- "Well, Uncle Sam, we looked so hard in US and nobody answered our job posts, we have to go to ... $othercountry to hire, there is no other way"
Contrary to popular opinion, IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
America is at near full employment [2]. Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
This is such a deep distraction but a virulent virus of a narrative, surgically designed to needle our reptilian minds.
[1]: https://www.goodreturns.in/news/tech-layoffs-2025-oracle-cut...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...
[3]: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2, https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2
Why dont you address your blatant lie here instead of going on cringy pie tangent?
Pretty sure that is the U3 rate which only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for a job. The U6 is better and rarely falls below 5%:
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/nx-s1-5660752/why-americans-d...
And if they don't want to work, why would that impinge upon full employment, because what is the plan? Force people to work who are retired, or don't want to? Work or go to jail? "Full employment" is always presumed to be "people wanting to work can find it".
If the best data you have is conjoined, then you must either figure it out, or ignore it.
Do you know what percentage, exactly, are retired vs "giving uo"?
No?
Then when someone says full employment, they're right unless you have specific and precise data to counter that.
We could also discuss people too sick to work. Or on maternity leave. Or wealth vs desire to work. Or 100 other factors.
That's odd. The burden of proof is not exclusively on one side.
Then yes, you have to start the dance. And work at it. And convince the entire planet to change.
And what percentage of those workers are Walmart or Amazon warehouse employees who don't have healthcare coverage and don't make enough money to actually cover their monthly bills without being on welfare/public assistance?
Because my linkedin extended network says there's an awful lot of highly skilled people unable to find jobs in their respective fields.
Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 - September 2025 (526 comments)
Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments)
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments)
Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 - December 2024 (65 comments)
How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional citations)
As I've commented previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46257889 "I am calling for a temporary moratorium for issuing new worker visas based on the current economic macro and existing immigrant worker base in the US companies can pick from, yes. I support the current $100k H-1B fee, in perpetuity. The domestic workforce exists, it is a choice to not pick from the domestic labor pool. Choices have consequences."
The US has an obligation to its citizens, not corporations, not immigrant labor (already on US soil, or desiring to be on US soil). Shareholder returns go to the top 10% of Americans (who own 90% of US equities), so any argument about prosperity impairment from impaired immigration is going to fall on deaf ears in this context. Again, we may disagree on this, but I think I can find a majority of Americans who do agree with this sentiment (considering the current macro and affordability crisis in the US).
"We fail to tax our corporations adequately, so the proceeds of rampant deregulation and profiteering don't benefit the general populace".
I don't necessarily disagree with your stance but this seems like a weak justification (it's pragmatic, to be fair)
Highest praise. This is what I optimize for in a dynamic, imperfect, and more often than not, unjust world. Move fast, break systems.
> you’re probably not “the little guy”, you’re probably in the top 10% if you make more than around $160K
I am closer to a blue collar worker than a CEO or other very wealthy/empowered person driving these anti labor decisions, so your argument is not compelling, I know who these people are behind closed doors. It's always about some combination of wealth, profit, status, power, and/or control.
We'd rather be training in-house people to be better long term than training up people that get moved off the project as soon as they get upskilled...
https://www.fhfa.gov/blog/insights/who-lives-in-rural-americ...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america...
Before the retort starts that “if that’s what I think then why don’t I leave?”, corporate America has been decent to me. But I’m in my 50s and working on my exit plan and have been in the country I plan to retire to now for six weeks.
Crazy take to think the morally correct move is to capitalize on the virtuous parts of America, then leave when it's at its most vulnerable.
Here's to hoping the rest of your generation is willing to fight to bring back the country that allowed you to prosper.
No I’m not saying everyone is racist.
My fight is closer to being done than starting. In the country I’m in right now (and have been for four weeks), the police don’t look at me suspiciously, the people are nice and tolerant of my horrible Spanish, the ex pat groups I’ve become a part of are friendly and welcoming (and not patronizing like a lot of west coast liberals) even though I’m the only minority in the group.
Did I mention the country I’m in now that they have universal healthcare, a sensible vaccination policy, they actually enforce a decent wage on service staff so they don’t have to live on tips, etc?
For me? I will continue “adding on to what Becky said”, “looking at things from the 1000 foot view and finding synergies” and doing the other corporate speak with decision makers as long as they pay me and continue to allow me working remotely.
The US won’t get better. A large part of the country has been racist, homophobic , etc since its founding. My still living parents grew up in the segregated south and the country voted for a president who claimed Black immigrants were eating pets in 2024.
In an ideal world the US _is_ it's citizens. Importing thousands of "guest" workers on h1b visas who never end up leaving seems borderline seditious.
It's actually exploitative, on both ends but one worse than the other.
H1Bs wind up feeling forced to work far more hours than they should, but then it adds pressure to any in-house employees to work more than they should too.
It's extra evident in the people that go from H1B to full citizenship, they often never learn to just take a break, sometimes to their own detriment.
> Federal data shows Oracle filed for 2,690 H-1B visas in fiscal year 2025 and 436 so far in fiscal year 2026, totaling over 3,100 visa requests.
There is no proof that these people were also not part of the layoffs. Typically in layoffs, until the day off the announcement, it’s just business as usual. Which means people keep getting hired and H1B petitions being filed. The article doesn’t say they filed these petitions AFTER the layoffs.
The number from 2025 is not really relevant when the layoffs were in March 2026. The article author clearly has a narrative they want to push.
