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.

"Note that I'm also an immigrant."

This sentence doesn't really help your statement, it just makes you a gatekeeper.

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.

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.

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

All the Microsoft layoffs were US citizens? Do you have a source for this?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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 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.

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...

Can you clarify this? You saying non H1B's would not pay the crazy high rents of SV's housing?

> 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.

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.

All true, but now the endgame is just about here. Those chickens be clucking!

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.

I meant immigration in general. Obviously people on H1B visas don't (or at least shouldn't) change voting patterns.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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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.

Yes that something is the rapidly vanishing government funding for public universities.

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...

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.

> 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.

If we tax remittances at 50%+. I'd buy so many BTC call options.

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.