore, because companies like the sugar high they think they are getting by hiring semi-skilled foreigners. That's the truth.
I've been all over this issue over and over again at multiple different companies and it's always the same thing--the resume has to have X, Y, and Z or the person is overlooked, despite them being more than capable of becoming skilled at X, Y, Z, K, W, R, you name it. Time and time again! And it's even worse in 2025 because now every product has 2-3 other competing products that do the exact same thing and we're supposed to be experts at all of them!
At least from my experience it tends to be that outsourcing agencies who often supply H1B candidates are not finding the most experienced or talented people. i'm guessing that CS degrees are still better in the US on average.
One can trap an experienced seniour dev for a few years for a price of a fresh grad which may or may not turn out to be a valuable resource and which may leave at any moment. In this context quality of the grad is not much relevant.
Well, not clearly inferior but it’s a mathematical property that if A is a subset of B then max(A) <= max(B).
I’ve hired people for a decade in tech and through that period people have been bellyaching about this stuff throughout.
The absolute truth is that if you can’t hit $500k annual income in 5 years despite trying to do so, you’re not good enough.
The H-1B workers I know are making millions. If you’re getting pushed out by them it’s because American competitiveness is enabled by this. And I care a lot more about what’s good for America as a whole than trying to protect someone’s income.
> And I care a lot more about what’s good for America as a whole than trying to protect someone’s income.
Uncharitably, it sounds like you think of your nation as a generic economic zone whose growth you want to continually increase at all costs, regardless of the fate of its citizens. But what is a nation, if not the people that comprise it?
Sure, that's one way of looking at it. But the truth is that there is only one force for civilization in the World today and that is America. The end of USAID illustrated something: America stands alone against the entropy of nature. She is humanity's only vanguard against ruin. The Chinese are dedicated to their own advancement, the Indians are currently bootstrapping out of poverty, the Europeans are primarily concerned with wine, cheese, and luxury goods. Fair play to all of them - may they live in peace.
But one nation, alone, fights Humanity's cause. Trump et al have cast off the mantle, but it's only another 3.5 years and we have a shot at donning it again. The nation is not for the people - or we would simply rapaciously consume its resources to feed the present. The people of the nation are not for the nation or we would consume them to fuel the engine. The nation and the people are both there to advance the principles of the group into the future. And I believe America's principles deserve to exist into perpetuity so long as they adapt to meet shifting weather.
Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
Europe (as a whole) gives more money absolutely and multiples more in proportion to national income than the US. The US does (or did) have very good distribution networks, and that’s not liquid in a monetary sense.
I would encourage you to examine your statements on rapacious consumption of resources and people as well.
All USAID showed was now the grift machine works--most of that aid money was getting kicked back to corrupt politicians to pay for campaigns. Other monies were being siphoned off in the corrupt nations that accepted the funds. Those NGOs advertising for more "migration" were doing on the US taxpayer's own dime! So I don't know if we can draw many conclusions from it other than it created some money velocity in various forms.
America's cost of living crisis is in large part due to the huge carrying cost of all that graft--it wasn't illegal, mind you, just unethical.
Sorry, but I don't care about the self-interest of my nation in any matters that don't concern the self-interest of her citizens, much less any matters that work directly against the self-interest of her citizens—and no amount of rhetoric is going to convince me that I should think otherwise.
Clearly, you think that every tech job exists on the coasts.
This phenomenon really frustrates me on behalf of my peers. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but anecdotally I've observed many others struggle to get their first jobs in tech, while, meanwhile, I am mostly being assigned to interview people who require visa sponsorship. Most of my referrals for my low YOE peers are rejected before the recruiter call. I have observed this at both very-big tech and my current medium-sized tech company.
I have also observed that on my team, more than half of the people are either currently on immigrant visas or were previously on immigrant visas. Just to be absolutely clear—these people are great, and I don't fault them or hold any ill will for them having coming here to work.
At the same time, it seems that most hiring is done at the mid and senior level. If we only hire senior talent and rely on immigrant visa labor to fill these ranks, where exactly is each subsequent generation of seniors supposed to come from? I feel there should be some requirements in place to ensure that companies aren't perpetuating this shortage by hiring very few domestic workers at the entry level.