And of the 436 petitions in 2026, only 235 are new hires (remaining are continuing approvals). Hardly a scandal there. Especially if they're likely hiring AI engineers and laying off call center employees - its not like their laying off an american citizen to hire a cheap H1B employee as this article is angling to have the reader believe.
They are in no-way laying off call center employees, they are laying off tens of thousands of the most highly paid US workers.
And yes the numbers of H1Bs granted in 2025 is relevant. You don't layoff 20% of your 100,000+ people workforce all of a sudden 'cos March went badly.
You don’t know that the layoffs are happening tomorrow. That’s how layoffs work. Except for a few in the loop everyone else is largely in the dark. Hiring doesn’t stop, whether it’s us citizens or it’s H1Bs. 2025 hiring, whether H1B or not, is immaterial here.
Here’s an example of this: Coinbase reneged offers at the last minute. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Coinbase-rescinds-acc...
I can share plenty more if you’d like.
"In 2025, it was estimated that over 163 million Americans were in some form of employment, while 4.16 percent of the total workforce was unemployed. This was the lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s, although these figures are expected to rise in 2023 and beyond."
Here is U6 which is a better reflection imo:
This is only true if you define “unemployment” narrowly to exclude people who are in school. In 1950, you could get a job out of high school. Today, you need to spend four years in college, sometimes more.
Counting people who are in school as “not unemployed” ignores the opportunity cost of school. You’re spending 4 years in the prime of your life. And during that time you’re not earning any income, but instead paying money. So even if eventually your job prospects are as good as they were in 1950, clearly the economy isn’t as good as it was when you could hit that same rate without people making that up front investment.
That can’t be further from the truth
Actually H-1Bs are more expensive than Americans due to visa costs and attorney costs, so Oracle can SAVE money by hiring Americans, yet they still decide to continue hiring H1Bs along with Americans.
The number on two paystubs can be the exact same while one person is being brutally overworked and the other given a leisurely, comfortable WLB, which effectively amounts to underpaying the foreign labor, per unit of output, devaluing each unit of labor of domestic output.
It’s not great. But this is similar to how health insurance is tied to employment, not to the employer. Both citizens and H1 employees experience the same abuse here
the only reason to put up with abuse is boatloads of money, which is the primary reason why people change job (including the h-1bs)
HN does know. Some of us question whether brave and courageous leadership knows.
What America is full of is fake employment statistics that are artificially inflated by young people hiding out in school to avoid the bad job market.
20-24 age employment has been about the same for last 16 years:
Male 20-24 employment rate is down 14 percentage points since 1960: https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_labor_force_participation_...
Then why does it take months and months for even experienced devs to land a job?
Software is undergoing a secular downsizing. It increasingly looks like we have too many SWEs, and that we need to support them retraining. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a labor shortage in other industries.
> IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
You are stating what IT people understand and are blatantly ignoring the realities of many companies. I've been at more than one shop that decided to do layoffs in a 'corporate' way and the people who knew the system were let go, the people who didn't know a class from a function were kept around, and the smart people from other teams have to jump in and pick up the slack.
And that's not event getting into outsourcing/etc, that's just basic corporate stupidity.
> America is at near full employment [2].
Doesn't tell the full story, i.e. under-employment where someone's working at a Walmart with a CS degree; They're still 'employed' but it's not in their field.
> Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
A Single link to a single enforcement action only resulting in < 180K USD for damages is not a great example of enforcement.
Outsourcing companies prey on gaps in US tax code and the like to make it 'look' cheaper to outsource, except for the huge maintenance cost for the trash that comes out.
And, some of that is the fault of the company procuring those services too. They don't give good enough requirements, they take too long to figure stuff out...
And yet I've found a niche specifically around spending half of my day reviewing pull requests from offshore houses where, requirements be damned, it's obvious the contractor is either overworking employees, letting incompetent employees in, or the employees think they can cheat and put code that 'just happens to work under testing' but inevitably will break under any stress.
But at the end of the day you can still do it. WITCH consultancies have seeped into a number of our industries and all the average consumer can do is bitch about how every software product or interaction UX from the providing companies has gotten so much worse.
Hope you're not saying this at social gatherings.
What the newspapers(economists | politicians) say, is not reality for most people.
Real wages are 15% higher than they were in 1979 [1].
On top of that even if we take your link at face value that's a 0.35% growth per year. The medieval warm period had faster wage growth.
Hourly earnings (nominal) have grown at 3.2% per year between 2006 and 2025 [1]. Inflation in that interval was 2.7% [2].
> Americans are working longer than they did in 1970
Source? These data show hours worked are down [3].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003
[2] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=200601...
>Source? These data show hours worked are down [3].
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/october/how-h...
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/america-has-becom...
(Not my favorite think tank but they have a nice chart.)
Which price index are you looking at that doesn’t include housing?
Almost all BLS price indices, including CPI, include housing. (CPI measures the “rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, utilities, bedroom furniture” [1].)
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/concepts.htm#the-cpi-as-a-c...
Of course, CPI doesn’t capture whether people have roommates or have made other adjustments to keep their housing costs within income limits.
With the gig economy as long as you can make 50$ a day via Uber Eats , you might be considered “employed”.
For the days I need to be in the office, my commute is well over 2 hours each way. Pay cuts, horrible commutes.
(Im in the same boat, but much longer than 6 months)
https://x.com/chrisbrunet/status/2037376353461567734
Apparently, no citizen wants to do this job? Why do we allow things like this?
