>It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.

It does say in the law [1]: "there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the United States and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor".

The rules of DOL are just guidelines how they are going to determine this but they are not the law. I will argue that if you are planning to publish your job ads in a small town newspaper you do not believe yourself that there are no "able, willing, qualified and available" Americans for your job.

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182

It also doesn't say that the paper needs to be widely read, just circulated, right? I mean, why pay for a job ad in the SF Chronicle when you can put a cheap ad in the (now defunct?) SF Weekly free paper? When it was still around, SF Weekly would have met the threshold for being widely distributed...

Why pay to reach many thousands of people with a widely read paper when you can pay pennies to reach dozens of people that you don't want to apply to the job anyway?

This is an entire business model.

Some of these requirements are so ridiculous that they create the need for everyone to do what Vance is accusing Microsoft of.

Many companies fulfill the intent of the law. They run a real hiring process — where they advertise online and interview people with work authorization/citizens and people who would require sponsorship.

But if someone requiring sponsorship was the best candidate for the job, then they have to run an additional “fake” process that fulfills these requirements, since no one actually hires tech workers from the newspaper.

> The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.

Based on that I would expect that if you advertise in small town newspaper, the job needs to be located in that small town. Want them to work in your big office next to big city, then it must be a newspaper widely distributed in that city not a small town on the opposite side of continent.

> Listing the wage is optional, but if included, it cannot be below the official prevailing wage.

What an absurd carve out seemingly designed to facilitate exactly the sort of fraud being alleged. If you want to argue that you couldn't find qualified local workers one of the basic prerequisites ought to be documenting what the prevailing wage is and openly advertising the position at some small percentage _above_ that rate in order to attract local talent. In all cases the accuracy of that value should absolutely be audited by the government before granting the application.

"We couldn't find any qualified local applicants willing to accept substandard pay and we don't feel up to competing properly" is absolutely not the stated purpose of the program yet the rules apparently cater to that. A complete farce on the part of the federal government.

Those are some seriously out of touch requirements that could easily be fixed if anyone in power actually wanted to.

Waa! Is that why I'm still unemployed, because I haven't been buying (or reading) newspapers...

I heard that this rule is genuinely keeping the lights on for some local print media publications.

I would hazard a guess that Microsoft follows this process exactly, and this probably won't hold up in court. But it looks like good midterm fodder!

Do people still look for jobs in newspapers? I don't think my city (non-American) even has a local newspaper anyore.

> • The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located.

> It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.

What does 'widely distributed' mean if not "not just in a small town"?

> The job must be advertised in the print edition of two different Sunday newspapers.

Advertising in the Sunday newspaper seems a bit antiquated. I don't think I've looked in a newspaper for a job since the 90s.

But why must it be on print? I mean ... does that make objectively sense? I don't even read paper news anymore.

This is very similar to the incorporation requirements in NY State that keep some smalltown newspapers upstate aflot.

I forget what they are, but i think its something like "must post 3 notifications of your incorproation in newspapers"

> Both ads must run between 30 and 180 days

what can be a reason for an upper limit?

> It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.

I think it is implies in: "The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located."

"The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located." Which of these mega-crops are located in a small town?

> The job must be advertised in the print edition of two different Sunday newspapers

Ah yes, the newspaper, the bastion of where all millennial and Gen Z software engineers deign to get their news from in 2026…

Yeah, the rules are designed to facilitate fraud. They let you put job ads for web developers in a newspaper instead of, you know, on the Internet.

If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud, they would have required the company to advertise the position in the same places they advertise their other jobs.

Sounds like a good time to start responding to newspaper job ads

Please use more than one brain cell in order to consider the intent behind those guidelines, and whether what Microsoft (and similar companies) is doing is actually within the bounds of what voters and the representatives who wrote the relevant laws wanted. Do you really think the purpose of making companies advertise the job opening in a newspaper was just to give companies a bunch of busywork? or might there have actually been an intent behind it? Are you capable of ascertaining what that intent is? (note: this question has a right answer that all people arguing in good faith are capable of stating)

Imagine if they changed the law to reflect what they wanted instead of randomly punishing companies that most likely are doing the same thing everyone else is, but they angered the admin by telling them "no" on some topic.

Newspaper!?

Are you trying to justify the exploitation of this loophole?

Nearly all these ads say "Send CVs to immigration_department@tech.corp" they aren't even trying to conceal what they're doing.