This is the critical "inflection point" that I've been posting about--we've lost the pipeline of novice -> senior and it's going to blow up in our faces.
For perspective, in the same time period, The number of employees at Google multiplied by five. I wouldn't be surprised if the growth of the software industry, at least, actually outpaced the increase in H-1B visas.
This is the classic problem with american policy, well known to be abused and terribly implemented but too politically difficult to change.
You could easily move from a lottery to a total comp auction process. IMO if your company does layoffs it should automatically void your ability to participate for 5 years. It's pretty gross to see tech CEOs whining about how they can't get the talent they need on a Monday and then mass laying off on a Tuesday.
To hear Elon tell it, the only way forward is to keep raping the US citizen workforce by flooding the market with cheap talent from overseas. Hey, as long he is still on course for becoming the first USD Trillionaire, it's all good, right?
Does this conflate the number of new visas issued to new workers, with the existing visas renewed by already settled-in-US workers (that must be renewed every 3 years)?
Because due to the GC backlog, the existing visas do not go down for 2 major contributing countries.
Yes, the renewals are included
That's less than 0.2% of the total population (340 million) and about 0.3% of the workforce (163 million).
I don’t think these workers are competing directly with 100% of the population. How many unemployed Americans could be employed right now if there was less temporary workers?
I personally believe we hit some kind of inflection point recently with whatever secondary effects all the importation of cheap labor has caused. The chickens finally came home to roost right around 2023. It's now a full blown crisis.
It's very difficult to tell. Employment isn't a finite thing, especially in white collar jobs. High quality workers will generate economic activity which generates new jobs. For ex: imagine a Chinese AI engineer working at OpenAI develops a new tool that generates enough $$ to support a whole team.
How much of that is reality or how much is is suppresses wages will always be hard to pin down.
A basic starting point would be cracking down on H1B mills that explicitly do wage suppression + more scrutiny on big companies like Amazon using it. There's some big H1B consultancies designed to undercut gov contract tending who are much more blatant despite hard rules in H1B meant to stop it. Biden admin passed some new policies to help combat it but enforcement has always been problem #1, not a lack of rules meant to protect American workers.
> For ex: imagine a Chinese AI engineer working at OpenAI develops a new tool that generates enough $$ to support a whole team.
Whose to say an American, given the same opportunities, couldn't do this as well? If you look at where the top AI companies are, only 1 is in China.
I don't think h1b mills impact tech workers as much. Most of those cases seem to be in the healthcare space or in low end tech jobs that Americans probably don't want anyways...
Asians are 7% of the US population and above 30% of the engineering workforce at most tech companies. So either Asians are just extremely genetically/culturally superior somehow (which seems unlikely given the state of the software industry in most of their countries) or something is going on.
> something is going on
Many things could be going on. You should propose a concrete explanation instead of some vague "something is going on" placeholder which could uncharitably be described as dog-whistling.
For example, consider that leaving one's country is difficult and, so, the distribution is skewed towards individuals with higher skill and talent.
I'm not saying that is the only effect at play here. My point is there are many effects and a lazy "something is going on" statement does nothing to understand that complexity.
You pretty clearly don't want to hear my concrete explanation. I'm not sure yours fully accounts for what's happening there. It's pretty extreme especially when there's a large pool of unemployed talent in the US.
Oddly, over a 25 year period, I worked with far fewer Asians than I did Indians. India has to be the #1 supplier of H1Bs to the US, hands down. I'm not sure I can assess how the average Asian software developer did compared to Indian ones since the sample size was so skewed for me. Maybe on the coasts it was different? I look at Japan as a nation that has its crap together, but they also have terrible work/life balance that has now led to massive depopulation. It's like every race has its own particular blind spots.
There was a survey post on HN a while back stating that <5% of the US workforce can write any code at all.
So it's fairer to it's really ~490K vs 8M.