So maybe the actual question is what kind of a Stanford undergraduate would choose a university IT position in ~2021 instead of aiming for more lucrative tech roles. Perhaps the kind that wants to maximize their chances of getting H-1B.
Stanford wouldn't blatantly violate laws like this.
Blatant violation would be if they do it on many cases and large scale.
I agree with you. The category list in H1B needs to be trimmed. So that companies have less wiggle room for things like this.
The layoffs were also worldwide. Not sure what the impact to US workers was. India was hit hard.
Honestly, I'd preferably make it so that stock movement is frozen for a time except for laid off employees
The EU is actually clamping down on it because of populist/far right parties. I know someone who runs a Thai restaurant and he cannot fly in a cook from Asia. He has to find someone from Europe.
It's not though. It's a DoS policy wrt of issuing non-immigrant visas.
>Yes, the government issues I-140s to H1-Bs
So? The government issues I-140s to non-H1Bs too. Not having any US visa and never having set foot in the US is "a path to Green Card" if H1B is one too.
>I think just Googling 'H1-B dual intent''
I was hoping you'd do that and find for yourself how wrong you are.
"Congress enacted INA § 214(b) in 1990, explicitly excluding H-1B visas (under INA § 101(a)(15)(H)(i)) from the presumption that nonimmigrant applicants are intending immigrants. Unlike most nonimmigrant categories requiring proof of no immigrant intent, H-1B omits any foreign residence requirement in its definition, enabling holders to pursue permanent residency without jeopardizing status" https://global.temple.edu/isss/faculty-staff-and-researchers...
"The Immigration Act of 1990 created the modern H-1B program as a "bridge" to green cards, allowing immediate work while navigating permanent residency processes that included labor tests. Senate Judiciary Committee reports emphasized streamlined H-1B procedures without recruitment delays to avoid productivity losses, with senators like Arlen Specter and Slade Gorton highlighting needs for quick access to skilled talent. This dual-intent design responded to prior issues, like the Schwartz case, where immigrant intent prosecutions prompted the 1990 carve-out" https://www.cato.org/blog/why-congress-rejected-h-1b-recruit...
Congress also added INA §214(h). In the 1990 Act, that new subsection said, in substance, that being the beneficiary of a preference petition under §204, or otherwise seeking permanent residence, does not count as evidence that the person intends to abandon a foreign residence for H(i)/L purposes. That is the clearest statutory confirmation of dual intent.
"Congress originally intended H-1B to permit temporary work status while also allowing pursuit of permanent residence. The House Judiciary Committee report reinforces that reading. It had a section titled “Dual Intent” and explained that this problem was especially burdensome for H and L beneficiaries, and that the bill treated the filing of an immigrant petition as not, by itself, proof that the person meant to abandon a foreign residence" (attached link is the legislative history) https://niwaplibrary.wcl.american.edu/wp-content/uploads/HR-...
"Congress added INA §214(h), providing that pursuit of permanent residence “shall not constitute evidence” of abandoning a foreign residence for H(i)/L nonimmigrants" https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/eoir/legacy/2009...
"H-1B is “coming temporarily,” while permanent residence is handled through the employment-based immigrant categories in §203(b) and adjustment under §245(a)" https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=%28title%3A8+section...
>"H-1B is “coming temporarily,” while permanent residence is handled through the employment-based immigrant categories in §203(b) and adjustment under §245(a)"
Exactly! Do you even read what you pasted from the prompt?
Think of someone from a place that isn't nice enough, but well above the threshold of absolute shitshow with genocidal aftertaste that allows protection. Such people, by virtue of claiming to require asylum get temporary protection and right to residence and then clog the system by appealing everything ten times with the obviously foreseeable result of not being granted anything. The current idea that is supposed to solve everything is hosting the immigration ghettos offshore (surprise surprise) to not upset the local population until the positive decision is made.
Right populists are mostly riding the racist feeling and the idea that the actual legitimate asylum seekers are undesirable, because they are Muslim, because immigrants leech on the system and all that, plus the actually observable existence of ethnic (organized) crime.
All at the same time, the tech immigration is very easy as long as you get an offer. No quotas, no 100k shakedown, not even a degree requirement or a language test, just someone willing to fill the form and pay like 500 bucks in processing fees and pay you the above media salary. Family immigration isn't restricted either and partners of citizens and immigrants get right to work (because what else they would do here, lol).
But the actual non-fancy low-skilled low-paid immigrants are either EU citizens from less affluent side of the continent or the (former) asylum status holders (which is straight path to citizenship most of the time). Packages have to sorted, garbage trucks have to be driven and cheaply. But sure, anti-immigration attitudes we have.
So yeah, the only sure way to fly in a Thai cook is to marry her or give her husband a tech job.
Out of curiosity, isn't that the same case as what happened with the Biden immigration surges, at least Venezuela? And now the current administration is taking action?
Also, you can pay taxes without legally residing in the us it seems.
With green cards, the government is concerned about permanent residents being dependent on the state if a company ceases to exist or fails to pay salaries or lays people off.
This worry is largely not present for limited term work visas.
This is why I’m wondering: did the EO get blocked, paused for judicial review or something? Is it even in effect?