Yes, these are literally the guidelines provided by the DOL. And the government seems to want to punish companies for following the exact published guidelines.

Just vote bank politics. Microsoft is not a cheap sweatshop. If it is a sweatshop and still producing what it produces then that defies logic. We can only expect more of these as mid terms approaches.

Is there no better source (perhaps a link to the Seattle Times Classified) than an image on Twitter from a political account?

If these jobs are fully remote, why are tech companies going through the process of getting visas to import workers? Am I missing something?

Let’s put our pitchforks down and think for a moment.

Do you really think that Netflix has a preference for non-Americans?

On one hand we say they chose Americans to pay less money on the other hand we see this absurd amount of money for a remote job

Why? Because this is not them looking to fill a position but rather trying to get a PERM for an employee that they are already happy with. We don’t even know if it’s H1B or L1

Not saying that the H1B program doesn’t have its problems, but this is not the case of let’s fill this job with non-Americans for less pay

Cheap labor

> The question is what the purpose of visa to residence work programs achieves

It achieved wage suppression and control over workers livelihood.

And it should be illegal, perhaps even criminal the way some companies go about it.

That reminds me of the Richards Tip episode from Nathan for You, in which, in order to fulfill a legal requirement for a name change, they started printing a newspaper called The Diarrhea Times.

It’s because the companies are following a flawed process, not that they’re committing fraud.

The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.

In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.

I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.

100% happens. Microsoft is for sure an offender, but the biggest offenders are companies like Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, and IBM (among others).

There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.

IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.

It's fairly accurate.

It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.

I used to work for corp Walmart and they’d do H1B postings on a wall which would list salary and stuff. I don’t think they’d post it anywhere else

This happens. It’s the SOP, but it’s because they already have someone doing the job on a work visa and they don’t want to have to fire them and hire/train someone else.

It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.

One should not have to disclose one's politics to make such a comment. IMO. That means that we should not think "smells like a Republican, so ignore them!".

It's rather insane that you have to state that first - don't you think?

These companies are going to bribe the govt for h1b. They thrive on cheap labor provided by h1b and the whole masters to h1b pipeline via opt.

It's literally required by the government's PERM process

You can't prosecute someone for following the law verbatim.

If Republicans started prosecuting crimes there'd be no republican politicians left.

Trump gave the Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, the National Medal of Science today

The "replacement of an American" is where the narrative breaks down. Traditionally we haven't had large numbers of unemployed developers. One of the consequences of the the Dot Com bubble bursting is we lost an entire generation of native-born engineers. People weren't going in to CS. At the same time there was an explosion of software positions. This is part of what fed the increasing use of H1B talent. This was also one of the sources of the bootcamp phenomenon. Things are bit more dynamic these days. This is just a nativist, anti-immigrant move.

You did not respond to the point.

> they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes

If a law is on the books, but it's only applied to a specific set of people in a retaliatory fashion, then it's worse than not being applied at all.

It's only kind of accurate. It has to be 2 newspapers in the area the person is employed in. Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.

The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.

> but if that was the only posting

"I saw a thing once, and I'm going to wildly guess some incriminating details, and then claim it's proof of some sort."

Even Vance does a better job of manufacturing outrage than that.

That is actually not complying with the law. The law says it has to be in at least two newspapers.

Internal job postings are not unusual.

Vance actually admitted the "eating cats and dogs" thing was BS, but said it was okay because it helped "advance the narrative".

That's more likely to be a terrible hiring manager. I've seen that at smaller companies, too.

If they change the ad between the local newspaper and the foreign search, they would be breaking the law. That's not what is claimed, even by Vance.

Based on its track record, I don't think the administration is "going after" anyone in good faith. This is just a way to compel Microsoft to do something beneficial to the guy in charge.

Or he's trading off of it.

Microsoft is banking on the fact that nobody looks for jobs in the paper. The point is to use the lack of response be able to write on paperwork that they've proven that no qualified jobseekers exist in the US. They are aware that advertising in the newspaper is not an effective way to fill a position; the goal is to lie about how much they tried.

It's compliance theater. They can claim they technically complied with the requirement to search locally for applicants first.

This is a very well known tactic in H1B factory like Tata and Cognizant, people has been complaining about this for years. Not sure about Microsoft though.

Why aren’t they trying to change the laws of h1b, etc. while they have control of the all branches of the government and instead just target certain companies? Why not just close the loopholes, assuming there is systematic abuse, so no one can abuse the system anymore?

