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Comments (284)

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  bijowo1676
  Canada is jumping on this opportunity to invite the US tech workers who are frustrated with US H1B visa restrictions and GC backlog by offering an express permanent residency in 10 dayshttps://canadabychoice.com/services/move-to-canada/usa/occup...Canada also floating idea of alliance with Europe for travel and job opportunitieshttps://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-european-union-eu-me...
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  bearjaws
  Not surprising, H1B for my entire career was a cost cutting measure.Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B.Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.
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  Sol-
  It's funny how quickly tech employees turn MAGA when it comes to qualified immigration. Bad zero-sum intuitions about work abound across all strata of society, it seems.
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  mvdwoord
  So it was never about the talent, but just about cost?
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  unified101
  I think this will go hand in hand with tech compensation and jobs falling off a cliff. In the AI world too, we can't have our cake and eat it.
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  sebastiangrill
  Good, H1B is just modern servitude. But there should be an incentive to hire local workers instead of just hiring foreigners in their own country.
• rayiner
  The H1B debate has a lot of factions, but one thing is clear: AI is going to be replacing some to a lot of entry level knowledge jobs. Even if it doesn't get any better than what we have now, it'll create a pipeline problem where senior engineers are more valuable than ever and we'll have to figure out how to make room for junior engineers so that eventually they can become senior engineers. Given that, it seems prudent to pump the brakes on H1B--which has become a way to get bodies for entry level work (while top talent has shifted to O visas and the like).
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  superjose
  Wow. This will affect universities and negatively impact the US in the coming years.How many of the talent from frontier labs is immigrant?
• threecheese
  Is this just posturing (I won't speculate on the intended audience), or does the admin believe this will actually net more jobs for US citizens?TFA doesn't go into great detail about how this actually pushes offshoring - the variety that I'm familiar with at least (X/Y% blend of US/"near-shore" aka anywhere-but-west-asia roles). I have no doubt however that Y is just going to get larger while X stays the same or decreases (not even factoring aipocalypse).What constraint specifically makes them believe this is going to net in the way they want us to believe?
• Hippocrates
  I worked with and hired tons of H1Bs (and non) over the years and the idea that they earn this visa with exceptional talent is a farce. I work in bog standard web services. We fill seats with H1Bs to write ho-hum crud apps and do UX testing work. Some have been great! Others terrible.Could be wildly different for someone in a very high-tech org or medical field, but at places I worked it was used as a convenience, but not necessary.
• vjvjvjvjghv
  It's the same with the tariffs. My company has a huge "globalization" effort that expands offices and manufacturing facilities in countries with cheap labor and no/low tariffs. Instead of everything centering around the US, almost nobody gets hired in the US, except top management.
• 0xfacfac
  I feel like this is what the U.S. is not getting. If a company wants to hire a person, it will hire in or out of the country. They not allowing this form of *legal* immigration, is just making the country lose tax revenue and money circulating inside of the country...
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  aluminussoma
  On the whole, this is a good thing. There are policy responses that can be enacted as needed, in an easier and more humane way. The goal of the US government should be to protect the interests of the American citizen, as much as the goals of India or China should be to protect their own interests.
• drgo
  Hopefully this helps stem the brain drain from developing countries
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  afavour
  I'm a former H1B visa holder and I feel very conflicted. My experience was a great one: I was hired by a startup on an H1B, successfully transferred to a different startup, then eventually went to work for a bigger company that sponsored my green card. I wasn't underpaid by those startups and I know this $100k fee means a similar company will never hire someone like me again.But over the years I got to know many people on H1Bs who were indentured servants to their employers: once their green card application was in they were stuck. And if you're from a country like India that can take a decade or more. The whole thing feels like a scam and the $100k fee isn't going to deter those companies from doing it, it's still well worth the money to them.I wish we saw sensible, well thought out reform here. Instead we get the Trump administration.
• giantg2
  Bringing new labor into the market isn't an optimal solution in the current market either. If it's a problem, simply tax offshore labor.
• anon
  undefined
• Hippocrates
  I'm seeing a lot of "offshoring" and go to Canada at the moment in my co.
• draginol
  The $100k fee is such a bad idea. I would be fine for there being a minimum salary to get rid of the undercutting of available American labor. But there are certain niche jobs that there just isn't any local talent for that will just result in contracting with them overseas which is a lose-lose.
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  emodendroket
  Nobody is willing to state this but it’s pretty clear if you look at the way officials behind the policy talk: they’re OK with this. They don’t mind economic harm. The purpose has nothing to do with protecting workers and everything to do with creating a more ethnically homogenous country.
