It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids.

The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.

This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.

I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.

Yeah, a salary-based allocation would cut through a lot of the noise. If a company really needs top-tier talent and is willing to pay for it, fine... That’s very different from using H-1Bs as a way to fill mid-level roles at below-market rates while locking people into visa dependency

H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card.

Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely.

I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.

Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.

Except this isn't about H1B this is about the PERM process for EB2/EB3 greencards.

The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.

Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?

PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.

I can't help but expect throwing yet more bureaucratic rules and control at the problem will only make it worse.

We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.

I think we should get rid of H1B altogether. We have EB1 and EB2 for exceptionally talented individuals (and other programs for post-docs, J-visas, L1-visa for companies transferring their own people around, etc.).

Applying the American immigration standard that only a small percentage of immigrants can come from one nation to H1Bs might change the situation as well and keep with our priority that immigration should be from diverse countries.

> It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.

This is still true, right?

Overall, the only hard requirement of the H1B seems to be "can you hold down a job 100% of the time, until you choose to depart or receive a green card?" It is quite hard to think of other requirements that are possible to implement at scale, but I do wonder.

The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.

The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.

This is an absolutely perfect and extremely simple solution.

But people would have to implement it. Sorry.

You could also "solve" these problems by cutting every social service. That's the only reason H1-Bs are willing to work for less, because their country doesn't invest nearly as much into them.

People seem to have a moral problem with cutting social services, I wonder why this doesn't go both ways when hiring foreign nationals who can only work because their country doesn't.

They don't even have to be foreign red states have been supplying silicon valley with cheap labor for decades. If you want the pure solution you would have to block hiring from these states too, not just H1B. Do you really want to exploit someone who was taught that the earth is 6000 years old and will also have to uproot their live when they are fired?

You can try to classify underprivileged workers and scale compensation based on their class, but any mistakes would lead to unfair wages. The real solution is to increase the standard of living in developing countries and decrease the standard of living in advanced countries starting with relatively wealthy people. Your solution is just a weird soft ban that implicitly buys into the propaganda that there are genius H1B workers when we all know why companies hire them.

It's crazy. We have some job openings. 500 applications each. 95% of them are people who did their undergraduate in India and graduate degree in America. My interviews this week have been 9/10 people with thick accents, terrible answers, not sure what the hell is going on.

Is it HR, is it the leadership directing HR? No idea, but it feels like the company is shooting itself in the foot. Especially a growing company where these jobs are high responsibility and require a lot of initiative. I just don't see it happening with these candidates. Getting a simple point across takes long enough.

>It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs.

This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.

Then work for a body shop for 1/4 the billing rate in Arizona, Lansing or whatever. You can get a better gig at Burger King.

There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.

The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.

I have no problem with giving the job to someone overseas but they can do that on their home turf.

Outsourcing needs to be eliminated. If the company is doing 20% of their business in Ohio, 20% of their workforce needs to be in Ohio. 12% in NY State, 12% of the workers need to be in NY State etc.

To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.

If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.

When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.

Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.

As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.

That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.

It's still picking someone for the job when there might be other qualified workers who are fit for the job, but you're not even giving them a chance.

The whole point of the system is that you shouldn't do this, and you legally can't.

So it really is as nefarious as it seems.

> Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.

For some reason those stupid racist citizens don't want to compete with the whole world in a borderless economic zone. Thankfully we have wise corporations to subvert democracy for the better.

>But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.

The spirit of the law is that this should not be your intent---that your intent should be to fill the job requirements, not to hire a particular person.

You're basically saying you think breaking the law is okay, because you don't agree with it.

The problem is, a lot of people don't agree, and would rather have your former employer prosecuted for the fraud.

Isn’t it funny that in the past the only thing you had to do was simply show up?

> anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.

I agree. There's 8 billion people in the world and we should let them into the US if they really want to be here.

The process forces everyone to act like they are

"The "hacker ethos" seems to be in decline, for any number of interconnected reasons"

FYI to anyone reading this, this is not what wage theft means. Wage theft is an employer not paying wages they owe to an employee.

> vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local

Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?

I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.

Nope, Infosys and friends aside, in SV companies would rather hire green card holders and US citizens because you have to sponsor the H1B/park and get a L-1, and sponsor the green card process. You just can’t ignore foreign talent, otherwise you’ll miss out on an incredible number of good employees

It's just outsourcing training/education (again, the first wave already happened circa 2009-2013).