Very on-topic, reminds me of some analysis of why Putin and Xi generally tolerate corruption among their subordinates: it allows them to purge anyone they want with plausible deniability, since everyone is on the take.

Even a stopped clock!

Unfortunately due to the corruptness and incompetence, you're almost certainly getting nothing beyond this headline.

This is why i voted for him and will keep doing so. The left is too weak to push through things like this with their “morally superior” voters. So, your welcome.

Generally they just focus on cases that are the most profitable and easy to prove.

I went through that and hated the charade despite being the one to benefit from it. A similar process also exists with public tenders: you can either list your requirements such that only your friendly company may win the bidding, or split your contracts into parts which go below the threshold at which you must hold a tender.

I've seen job ads for the DC/Langley area smeared over local "classifieds" sites for states in the Midwest. I almost applied once, but realized that'd just encourage the practice, and most of them seemed like they hadn't been updated in months.

Trump was defending H-1B a year ago even as his immigration crackdown was shifting into high gear. This is simply a pre-election move that will likely be reversed by the administration or the courts.

No need to wonder, Top offenders like Tata, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant all listed.

Presumably somebody didn't get paid.

> For nearly every job title that an H1B is brought in on, they are paid more than the prevailing average wage. The idea that they are coming in as underpaid foreign scabs is mostly a myth.

Source? But also what difference does that make? Just pay American workers more.

Yes and no. Why is the prevailing wage what it is, and how does bringing more supply in affect the prevailing wage? There are secondary effects.

Prevailing wage itself is a scam. I'm not sure how government comes with those values but they are comicaly low.

100% as someone who sponsored someone yeah they are and the government kind of wants you too

What does it mean to be an American citizen? Do we even have a country anymore if we allow millions of H1B from India to come? Do you even think what is the right number of eventual immigrants and from what country? Do we want the USA to be half India?

Speaking from personal experience, this is not true. Myself and every H1B I know was paid significantly below the prevailing wage.

I have worked with a lot of H1B's in tech.

I have not met a single one who was not over qualified for the job they were doing.

I have only met a couple who were (to some extent) getting screwed because of an agency in the middle. However I would not have found the wage unreasonable and the markup was well within the industry standard.

H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here... We need to fix the portion of the process where it is onerous to go from H1B to green card and citizenship.

Agreed. As an ex-immigrant to US who's gone through this process, credit where credit is due: Vance exactly described how this process looks like.

US needs a modern, merit-based immigration system. No lotteries of any kind, be it the de-facto lottery for H1B or actual Diversity lottery.

It's not very accurate, they need to be newspapers where the person is employed. It's the government that is behind the times with respect to how people find jobs. And it's not really "fraud," it's simply companies working in their own interest within the existing outdated rules.

Besides newspapers, they have to be posted with the relevant state workforce agency and 3 other methods. It would not be hard to require that one of those needs to be the company career site or wherever the majority of recruiting comes from.

Indeed. I had a friend who worked in freight forwarding - Japanese company, him a Japanese citizen, but based in US.

Once he got his green card via lottery, his pay went up and his mandatory overtime went down. His Japanese coworkers without green cards still had to work late.

Is Microsoft in particular a "foe" or have they done something particularly against the administration?

It's not an administration thing. Vance is positioning himself for a presidential run in 2028.

Literally hours later, the head of the same administration gave the head of Microsoft an award.

HN's shift from a group of plucky Wozniak-like technological enthusiasts to a group of unicorn focused wealth seekers tracked the broader change from engineers being primary staffed with hobbyists to wealth seekers across society.

That change FAR predates the most recent election.

There was never a mask. People have always cared more about their own country than their supposed political party.

If you made assumptions that turned out to be wrong, that might look like a "mask".

People are too afraid to challenge their billionaire bosses, so they go after immigrants, because immigrants seem like easy targets. It's basic human cowardice underneath.

Mask off about what? Supporting Bernie Sanders' opinion on immigration from 2020[1]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT2G3wcDMTU

There is no guarantee that any American will be hired to fill any job vacated by a former H-1(b) holder. The firm could contract or fail against foreign competitors.

None of this is how this happens though. The reason why companies spend thousands of dollars to pay lawyers is that local talent to do this work simply does not exist. They would much rather prefer hiring Citizens.