That's ~6% of the 9M. Not nothing but not a glaring amount. I'm seeing that there are 1.7M total SWEs in the US, which would bring the H1B % to 30%, assuming all are SWEs. This would make it a significant amount, not sure if it's enough to suppress wages / pass on US persons if they attempted it.
One look at the top H1B employers should stop this narrative however, because those companies do not pay near peanuts.
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
How much did the entire tech industry grow in that period?
I'm not sure thats even a lot in the context of 2011->2022 tech hiring though?
For perspective, in the same time period, The number of employees at Google multiplied by five. It seems likely that the number of highly educated positions, in general, increased by quite a bit during that time.
This is mind boggling considering how rampant unemployment is in tech right now.
curious how much of the growth is solely due to renewals since the cap on first time H1-Bs has stayed the same at 85k per year.
the green card queue is severely backlogged for India (and to some extent China, Mexico). this causes people who would usually get a green card after 3-5 years be on a continuous H1-B renewal cycle every 3 years.
As someone currently on the H1B program, and working in tech for the past 10 years, how do I navigate the current climate in the US? Especially when sentiment around H1B workers is at an all time low - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606374 ?
I love working in the cutting edge of tech, but no other part of the world has been able to replicate this model the way Bay Area, SF, Seattle, and now NYC has. Great companies, ambitious people, new emerging tech, and large compensation.
Are there other countries where YC sees companies originate from and they prove with a path to citizenship for software engineers?
Demand a competitive salary. If you stay in the US, your pay is a logistic curve that tops out when you reach your late 30s. You will start to feel the pressure of not keeping up wage-wise in your 40s, and you will be completely excluded from being able to work at all sometime in your 50s. That's the reality.
Management makes the decision to hire.
What is stopping American management to continue hiring American professionals instead of others or to look at it another way, what is stopping them to rise through the ranks and keep the employment number balanced amongst American and h1b holders?
H1B exists at this point solely to slave cheap labor domestically. absolutely nothing else to it whatsoever. it hasnt been exceptional candidates ever
Both political parties are selling out citizens employment opportunities to let corporations pay as little as possible and import foreign labor.
What if there were tariffs applied to importing laborer or using offshore contractors?
That wouldn't do anything to address any supply shortages of workers for certain skills but would at least level the playing field for citizens looking to get into fields like tech, nursing, medicine, and more.
If you tax remittances at 50%+ I have a feeling that suddenly many of the incentives for the H-1B workers themselves would change for the better.
If we tax remittances at 50%+. I'd buy so many BTC call options.
And then large companies can just set up entire offices overseas - all of the large tech companies already have large offices and subsidiaries overseas.
One major firm I worked at built a giant campus in Mumbai, I believe it was. The huge office building here in the US was sold off and was just recently torn down to make way for I don't know what--a whole lot of lower paying jobs, if anything. Their footprint here in the states is now laughably small. It's beyond ridiculous that such a stable employer for decades would now look like this.
A better approach would be to implement a significant application fee, less than the $5 million Trump implemented, but indexed to a multiple of the median wage, which would prove an employer's genuine need for talent not found in the U.S. In exchange for this premium, the employee should receive a green card, granting them the freedom to switch employers.
This would create a more honest system, ensuring these highly sought-after professionals are paid competitive market wages and the company has to pay a large premium to hire the foreign worker. Not engage in this fictional market studies to prove they can’t find people to find the role. Make them pay a premium and don’t lock them into the employer.
Further there should be a separate program for graduates of US universities and us university graduates shouldn’t be competing against Tata gaming the system. People invested in the USA that we’ve invested in should get a preference over random people from a consulting company.
In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens or green card holders with bachelor's or master's degrees in computer science. That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That's equal to 82% of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma.
for reference india graduates 1.5 million in just 1 year.
I’d like to see percentage of tech workers in SV that were American citizens then vs now. Regardless of whatever cap we talk about - it’s quite obvious that this has changed dramatically over the last 20 years for those under 40.
We are in an absolute crisis at both ends of the wage scale--there's no entry level, and over-50s are being deleted from the workforce in huge numbers, never to see the same level of pay ever again.
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