> the wage suppression

Do immigrants earn less than locals?

My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.

My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?

Yes, something like this would be great. You could tie the registry to both IRS and SSA databases ensuring a) the job hunters are real, and b) the jobs offered are (eventually) real. It would also be great to carve an exception into liability law and require employers to give feedback to workers about a rejection. I'm sure this leaves lots of room for malefactors on all sides, but it would handle the biggest flaws of the current system.

At the very least, if you want an H1-B, companies should be forced to post the secret jobs on a standardized, embarrassingly public database. Think MLS, but for jobs.

Please don't post in this inflammatory style on HN. You've set off a whole flamewar – nearly 100 comments so far – with many of the comments debating the definition of racism. This is the last thing we need here.

The overall topic is important, which is why it needs to be discussed with comments that are thoughtful and substantive, which the guidelines clearly ask us to do:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.

Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.

There are also Indians who loathe being on such teams and actively seek diverse meritocratic teams, as one of those Indians.

> It's extremely racist

I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.

It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.

I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.

So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.

Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).

So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.

Out of curiosity, do they favor hiring Indians in general, or Hindu Indians in particular. (To the exclusion of Muslim Indians)

Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.

Do you see them selectively picking based on the caste of the Indian?

[dead]

What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.

> Why is hiding the jobs necessary?

Because they'd gave to commit outright fraud with no plausible deniability if they have to hide US Citizens applications for jobs they've earmarked for current immigrant employees' PERM. Hiding the jobs gives them deniability.

I’m not sure why. Because they’re usually at salaries that you wouldn’t accept. Like paying 30% below market rate.

"You have just committed visa fraud and I am calling a labor lawyer"

“What do you mean it’s not available to me?”

What the… Yeah, I’m with you on that one. “We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling chronically onlines seeing if we’re obeying federal law!”

The whole thing seems to oddly disdainful of the people being impacted:

> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?

I feel like there was a lot of nonsense ideas for what is such a short, and supposedly journalistically rigorous article

I don't get it - if you were aggressively sourcing for months, presumably advertising your job via normal channels, wouldn't that already satisfy the requirement for perm? I keep seeing annecdotes about exceptional one of a kind talent, world class PhDs etc. I think we can all agree that majority of H1Bs we work with are not those people. They are regular devs without exceptional skills (not saying no skills, just nothing especially unique). There are thousands laid of, qualified US workers that can fill those roles. You can't convince me that we have such lack of talent in tech today that massive amounts of h1bs have to be brought in.

I don't understand how that justifies Instacart suing the organization that is reposting the job ads in a more accessible way.

Finally, someone in this thread says this. Thank you!

This opinion column from The Hill is written by a Fox News contributor. Of course it’s going to leave out certain inconvenient facts in service of a nativist agenda. The HN community time and time again shows that they are ready to be whipped up into an anti-immigrant frenzy at the drop of a hat.

[dead]

That tension between protecting labor rights and promoting open markets is real

And what percentage of H-1Bs are these PhDs with groundbreaking research backgrounds? The vast majority of the H-1Bs are hired by a handful of consulting firms (mostly indian) to do mundate SWE/IT jobs that don't require any special skills but a few months of bootcamp.

Also, don't forget that truly exceptional researchers can self-file for green-card using national interest waiver categories: EB1NIW, EB2NIW don't require employee sponsorship.

So, I think your point is moot.

For every job like that, there's 100 jobs that are "Write basic Java CRUD app against RDBMS backend"

> She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans)

Is this not by itself a problem?

I agree. Corporations excel at finding ways to disperse authority and accountability to do illegal things, sometimes intentionally, sometimes simply by letting the natural corporate incentives play out -- "oh, look, this department didn't fully understand the situation"... to which the follow up question is "Ok, but _who_ designed the departments? They seem pretty good at maximizing profit, so why can't they also manage to comply with the law?"

Fun fact: Meta was fined 57 minutes of revenue for these practices.

Or just require H1B workers to be paid above average (by some factor) for the position. Average pay for <workplace> is 50k? If you want a foreign worker, you must pay them at least (eg.) 1.2x the average, so 60k. This solves the problem of abuse (since they'll probably find a local for 55k), and solve the genuine need for foreign workers in areas where there are not enough locals (eg. touristy areas needing tourist workers) ... at a bit higher price of course.