No intention to make this political, I’m legitimately curious about the status of the law and its actual applicability here. Supposed to be such a steep fine they literally couldn’t afford to do this - not with them already going cash flow negative to build out AI datacenters. So either it’s not applying (why?) or somehow they’re justifying one HUGE fee and somebody is floating them one astronomical loan - which again, why? Where’s the profit in taking that big a risk? Seems absolutely unhinged!
We’re missing something here. Or, at least, I am.
There are a bunch of people in the country as students in US universities with an F visa. If they get a job, the employer can apply for an h1b, and the fee doesn't apply to them because they aren't getting a visa, they are changing status (might sound like potato/potata, but the difference exists and applies).
https://www.employmentlawworldview.com/update-to-the-new-100...
That’s like saying “Oracle hires tens of thousands and mass layoffs” (* hired during the pandemic)
These kinds of layoffs don't just happen on a whim, certainly aren't supposed to. Oracle's business conditions really didn't change that much over the past year.
It's perfectly reasonable to retroactively question a company's choice to hire immigrant workers relatively shortly before layoffs.
I just cannot imagine executives at tech companies/body shops having any positive ethical motivations. More like "they'll do what we say without complaining or they'll go home". There's no way it's not just a hugely abusive to both pools of workers. The whole thing really feels like another example of the imbalance between labor and capital in the US.
Who originally wanted H-1B/etc? Rich people with money and power? Of course!
The end game for corporatism is shown in Europe where you can see a clear gap between countries that are built on non-zero sum systems which are thriving, everything just works...and then other countries which have been heavily corporatist for multiple decades, everything is collapsing, government function is both non-existent in many areas and reaching new highs of intervention into markets. Unfortunately, the Chinese were right.
About what? Are you familiar with how the life of a Chinese salaryman is going about for the last one year while us in the West are trembling in our shoes about how open weight Chinese models are threatening SOTA frontiers?
> Large companies dictating economic companies is anti-innovation
Yes but what's the solution? To pass even more regulation against the large companies and make them behave?
> in Europe where you can see a clear gap between countries that are built on non-zero sum systems which are thriving, everything just works
Some concrete examples?
To remove all regulation. Using economic policy to achieve social outcomes is insanity. Even the most free markets ultra would never suggest this, and you have people who are slightly to the left of communist suggesting this...it is worth asking why.
Switzerland and Italy. Two countries that are next to each other, very different story. Slovakia and Germany, adjacent (can't really use Austria because that is somewhere in the middle atm). At a high level, Eastern and Western Europe. Eastern Europe is thriving, Western Europe is struggling to decide whether to arrest people for committing crimes.
Every serious attempt to answer that ends up admitting something uncomfortable, that democracy only functions as intended if voters are consistently rational and informed. But that assumption doesn’t hold. It never has. Even the Athenians put Socrates, father of Western civilization, to death.
If society were at all rational, we'd see a lot more people swing from lampposts.
This is something I'd encourage everyone with strong opinions about work visas to try and accomplish.
You don't change a system by crying about it on anonymous internet forums, you do it by competing against it and making it redundant.
Ultimately, companies who use H1B visas will outcompete companies who don't because the H1B system gives them cheaper labor costs. The solution has to come at the regulatory level.
150 years ago, if you told someone "oh if you want safer factories just build one yourself," that business would never survive because they'd get outcompeted by the less scrupulous factory owners who were happy to mangle their employees and just replace them with more desperate workers.
It's significantly easier to outsource white collar work.
And you can keep playing the regulation game until there are no companies left.
The government grants broad liability shields to owners of companies because there is a vested state interest in facilitating commerce/economic growth. I guess if companies are just going to move overseas then maybe those liability shields could just be vacated. They don't deserve to have their cake and eat it too. It's easy: want the liability shield? Stop being fucking greedy and be a good corporate citizen. Otherwise, no cake for you.
If you give companies the ability to choose US government protection against their overseas operations being nationalized versus the ability to hire foreigners on work visas, the overwhelming majority of companies will choose the latter.
Do you think it's a bad thing that the US implemented occupational safety laws?
I agree that it's not great that many of those risks just shifted overseas, but it's certainly a net positive that American employers can no longer let workers die or get permanently injured and just let the workers absorb those costs.
The H1B visa system isn't just a natural part of capitalism that I want the government to regulate. It's an artificial condition created by bad regulations. You can argue that we shouldn't have immigration restrictions at all since they're an artificial economic constraint, but that's a whole other argument.
By the time it'll take you to navigate the system to build anything physical in the US, you can have two iterations of the product in China.
The US way of handling this to go per incident and make one more rule, no matter how improbable that situation is. Eventually you end up with a system that needs a team of lawyers.
But people who oppose H1B don’t seem opposed to that.
I have utmost respect of your work, a customer of your fantastic product and have been meaning to reach out to you for a while (infact I learned about Cory from your blog in 2021) but I had to push back hard on this.
TinyPilot didn't happen in India nor China. I can argue it would have been cheaper to build it at any one of those countries but you know much better about it than I.
Labor costs only matter when you're selling an absolute commodity that has no edge than price.
Of all the people I would have expected to say that the solution has to come at the regulatory level given the experience, success you've had, with your transparency in how your company was doing, I am utterly surprised it was you.
I am more than happy to continue, reached out - I just wish our initial email would have been way more pleasant!
To clarify, I certainly agree it's possible for a business to succeed without using H1B visas, especially for something small at the the scale of TinyPilot (7 people when I sold).
I just mean on a large scale, the companies that use H1B visas will generally outcompete the ones that don't.