The implication here is that the laid-off 6000 American workers are citizens. That is untrue. No company I know of bases their layoff decisions on citizenship status. When an H1B worker gets laid off, that person counts as an American worker that’s laid off: the dataset where this comes from (the state-based WARN Act disclosures) does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens. That is an unfortunate inaccuracy in how these numbers are reported, and this inaccuracy is something that politicians like Vance loves to exploit.

Or being priced out of housing because supply became artificially depressed

Because we want to brain drain other countries, because it's our competitive advantage.

Clear path or no-path to citizenship I guess. The fact that H1B is a dual-intent visa muddies the water and allows employers to string along people for decades.

> ... but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.

The later is specifically called out for an EEOC discrimination. https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination

> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.

> ...

> National origin-related disparate treatment in hiring related to job advertisement also can include an employer making it more difficult for applicants from one national origin to apply for positions (for example, subjecting U.S. workers to more laborious application methods than H-1B visa holders during the PERM labor certification process).

Part of the challenge here is that the EEOC tends to not be funded well and is limited to acting on tips rather than being able to investigate or audit.

And they do act... https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/eeoc-sues-sibitalent-h-1b-visa... for example...

Though note:

> The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to investigate and litigate against businesses and other private sector employers for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.

And if this is important...

https://cwc.org/CWC/CWC/Updates/2026/Partial-Spending-Deal-W...

> Congressional negotiators have reached a bipartisan deal to fund the EEOC at $435.4 million for fiscal year 2026. The funding level is the same as that requested by the White House, but nearly $20 million (4.3%) less than last year’s budget.

And the funding and staffing by year: https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc-budget-and-staffing-history-1980-p...

over 50% of silicon valleys unicorns have an immigrant founder. if you cut off their ability to stay, you wouldn't have those companies, and there wouldn't be nearly as many high paying tech jobs.

There's always the option of performing the job in another country, either through contracting or by opening a subsidiary.

But that would defeat the whole point of offering the program(s) -- they are specifically designed to depress wages of American workers.

The average American doesn’t understand growth, you can see it in who they vote for.

pretty easy. over 50% of silicon valleys unicorns have an immigrant founder. if you cut off their ability to stay, you wouldn't have those companies, and there wouldn't be nearly as many high paying tech jobs.

Thankfully, reasonable people do not fall victim to argumentum ad populum.

> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.

I don't think this really holds up. They could offer the American engineers the opportunity to move divisions, but they don't because what they really want to do is what they did do: Fire Americans and hire foreigners.

> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?

Then make H1B what it is supposed to be for: elite specialists, not infinite low cost non-American laborers. Then you won't even need to have this discussion.

> What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program?

Yes, why not? Or more practically: keep the program but adjust the quotas annually or even quarterly based on needs. When you see tech companies laying off workers by the thousands, as happened over the past few years, that's the sign that there is plenty of local talent to be hired.

> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?

The solution to that is to separate visa renewals from new hires: allow companies to keep existing workers, while forcing them to hire new ones locally. This actually makes America _more_ attractive for immigrants because they know they cannot be replaced with a new generation of cheap workers from their home country when economic conditions worsen.

> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false.

In what sense is it false? Microsoft claims that of its 6,800 H1b filings 80% were “related to employees already working at Microsoft” (note no mention _which country_ those employees were working in) which translates to 20% to or 1720 new employees they hired.

And for pay, they only state that “international workers that Microsoft does hire through the H1b visa program are paid the same level of compensation that a worker from the US would receive”, but of course the point is that the average level of compensation for new hires today is significantly lower than it was 10 years ago, when there was a tech worker shortage.

So it can be simultaneously true that the current-year H1b hires are hired at the same rate Americans are, but that those rates are substantially lower than the negotiated compensation of the people Microsoft laid off. The fact that Microsoft declines to comment on this,

So the following are almost certainly all true:

  - Microsoft fired (or laid off) over 1000 American citizens last year
  - Microsoft applied for H1b visa for at least 1000 _new_ employees
  - Those new employees will almost certainly receive lower compensation than the citizens that were laid off

> I think the problem is that people aren't cloud capacity you spin up / down

Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.

How did you end up here, then? A rare duck around your filters to share this particular insight?

How do you implement auto-filters?