Employers already have to publish H1-B applications, including wages (but not personal information of the applicants, which would be a very bad idea to publish).

The problem is the inconsistencies. Fine, if a company wants to source talent from a news paper, great! But to only make postings in hard to find places, away from where the 'good' talent looks is bad.

The problem is its not a free competition. I applied for one of these jobs 2 years ago, but a company was trying to sponsor a green card for an internal employee. The recruiter said I can't interview for that team, but I could interview for another similar, but different role. These companies aren't even offering interviews for these jobs!

> many foreign students

Schools limit how many people can attend. Foreign students take seats away from American students. These programs deny American students a chance to compete for American jobs before they even start college. An American student, rejected from Stanford, will not have as strong of a job application as the foreign Stanford graduate.

Maybe the foreign student was more qualified and wasn't an affirmative action case. Maybe the university doesn't select % of students to be foreign to help subsidize the costs of american students. I don't know.

> intentionally barring foreign talent to artificially inflate wages for domestic workers undermines U.S. competitiveness

Sure, but the Americans here don't really care about American competitiveness - they care about their inflated wages! The biggest thing they fear is that American wages will become more in line with the rest of the world.

And to be fair, the American tech industry is still doing pretty well in spite of the enormous wages. Probably because America is such a friendly environment for startups.

That is what everyone is asking for though. As you can see from the complaints in the thread, people are angry about jobs going to immigrants in the US. The alternate is for jobs to go to immigrants abroad, i.e. offshoring. It appears that people are generally happier about the latter.

That's an editorial point, not a substantial one. Obviously requiring an application be submitted by an inconvenient and antiquated method that isn't used by the demographic in question is going to create friction and reduce the number of applications.

That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.

Doubley stupid because the task is about mailing a letter, which does not require a post office.

Or companies could, you know, train people to fill permanent positions instead of claiming permanent positions are temporary and acting shocked when they aren't.

Many h1bs get masters degrees in the USA, b/c they are lower cost than undergrad, can be done online/remotely, and are higher chance of winning the lottery.

I don't think requiring a US degree would impact even half the candidates.

That's all well and good, but anyone who does this will likely just be terminated asap without cause, possibly as a part of a multi-person layoff that makes it appear innocuous.

> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments

It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.

If they had someone specific in mind the usual method is to have their resume next to you when you write up the job app. Make the requirements perfectly match their skills. Now you can say when you picked them that they were the best candidate all along.

For those curious, a common method is to publish the job listing in the newspaper classifieds.

This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.

Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.

There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..

> Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.

Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.

Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.

The thing this article didn't mention and the author likely doesn't know is that there's a guide going around instructing people on how to apply for H1B jobs on forums like 4chan.

The frustrating part is that this isn't some loophole getting accidentally exploited, it's baked into the system

Semi-related: reminds me of reports that public tenders in Russia had to be submitted into a central portal according to law, but to prevent anyone from finding them, various Unicode tricks would be applied to the document to replace characters and prevent effective searching.

[flagged]

Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.

At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.

H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c... | https://archive.today/7JX9A - June 27th, 2025

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (citations)

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

HN Search: h1b - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://h1bdata.info/

https://www.h1bsalaries.fyi/

The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.

>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.

I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.

The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.

This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).

That's not the only way you can work in the US. "In 2023 17.9% of employed workers were immigrants"

https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percent-of-jobs-in-the-us-...

Posted more info in a separate thread, but our latest req had 500 applicants. 95% from India with their grad degree in America. I spent 10 hours his week trying to do technical interviews with people I could barely understand. F me.

1% of all jobs is still a huge number of jobs in total terms. Spitball math put's h1b's much lower than that actually, .4 to .5% of all FTE positions.

That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.

Ranges from 20%-80% in tech roles from my experience.

What percent of tech jobs?

> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.

But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.

"On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens."

This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.

This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).

Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.

The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.

This is the bigest misconception that H-1B is meant to hire the best. It is NOT. Foreign H-1Bs are typically rank-and-file employees to take mid-level jobs en masses. The best and brightest cannot go through H-1B due to oversubscription and resulting lottery. Thus the best and brightest are using different visa types like O-1 and self-apply for green cards using EB1/EB2 National Interest Waivers.

I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).

This will incentivize foreign intelligence services to fund their own market of conveniently cash flush moles.