What's the cost difference between a US citizen and an H1B? I'd guess it's something around 20% less expensive to hire an H1B visa holder. In an industry like software where the dominant cost is labor, then H1B companies have a 20% advantage over non-H1B companies. Non-H1B companies can outcompete them by being 20% better, but that's a big disadvantage to overcome.
Running my business actually made me oppose H1B visas more. The H1B visa system gives big businesses a massive advantage over small businesses. There's so much frictional cost to hiring someone on an H1B visa (legal fees, admin overhead) that it's not practical if you're only hiring 1-2 employees, but you'll get ROI if you're hiring 10-20. But it just gives an advantage to bigger business, and the advantage wouldn't exist if the H1B system didn't exist or if the government designed it to be employer-agnostic.
You deserve and earned them!
> There's so much frictional cost to hiring someone on an H1B visa (legal fees, admin overhead) that it's not practical if you're only hiring 1-2 employees
Very true but as you saw in my email, I have extremely experienced friends back in India who I have been able to hire as contractors without issue. No H1B - just plain old Slack, email and Forgejo. The playbook for asynchronous work is well tested and debugged by now. 2019 was a blessing.
I will concede, this doesn't work for every company - a hardware or biotech company definitely would appreciate people all being together in the same physical lab, in which case I hear you!
> the government designed it to be employer-agnostic
... but the government cannot be employer-agnostic, Michael.
The government is not an impartial, unbiased mainframe running in a DC somewhere. It's a group of people accepting and pushing policy who can be influenced, just like I am influencing your today, and you, me.
As an SMB and bootstrapped founder, you then have to choose between spending your time and efforts on being at the influencing table vs making actual design and business decisions at your startup the moment you yield influence to this group.
The bigger business simply doesn't have to make that decision. So don't help tip the scales further against yourself and SMBs like you.
That's one of my points that I was hoping to discuss in our email - that involving the government adds further overhead, resistance and expense into the system, so we should exhaust all other options before we even consider it. I personally have never seen an option that needed government intervention that couldn't be solved by the free market. I don't work in healthcare or education or finance - maybe those do require government intervention - I am entirely unfamiliar about those domains and not talking about them.
The other interpretation of being employer-agnostic is that the H1B isn't tied to a "sponsoring company" and doesn't require any of the transfer shenanigans. Sure, but the issue it isn't that way is because it's a rare "dual intention" visa in that, you are a non-immigrant who can become a citizen through the H1B. This was a feature added to the H1B to entice top quality talent. The problem with making the H1B employer-agnostic is that now you can I can start a perfectly legal, fantastic lifestyle businesses hiring H1Bs, petitioning for their greencards and immediately letting them go. As long as they can figure out a way to eat and sleep, they can now become citizens. So for it to be employer-agnostic, we need to remove the "dual intention" - the very carrot employers use (if you tough it out through all those JIRA tickets, you'll get to be a citizen!)
> I just mean on a large scale, the companies that use H1B visas will generally outcompete the ones that don't.
This is where I continue to push back. I was hoping to discuss over email but do you feel you could have built TinyPilot at either MS or Google, not as a side project but as an official product offering? I don't want to get too tied up into the specific features that TinyPilot offers - I'm using it as a proxy for a very useful, innovative product that provably solves real customer problems.
At the large scales where H1B makes sense, you as a major decision maker at the company wouldn't allow a worker with a risky status like the H1B be responsible for high impact, meaningful pieces of work. Actually, forget H1Bs - at the large scales where H1B makes sense, you would simply not entrust a single individual, H1B or not, with high impact, meaningful pieces of work.
If we disagree on this take, please say so - I am here to learn and listen.
The original intention of the H1B was to handle temporary supply shocks in knowledge work while the U.S. slowly fixed those supply constraints on its own.
If avocado toasts became an overnight sensation, the H1B was a way to provide breathing room to local avocado farms so the demand could sustain or grow (and not collapse) while they came up to speed to meet that sudden demand.
The H1B wasn't designed to be a way to absolutely wipe out local avocado farms because it's cheaper to just import avocados from Mexico.
The H1B has completely diverged from that and going in the opposite direction where it's actively and negatively impacting domestic markets. Massive corporations in Asia have grown whose sole business model is exploiting this geographical arbitrage and nothing else.
What piece of critical, useful software that has had a mention on HN can you name or recall that has come out of these many mutibillion dollar outsourcing giants?
A $60k/yr salary as a resident doctor is fantastic if you did most of your education in Asia but if you attended medical school anywhere in the U.S. and didn't have a 100% scholarship, you're starting your life off in crippling debt.
During COVID, there was an explosion of domestic coding bootcamps to address the supply constraints - this is precisely the kind of domestic corrections we, as the U.S. need to encourage and develop local talent, get them educated and motivated about tech, but these bootcamps require an investment that in Asia covers education, boarding and lodging without any scholarship. There's just no competition when it comes to cost. We in the U.S. have an extremely high quality of living and our CoL reflects that. As I wrote in my email, things we take for granted here - running water (not potable, just water that you could water your plants with), 24x7 electricity and internet - these are still unavailable where I was born, so of course, the CoL is cheaper. Way cheaper.
One might say, "OK then, free markets for the win" - that itself is a separate debate on its own.
> The other interpretation of being employer-agnostic is that the H1B isn't tied to a "sponsoring company" and doesn't require any of the transfer shenanigans.
Right, this is what I was talking about.