  > they have no power to push back on the boss

IDK, with a lot of things it seems like big companies are just incredibly myopic. When I got my PhD people interviewing me used to love to say "well in industry, we do things that actually matter" (a weird premise) and boast about how efficient they are. Yet IME I just see an incredibly suboptimal setting. They routinely waste tons of money to save pennies and the attitude of "I just care that it works" really just ends up with "it looks like it worked but it's actually broken". But that's the obvious result if you surround yourself with yes men and don't let people do their jobs

> It’s a fiction, like the idea that contractors would prefer contracts over full time employment

That may be uncommon but it is not a fiction. I worked as a contract for one of the telco companies for a couple years by choice. My boas would regularly ask about making me full time, I was getting paid a bit more as a contractor, didn't need the benefits, and my work was otherwise identical to what it would be full-time. Why bother?

I've been a tech manager for 21 years, much of that at a large Fortune 100 that had tens of thousands of employees from Infosys and TCS. The hourly rates we were charged for local workers on H1-B visas were $15-$30 less than we'd pay American contractors from body shops like Teksystems, and that is just what we were paying Infosys. The employee didn't see anywhere near that.

Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.

The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.

Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.

The problem isn't just whether they're hiring below market. It's that market rates themselves are impacted by there being a whole underclass of workers who can't just freely move between jobs, and has to speedrun getting a new one if they ever lose their existing ones. The precarious nature of it makes an H1-B worker less likely to speak up about most things related to working conditions due to the precarious nature of the job. And that impacts everyone else -- because the fastest way to get a big raise is by getting a new job, so there's less incentive to pay people better if fewer workers can actually move around and you can threaten the ones that can purely through the existence of ones that can't.

I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.

Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.

> Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level.

This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.

Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.

Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.

> You’ll take these low wages and be happy about it or I’ll import a foreign worker who will be happy about it. And if they complain, I’ll have them deported.

>but I’ve never seen it to be true.

it's been true 100% of the places I've worked. I can't name names on the internet.

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=microsoft+corporation&job=...

Idk if people don't realize you can look this up? Pay doesn't look suppressed to me....

> the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.

Laughs in ESG. Companies stopped reporting this in 2024, but go look at prior year results compared to US demographics.

My $0.02 here is that AAPI and African applicants have crowded out ADOS and Hispanics when you look at corporate demographics.

> comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level

You're so close to getting it... keep going...

I think the H1B process gets abused by body shops. Salaries are pretty demonstrably lower there than at many other tech companies.

At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).

If your "household name" company is more susceptible to scrutiny, they may not have as much of a pay gap and strictly rely on a the possibility of getting the employee sent back home if they don't contribute enough being the motivating factor. But odds are there are many sub-contractors that are through agencies that are significantly underpaying and you may have not been privy to the contracts through these parasite vendors.

Then tell me why companies hire locally rather than set up shop outside like in India or china which I assume will be much cheaper.

The only reason I think is because they want the local market dev prices to keep down,so they bring in visa restricted foreigners

sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more

How about the contractors working for Microsoft?

and how much pressure do they feel to raise the band over time when theres a constant stream of people coming in form another country who accept anything presented because its still higher than back home

The problem with H1B and some of the other employment visas is its really difficult or impossible for the worker to change jobs. JD Vance calls them indentured servants. I suspect the situation for actual indentured servants is a bit worse but in any case the workers dont have a lot of options at their disposal. They cant just leave without losing their visa. So their “choice” to work for less money isn’t really a choice at all.

Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?

H1B visa's are a modern form of indentured servitude. The employer knows you can't quit, and if they fire you, you have 6 weeks to somehow find a new job (which is already hard if you are a US citizen or green card holder) or you have to leave the country.

Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.

Lower wages with the same quality is an MBA fantasy. The old saying "you get what you pay for" applies to tech as well as any other topic.

Half my days are spent on calls with people trying to understand accents, phrases, and metaphors between people who speak different first languages and have different cultural backgrounds. The cost isn't measured, but the extra time, effort, and re-work (due to misunderstandings) is huge.

Paying people less because they came from somewhere else and can get away with it, sounds a bit exploitative to me.

The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).

I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.

One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.

Congratulations. Your trolling level is out of this world.

The most racist part of the program is the per country quotas. Right now they are granting EB3 for Indians who applied in 2014 while EB3 visa for the French from 2024. So that's an extra 10 years Indians are stuck in limbo. And, no, this is not just because there's more Indian's immigrating.

Let them and it is better that way anyway.

> I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.

Enforcing existing regulations and supplying the resources for the agency to effectively audit the already existing category of H-1B-dependent employers (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer ) could be an approach taken.

Huh, there are other Indian IT vendors in list like Tata, Wipro, Cognizant and Infosys. MS is not alone in this. It'd be payback if it was about Microsoft's business/contracting with government.