• arjie
  Terrible own-goal in my opinion. I know loads of startups that only exist because the founders were here on H1Bs originally. But it can’t be avoided I suppose. For all the complaints about VCs, they’re tuned into something innately that most people are simply incapable of reaching for - the idea of the bet on the not-yet-great population in order to get wins.People are usually quite high-time-preference by default and “if I had bought Bitcoin/nvidia/etc” is the norm. The United States, like Europe and the UK, has hit the population wealth distribution where loss aversion dominates growth policies. Consequently, most Americans aim directly at the same targets as Europeans have succeeded at - constraining the total success of their country in an aim to extract maximal personal piece of the existing pie. The resulting shrinking in economic growth often causes much lower wealth for everyone but it’s very attractive.This leads to nonsense like dockworkers constraining US shipping to the cost of the rest of the economy or landowners successfully prohibiting the construction of more homes. Local constituents like these block growth and prosperity for most other Americans. But just like massive minimum elevator size regulations are “estimated to not have any cost impact” so are these.The common thread, I suppose, is an absence of systems thinking. I wonder if it is inevitable among countries that hit wealth. We will have to see what happens to the Polish and Latvians as they overtake the British and Germans in prosperity. People think in their lifetimes. The challenge for civilizations is thinking in longer terms when comprised of shorter individual lives.In my opinion, American cities should be towers to the sky. America has easily space to build more New Yorks. The H1B is America’s hukou for the world and the US should attempt to test-select people in and unleash coastal megacities. We shall see where we get.Datacenters are good, ships are good, factories are good, power plants are good, space launch is good. And the people we will need to get all that now that we don’t make enough locally are also good.
• BatchJob
  As a SWE I would prefer offshore labor remain offshore. I have no problem with it.
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  binlog
  The H1B problem could be fixed overnight if the government handed them out by a simple test of ability rather than an idiotic lottery. Having world class researchers and engineers who command million dollar salaries enter the same line as a $60K worker at a slop factory like Infosys or TCS is beyond idiotic. And a high visa fee ultimately hurts more than it helps because it drives away both groups, and US tech needs the top talent from across the world to continue to remain dominant.
• micromacrofoot
  but no, you can't work remotely
• rvz
  The point of the these visas is to hire outside talent which cannot be found in the US and qualifies as the "best and brightest" and specialized "talent" that is beyond outstanding. Everyone knows this has been heavily abused for years.Now the word "talent" has lost its meaning or most commonly means "anyone" for cheap even though the employer knows that they are unqualified and hires them anyway for cheap labor to reduce their operating costs (expensive US employees).You can't say "we are hiring the best and brightest" and then decide to then go for those who are unqualified. Now this $100K fee is pointless when AI agents, and data centers (homes for the AI agents) are getting hired over both US employees and off-shored employees.One more thing. The big question is who would you rather trust to hire to not create a disaster like in [0][1] (Human or AI agent, hint one of them cannot be held accountable.)[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061682[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
• OutOfHere
  There is indeed no need for office jobs to be done in the US, and that's the hard truth.
• stego-tech
  Almost like if the $100k fee is the sticking point, then maybe the talent being brought in isn’t world class talent we can’t find domestically so much as easily exploitable manpower that can be replaced with another H-1B if they start asking for reasonable treatment or higher wages.Sorry IEEE, but offshoring happens regardless of the H-1B fee. I’m a pretty flexible dinosaur but you’re never going to get me to feel sympathy for employers leveraging a visa that’s tantamount to employment slavery in its onerous restrictions and lack of direct pathway to citizenship.
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  bix6
  India has become super popular for US VCs. Why not invest domestically? Cost and control I guess.
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  nekusar
  I'd be happier if H1B's (read: employment slavery) was completely redone and not tied to a single sponsor company, or gotten rid of completely.I know so many IT folks who are unemployed. And compounding that is unmitigated slop machines for both generating resumes and filtering them.Its fraud all the way down every where I look.
• calvinmorrison
  I worked at a company that depended heavily on one of the major 4 Indian suppliers. Their employees were treated like garbage. they would bring them here for months at a time. It was like indentured servitude. they lived in a bunk house and worked all day and slept and a bus picked them up and they worked. 6 days a week. If they fucked up, they were gone the next day. All for the chance to make it here.Once we added a resource and had a sham hiring process in which the supplier supplied an expert with no less than 10 pages of experience in our niche project. To his credit, he did not lie to me, and told me he could try to figure it out but had not worked on the product, but that he needed to do well. We were forced to hire himLater our team slated to replaced by that firm to maintain a major product while we went to green field stuff. I resigned and my team flew the coup over the next year orDisgustingwe should have a tax or tariff on "W2" employees or firms outsourcing labor. Minimally a tax that helps pay for our social safety net. We depend on new employed young people and sending that work afar does not help us.
• dominotw
  why did submission change the title to clickbait?title is false. There are no jobs "pushed" offshore for the feedang really sleeping on his job these days :D
• jasonlotito
  I remember when this was announced here on HN. So many right-wingers were on board with this because it would bring jobs back and make companies pay. A win-win as they said.