I think the current system gives H1B employers way too much leverage over H1B employees and degrades the job market for everyone. Employers can tell H1Bs that they have to work evenings and weekends or be fired and leave the country. And then the same employer can turn around and tell US citizen employees that they also have to work evenings and weekends because the H1B employees are doing it. They have less leverage over the citizens because the citizens can get another job more easily, but forcing H1Bs to establish precedent definitely does pressure other employees, and I've seen this happen directly.
> So for it to be employer-agnostic, we need to remove the "dual intention" - the very carrot employers use (if you tough it out through all those JIRA tickets, you'll get to be a citizen!)
I think you could design it without such an obvious loophole, but I agree that there are probably loopholes no matter how you design it.
That said, I'm a bit confused about our disagreement at this point.
I think the H1B system is a net negative for the US economy, and it disproportionately hurts small businesses. I'd be in favor of a revised H1B system that allows companies to fill short-term labor shortages with foreign workers but with limits that prevent companies from abusing the system to depress wages and conditions for US workers, as they currently do with H1B today.
It sounds like your argument is that H1B doesn't matter because the companies using it aren't really innovating and so they'll naturally be outcompeted by smaller businesses who are too small to take advantage of the H1B system. Is that correct?
Also, I'm confused because you're saying you advocate free market solutions and that's why we shouldn't mess with the H1B system. The H1B system is the opposite of a free market solution. It's extra regulation that we'd be better off without.
We disagree on the diagnosis and path forward, not the symptoms. Let me explain:
> I think the current system gives H1B employers way too much leverage over H1B employees and degrades the job market for everyone
Correct and it's by design. The overhead of H1B needs to be in the black when it hits the bottomline - the H1B isn't a charity auction to take brilliant engineers from developing countries and move them into the U.S. - it's to ensure the companies turn a profit on it.
> I think the H1B system is a net negative for the US economy, and it disproportionately hurts small businesses
Correct again on both accounts. While it is a brilliant solution 1% of the time, it's misused 99% of the time.
> It sounds like your argument is that H1B doesn't matter because the companies using it aren't really innovating and so they'll naturally be outcompeted by smaller businesses who are too small to take advantage of the H1B system. Is that correct?
Correct again
> you're saying you advocate free market solutions and that's why we shouldn't mess with the H1B system. The H1B system is the opposite of a free market solution. It's extra regulation that we'd be better off without
Correct again
Where I disagree with you is when you said we need to add more regulation to the existing H1B system. To me, and this is not something I'm hearing for the first time, it sounds like a band aid on top of a bunch of band aids 12 feet deep.
The H1B system was wonderful when it was initially implemented. The U.S. was undergoing massive technological shifts leading to tremendous supply shocks - just like how we are struggling to purchase GPUs, RAM and SSD today. As much as we disagree, history has proven repeatedly this shock will pass (unless the market is distorted by new regulation).
However the H1B has long since distorted into a geo-arbitrage, QoL and CoL hack. Even the current administration's $100k fee is a bandaid. Just the fully loaded cost of a 4-6 year domestic education is more than that, so the domestic supply is being destroyed.
Ideally what should happen is we should decommission the H1B completely, no ifs and buts, and have a "cool down" period where we notice what impact it actually has on the domestic demand. I do appreciate that this isn't accounting for the case where there are only a 1000 people worldwide who know how to train an LLM from scratch, or, 1000 toptier cardiologists worldwide that we would like to attract - I'm very sure we will figure something out for them but I argue we need to discover why our domestic supply is lacking in the first place instead of continuing to rely on band aids.
The U.S. today seems to rely on stents to save it from heart attacks. We should probably take a strong, hard look at the diet and lifestyle choices instead of continuing to rely on stents as a savior. It was necessary when we had an emergency, but a sustained reliance on emergency intervention points to underlying structural issues.
The H-1B visa program is simply another element of the system that capital uses to abuse labor in the United States. It's not enough that healthcare (if you are even lucky enough to get any) is tied to employment. The low bar for bringing in foreign workers is used as a negotiating tactic by employers. There is no equivalent leverage for workers, absent economic ruin. This problem affects tens of millions of Americans and that's not normal and it's not okay. Maybe the law should allow H-1B visa, but also charge an absolutely huge premium (> $250k) that the company commits to worker healthcare or something. If the positions are so essential then $250k is still an incredibly good deal.
America has to start addressing the imbalance of power between capital and labor. It's gotten bad enough that one could easily argue that it's becoming a potent anti-democratic force in the US. And, I'm sorry, but Americans should not have to cede their desire for equal economic footing because people like you want intimate that it's about "not hiring immigrants".
Unfortunately, the current status quo and economic footing everyone enjoys in the US is built on this and similar exploitative behaviors explicitly enabled by the US government for its entire history.
How willing are you to sacrifice your standard of living for the purpose of labor gaining some foothold against capital? The GDP per capita of the poorest US states are more than virtually all socialist countries.
Schools are the main beneficiary of the program: there are 1M foreign students in the country, each paying full tuition and living expenses. Without H1B the number would have been orders of magnitude lower. For example, in China, where education is literally 10x cheaper, there are just 0.25M foreign students, because there is no immigration pathway for those. So any politician trying to clamp down on this program would have to explain to his or her alma mater why does he or she hate it so much.
And yes, the next round will be "worse than Trump". The reality is Trump ran on certain principles that his voters adhered to, and he didn't deliver. The next logical step will be to support somebody even more "extreme".