Makes no difference for the current conversation - which is - is Microsoft (and others) paying way less to H1Bs than American workers.

This is also why I as a US citizen strongly support green cards for everybody in the industry who's fractionally eligible for them - my working conditions are shaped by what they can get the labor force as a whole to put up with, and that's shaped by visa indenture.

Well, from the Gov's POV, they don't want to import wards of the state. If you arrive in a country, someone has to fund you. Tying it to an employeer guarentees that you're funded. Without that you're just filling up ERs and hostels, etc.

I know you post this canon of "but acktually, Congress didn't want skilled immigration" in all threads, so it's useful to point to the actual legislative record, AC21 (American Competitiveness in the 21st Century), which is the most recent passed legislation that covers a lot this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Competitiveness_in_th...).

That’s just a weird modern view tainted by recent nativist and populist sentiments. If you go back 20 years, in 2006, it would be utterly not controversial for a republican politician to support issuing green cards to anyone who completed a PhD in America.

If you don't have access to a 401k at work you can contribute pre-tax to a traditional IRA instead. It is weird to have both, though.

But then you can't run modern slavery!

Didn't healthcare get tied to employment due to union demands in the 60s or 70s?

The idea that international socialists have that domestic labor conditions are made worse by a lack of protections for foreign workers (rather than the presence of the workers themselves) doesn’t pan out if you look at Canada; it’s quite rare for status in the country to be tied to a particular employment agreement, so immigrants are free to leave undesirable employers, but wages are substantially lower there due to the country having accepted about 3 million immigrants and temporary workers in the span of the last ten years.

He's speaking specifically about the green card process, at which point you've already been in the country for a long time and paid into U.S. taxes. Not people who might want to pay money to immigrate here (although for them, the EB-5 visa program exists).

I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.

I did go in details in another comment so I won't repeat myself because that comment is LONG.

But a nation couldn't ask more than a working age adult where you invested zero in education and health for 20 years and suddenly pay taxes with none of almost no benefits.

In the UK, which I raised numbers due to the discussion going on in there, visa workers generated yearly 12 to 20 Billions in direct taxes and fees and they use 4B in health (which technically they paid in fees a combined value of 6B upfront If my numbers are right)

But the real numbers lies on what other revenue they generate. It is estimated in my calculations that +50B-70B pounds are from immigrants on UK with a working visa.

That's no amount to shy considering about it is 8M people in that specific situation. And remember that none of them had to have their education covered by the government.

Someone in the other comment said that 8M British people would generate more taxes than that, but I did not find evidence of that. According to the public consultation documents UK gov released about immigration a couple of years ago, about 10% of the immigrants are responsible for more than 35% of the taxes collected. Hence the suggestion on curb immigration considering the salary range which might make sense or not depending on where you stand on the topic. I have no horses on this race and my impression as an outsider who just likes analysing data is that it seems as much of a claim as saying that EU took more money from UK than what it put in which turned out to be mostly incorrect.

> Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.

I think the "chud" immigration logic is rather, take whatever win you can get in the general direction of restriction, because you've been losing every single battle for 5+ decades.

> Peak chud logic here to penalize the smallest and most productive slice of immigration.

Yup real chud. I'd play world's smallest violin in solidarity with these most productive people.

We are talking about Microsoft employees.

If they had wage parity there is zero disadvantage to a US citizen. The problem is not H1B's as a concept, it's making foreign workers indentured servants paid a fraction of the wage, thus incentivizing their hiring over US citizens.

> you can already get a greencard by paying less than $1mm in taxes.

Not really.

Your only generic option is EB-5, with $750k in direct investments. However, right now it takes 3 _years_ to process the initial application (https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times - look at the I-526 form). And after the initial form is approved, you need to apply for the actual green card, adding another 1-3 years.

Approved I140 is almost standard across all companies. They abuse perm process for the MS->OPT->H1b pipeline and keep on extending

Surly the “corruption” is big corporations pushing for the H1B program in the first place, at a time (early 1990s) when decreasing immigration was overwhelmingly more popular than increasing it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx. Surely the “corruption” is the government looking the other way for years while Indian body shops imported massive numbers of foreign workers while ignoring the requirement in the law to advertise to americans?

And this is hardly new. Ross Perot was opposing H1B when he was running for President in the 1990s.

Its considered a dual-intent visa.

People are willing to take a discount on their wages and quality of life for the intangible benefit of ‘the experience of living and working abroad for a summer’.

For non-native English speakers it also has the advantage of providing a free total immersion language course as well. People pay for opportunities like that.

So yes, an Italian 19 year old is willing to work for less money for the chance to work in a water park for a summer, improving their English and boosting their resume, and if it gives them enough money to be able to fund a couple of weekend trips to New York or DC so much the better. It’s a life experience and a working vacation.

That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.

Same thing with au pairs and childcare work: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/09/683831264/au-pair-sponsor-age.... It’s basically below minimum wage.

If this is like what I saw in Maine coastal tourist towns this summer I suspect its popular with Europeans because the $15.10/hour local wage is attractive. But more so it's because you get to spend time a few months in a beautiful location surrounded by other attractive young people. Party scene is probably great.

Naturally, there’s an old This American Life episode about this which focuses on young international people who work summer at a highway rest stop.

Ep. 388

The right policy response would be telling the firms running these programs to get fucked if they can't successfully operate while paying staff the prevailing wage that local Americans would accept.

I learned this hiring practice in my home state of MN. The lake Superior North shore has resorts that hire these types of workers and pay them shit.

I agree. If the minimum wage is raised, there will be less incentives for businesses to hire cheap foreign workers.

I agree, my reply was tangential to the topic of the AP article being discussed here. I apologize for getting off topic.

And I didn't mean to give the impression that I have some grievance that these jobs aren't filled by Americans.

My curiosity was why aren't there more American kids having a working vacation in beach towns, not shame on these towns for importing labor.

And also the indentured servitude

In Maine there are lots of early 20s workers that mostly seem to come from Balkan countries. I think those little tourist towns just don't have large enough populations to support the demand. Tourists probably outnumber actual locals. Places like NJ and Brooklyn though have plenty of 16-22 year olds who will work beach jobs.

There is a program that allows university students to come to the US, work for a bit, and then stay for a month or so longer. It’s called work & travel. Many entertainment companies like six flags and casinos hire them. I have many friends who have done this years ago. The pay was low but they had a fun summer, travelled a bit, and came come with a new laptop or a good SLR camera. It wasn’t glamorous but a generally positive experience.

There is a "work and travel" program for students in Europe with valid visa and everything. I know lots of people who did that for a summer or two, it was an opportunity to see USA and also it was a great thing to list on their CV when getting a job back home.

Only half?

Interesting framing. I thought that was part of the appeal. When I was in college I was actively looking for an opportunity to go to another country and do a temporary work thing where you stayed in a mountain resort and worked at the front desk all summer.

This is prevalent among the big ski consolidators (Vail Resorts, Alterra) year over year.

What does this mean? Use more words please.

whats your point?

you cant build career out of seasonal job in some random resort places across the country.

the idea is that foreigners will do the temp/seasonal low value work, while Americans were supposed to educate and upskill using federal student loans and get a high value jobs.

unfortunately American education system made it impossible, ue to stupidity.

Only China is able to do that: massively educate population and upskill and go up the value chain of manufacturing and industrialization.

The person you're replying to was presumably talking about a vacation town in the US. Double taxation, by the way, is only an issue if an American makes over $100,000 per year in their foreign job.

I believe they are implying that the filing data is similar (I haven't checked myself) but the bottom two companies are not being targeted by the admin due to their links.

The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMFj8uDubsE&list=RDMMFj8uDub...).

and Apple since reception of Golden iPhone was reciprocated with zero/low tariffs a.k.a. Government picks winners.

November can't come fast enough!!

> For one, the engineer in India doesn't drive the demand for housing in Seattle thus keeping it more reasonably (less insanely) priced.

I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.

If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).

Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.

The engineer does marginally increase housing demand. They also increase local and federal tax revenue to support education, healthcare and other services. And the engineer will spend a large portion of their salary in the local economy, helping to support all the other business in Seattle. So there are also positive externalities.

What are some of the other "many negative externalities" you mention?

I feel like we could have the best of everything if you we just built more housing to keep up with demand.

The engineer in India also doesn’t drive demand for managers and product teams and ops people and HR and payroll staff and canteen workers and office space construction and highways and education spending in the US. All that happens in Chennai instead.

Housing is not a finite resource. Not building more housing is a choice.

But look at the other side. An engineer living in Seattle pays taxes and contributes to the economy. Seattle loses that benefits if that same job moves to India.

So, I am not sure if that housing argument alone makes that a better outcome for America (and workers).