Honestly tell me: Would you ever apply to Oracle for a job?
Why can Oracle continue to hire good talent despite offering poor working conditions? H1-B.
Is it circular? Absolutely.
There really should be a strict maximum percentage of visa hires for any particular job type at a company. Say, 2x the overall average for that job category, and never to exceed 30%.
If they still need more labor, then they need to attract and train local talent rather than relying solely on overseas talent.
Eventually yeah.
By your logic, if you were the only person in the country, you'd live like a king.
In the real world, the evidence is obvious: average productivity/wages drop, incentive to invest in labour-saving technology disappears, and you get multiple decades of stagnation. Every country which had unlimited, unfree labour has had decades of slow growth as a result.
Income growth in the working age population in the US since 1990 has been about the same as Japan, a country which is widely regarded as on the verge of economic collapse. US per capita income is probably 20-30% lower than it would be with first-order effects from immigration, likely much more with second order effects. Under any other circumstances with economic policy elsewhere, the US economy would be growing 7%/year now (and ofc, the answer for Japan's ills is apparently, you guessed, lots of immigration).
China is seeing secular reductions in production costs because of capital investment, not low wages. The peculiarly statist notion of American capitalists that the route to economic supremacy was large numbers of illiterate Guatemalans should go down as not only an economic failure but a moral one (equally of H1B).
People who are wondering about $100k fee- it only applies if you are bringing people from overseas for this job; meaning if an immigrant is already in the country (eg: on a student visa), they don't have to pay $100k. It's just a visa change for them. There have also been murmurs about pay-to-play system, not sure how it works though.
People who got pissed reading the title- majority of the visas sponsored were last year and not last week's layoffs.
Or you can buy your way out of that restriction by paying each laid off worker 3 years of wages.
Pick one.
Despite the rhetoric the administration is very friendly to big business and will absolutely help them hire cheaply. Larry Ellison especially.
But no, they did virtually nothing. I would even be surprised if more than 100 companies paid the one time $100k fee at this point with all the loopholes that were included.
All the new regulations (carefully presented as crackdown) make it easier for large companies to hire immigrants in a more reliable way. All carefully choreographed by big tech.
The chances of a specific company being able to sponsor a specific employee through this year's lottery went by significantly (3-4x) compared to the last several years.
The better solution is just stop H1B lottery from next year.
Realistically, the H-1B visa program should be terminated all together.
The 100k fee basically does nothing to curb H1B cheap labor. It's a one-time fee, and when you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job, it's a fee that easily pays for itself. H1B's are paid less for the same job (just google "are H1B's paid less"), and since they can't easily leave, the reduced turnover saves them money as well. If you think that an employee is likely to stay for 4 years, that's only 25k per year and the fact that they are paid about 15%-20% less than an American, the equation still easily comes out in favor of importing the cheap labor.
It was a move crafted to look like it was cracking down on abuse, but not actually cause any real pain to the companies abusing the system. Hence why all these mega corps are still filing for H1B's even while laying off their American citizen workers.
You have 2 countries, C1 and C2.
Scenario 1: C1 has enough demand for 100 tech jobs. C1 only has 50 qualified natives for 100 tech jobs.
The wages of C1 go up because there is more demand than supply.
Scenario 2: C1 has enough demand for 100 tech jobs. C1 only has 50 qualified natives for 100 tech jobs.
Now you put in a H1-B visa program that will pay the same as the prevalent wage as a local native. C2 has enough candidates to fill the other 50 positions.
The wages of C1 will NOT go up because now supply matches demand.
Is Scenario 2 fair? Who gets to decide what fair is? Given the above system, I think I would argue that H1-B visa programs cause wage deflation in C1, even if it is filling jobs that would not be filled and even if the jobs paid the exact same as someone working in the native country.
I am not dogmatic about that though. Willing to hear a counterpoint to scenario 2.
Country 1 is now a better place to start a new company or expand your existing company because all the best workers in the field work in country 1. Starting the same business in country 2 will almost certainly fail.
This is literally why the Bay Area became the world’s most important tech hub and isolationism will allow (and is allowing) Chinese tech to jump ahead of the US. The government doesn’t care about losing a literal arms race, largely to reduce the political power of California. By no longer educating and welcoming the world’s brightest engineers the USA is going to be reduced to support and manufacturing roles where its large workforce will have to compete with everyone else and salaries will tumble.
1. Companies can hire overseas. There's some cost to it in terms of added friction, but if wages rise enough in C1, then it's worth the friction to hire in C2 instead.
2. Workers also consume and invest, raising demand for other jobs. Employment is not a zero sum game, especially at the macro scale.
Also, why they need to do H1B instead of just outsourcing abroad?
Also, h1-b is limited to 6 years (one renewal) unless I-140 (green card) has been filed for the employee. In which case, renewals become unlimited until green card is granted.
For Indians the GC queue is nearly infinite, hence too many renewals.
The H1B worker is meant to temporarily fill a gap. If there is available US talent, the H1B worker should leave and be replaced by a citizen/permanent resident.
The H1B i140 petition thing requires you to advertise the job before submitting the petition. How does this work if the employee is not fungible?
The employer can legally say they advertized the job and had no applicants and need an H1B employee.
You're confusing things. I-140 is a green card application, not H1B.
H1B petition requires the I-129 form and an LCA from the DoL. No advertisement is required, except posting the LCAs in a conspicuous place in the company office.
It is very easy to fulfill the "muh we tried to hire! Nobody wants to work!" fake criteria to be able to apply for an H1B.
if you are already in the US it currently does not apply to you, or if you are transferring jobs with an existing h1b, or renewing your h1b.
source: former h1b
side note: as of february it’s estimated only 85 h1b petitions paid the 100k fee. the rest did not fall under the qualification.
https://www.staffingindustry.com/news/global-daily-news/1000...
I haven't seen Google or FB or Amazon or other top tech companies pay H1B any less. They get paid pretty well.
But firing people (some might be on H1B too) and hiring H1B at the same time is meaningless.
Btw, if you want to stop people from getting fired, J Powell needs to be fired. He is keeping interest rates high for any sort of hiring. These same companies hired like crazy during 0% interest rate environment.
Juiced economy and free cash is what led to massive inflation. Powell is trying to save hay until winter - when we get a recession the interest rates cuts are the only knob he has to turn to soften the blow.
For an I-140 PERM (employment based green card) however the requirement is that there was an effort made to hire locally first.
Most people on HN are uninformed about this, well actually uninformed in general.
Anyway, I feel that you need read this guy comment
Those are the voters that matter (unionized, geographically spread out, didn't price everyone else out via remote work) - not SWEs.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/82c1795b-704a-4da3-82ec-2f9cd52de...
These are union jobs where hours worked don't extend beyond 50 hours including overtime and with significantly lower barrier to entry compared to software.
Why should American SWEs earn more than Accountants (around $80k), Teachers (around $70k), or Mechanical Engineers (around $80k)?
It's this kind of attitude that makes non-techies feel schadenfreude.
Techies moan and moan, yet in reality we became the capital elite - a median TC of $190K [0] does make you the capital elite in a country where the median household income is $80k [1]. Even investment bankers have a similar TC to SWEs [2] - especially if you don't work for a Bulge Bracket or Elite Boutique.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/united-...
[1] - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/investment-banker?countryId=254&cou...
Union jobs with set hours and lower barriers to entry than software while offering middle class salaries? It's so horrible /s.
It's this attitude that makes people who don't have stakes in the software industry feel schadenfreude.
Oracle didn’t file “thousands of H1Bs”. Oracle filed 2690 applications in FY2025 (Oct-Sep), and so far filed 436 in FY2026, according to the article.
If anything, this would indicate that Oracle slowed down on hiring foreign workforce. Oct-Mar is half of Oracle’s fiscal year, but they only filed 16% of the H1B applications as in 2025? That seems in line with a hiring freeze and subsequent layoff.
This is just ragebait.
Since the ai data center cash suck the jobs have dried up… ai productivity gains maybe too, although we’re waiting to see meaningful results there.
From a recruitment perspective it’s still difficult to find experienced candidates with specific skill sets because any job openings get flooded with 10,000 ai generated slop applications that have to be screened by ai and the 10 excellent candidates get lost.
> Oracle [...] has filed thousands of petitions for H-1B visas in the past two fiscal years, even as it lays off thousands of American workers
Oracle is laying off workers of _all_ nationalities, not just Americans. I know people at Oracle with H1B visas that were laid off. Trying to paint it as if they're replacing Americans with foreigners is just unnecessary fear mongering.
However, we are not in the same economy we were 5 years ago. The job market is very tough and the H1B program makes less sense every day.
Why would Americans have to compete with the rest of the world exactly? The purpose of a country is to serve and protect its citizens first, not become a giant open bar for the entirety of humanity.
There is no issue finding talent. There is only an issue finding talent that is willing to work for the too-low pay you're willing to pay.
You didn't even try to read the comments to get a context. You assumed you were being attacked and you need to hate immigrants. You are just being manipulated.
Just trying to understand what context you feel is relevant here...
Even if Oracle is also firing people in India the idea that no American can do these jobs in the US should be challenged.
Let's assume they do need extremely specialised skills for these roles and are struggling to find those skills in a highly educated country like the US so need to look for employees in countries like India, the question you should then be asking is, well, if they couldn't hire from abroad what would they do instead?
Perhaps they would need to give someone who recently graduated a chance? Perhaps they would try to train people working in adjacent fields at Oracle? Maybe they would increase the salary so American's with these skills employed elsewhere would switch jobs?
So can you steal-man why I should be in favour of companies hiring abroad given there are clearly smart and educated people in the US who are looking for work or might be tempted to work for Oracle if they offered better salaries or training?
Can you explain the advantage to the US workers in allowing this?
Oracle is immigrants?
There is no evidence that the alternative party would have done anything about this issue.
It is obvious that both parties are completely detached from the interests of their constituents.
Remember that the Hyundai workers in Georgia were deported at the best of the local union. Right now, foreigners are a large portion of this field's workforce. If you are to join with a union, you will rapidly find that it absorbs the remainder of the workforce through being "a union shop". You will rapidly find that such a union will expand to include all these people. And then they will ask for you to be deported. It wouldn't be the first time. The reason Chinese and Indians couldn't be citizens for a long time is because the predecessor to today's AFL-CIO lobbied to block that.
Choose wisely. The danger is looking you right in the face and saying "I am the danger".
I’m a globalist and fully understand modern disliking of unions.
Understand carefully the consequences of joining a union. Once empowered this is what will happen to you. Keep your eyes wide open. Remember what the Ayatollah did to his young anti-shah allies.