Middle america is full of experienced EE's making $100K a year. After 20 years at the same company.

And they are good at it.

I agree. Specialized engineering is very different from software, you can't easily replace that expertise.

My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.

> You can't train a software engineer overnight to be a silicon engineer

But but but I was told that unions will force employers to retrain folks instead of laying them off.

[dead]

> Remote workers in India don't compete for housing, energy, health care, education, and food

You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.

As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.

To keep all of that money you just enumerated flowing in the local economy.

Sorry but there is no competition for health care in US. US basically has no health care. Unless of course you buy it (i.e. pay the fraudulent companies to give you false sense of security and leave you alone in the worst moment of your life)

Offshoring it hardly new. Take Microsoft for example. They offshored heavily over 20 years ago. Allow more immigration or the jobs will be offshored is an idle threat. Companies have done tons of offshoring and reshored many things after it didn't work out. More or less immigration isn't going to move the need on offshoring much either way.

Then let them already. Relocate all the work to India. I’m tired of US companies threatening everyone with job losses. Just fucking do it already.

I'm old enough to remember when people gnashed their teeth about the U.S. taking talent from abroad being 'brain drain' that hurt those countries. Which is it? We want to take the rest of the world's best and brightest and screw those other countries in the process, or we feel bad about that and don't want to do that? EDIT: Cynically, it could be both!

Ok, let’s say it leads to 60% offshoring and 40% hiring more Americans.

That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.

The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.

No, that is the incorrect take. Offshoring isn't easy or cheap. Especially when Trump is basically trying to get companies to hire American workers by any means.

It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.

"Suffer"? It might help bring home prices back down to reality.

For the first time in my life I'm seeing high-income earners as a big drag on society.

Like you I suspect the former. But if we really believe that economics is not a zero sum game then offshoring is better for everyone because it keeps talent in the countries they can help improve, and it is a rising tide that lifts all boats, serving to equalize wealth. Yes, for a while it should have the effect of reducing incomes in the U.S., but so does importing the rest of the world's talent into the U.S., so arguably offshoring is much better. But if [regardless of whether we believe economics is/is not zero sum] we want to keep the rest of the world down then we should absolutely take their talent.

I assume you mean offshore rather than "wfh" style remote. If so, companies already do that and they have been doing it on a much larger scale - https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/business/american-companies.... This will simply be another accelerant.

> but remote workers don't warrant US west-coast comps either

I mean, we don't really need that west coast comp either? If I was pulling my old FAANG comp here in Spain, I'd be in the top 0.1% of earners...

Why not? Doesn’t that depend on the worker output?

People need to stop asking what's better for the "economy" and start asking what's better for themselves. If the two don't align, it should be tough luck for the "economy", not the people.

Probably not a simple question or answer on the face of it, but it's really not worth looking at this action in such a narrow lens, because this is not happening in a vacuum. Instead, we should look at it through the overall context of all of this admin's immigration policies, which have been bad for the US economy.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/05/12/g-s1-12...

Depends a lot on how that remote worker's children vote.

So the exact same person working within the US, even better if sitting in an office, is a good employee but if they're working from abroad all of a sudden they're not that good?

Plenty of tech workers in Canada and LATAM in the same time zones

The rust belt was not caused by call centers in Pakistan, that was the Petrodollar and China deals. But it would be great to have both back (call centers and manufacturing).

I'd love to understand how people think the H1B program is going to survive the LLM era. Why in the world would I import a foreign worker to do something I can just as easily tell a clanker to do? The clanker is better at this stuff than I am!

Is it really just a matter of empire-building, at the end of the day? That can't last. Management realizes that, right?

I’ve experienced working with h1b workers that are not great, but this characterization is a bit rich. All of the massively valuable big tech companies have a ton of these workers. There’s no way they are like random people pulled off the street.

But if you stop growing, for how long will your peaceful secure life last?

Talent isn't enough for O-1, because the criteria are mostly about individual achievements. An established professional can fulfill them easier than a more talented junior. The criteria are about demonstrating that it has to be this specific individual, who would bring something more than the generic talent you can always get from the market by paying more than your competitors.

O-1 is also easier to get in fields like academia and entertainment, where everyone is building their individual brand. Corporate employees have a harder time qualifying, because their contributions are rarely attributed to them in public.

There's different degrees of talent. An international student who graduates from Stanford or MIT would not qualify for an O1 visa, but the US would be shooting itself in the foot to send them back.