I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

I remember watching the company I worked for in California lay off Americans and replace them with Indians. For all the talk about “prevailing wage” and “shortage of talent,” I just remember seeing it with my own eyes. One guy worked there till he was in his 60’s, built the company’s entire software, yet was kicked to the curb.

I worked for Best Buy. Entire teams fired but first had to train the Indian Accenture replacements. Entirely their right to fire us but don’t you dare say there is a “talent shortage.” There is definitely a talent shortage — of talent willing to work for $20/hour. In the jobs I’m seeing now, what used to be $65/hour jobs are now $48/hour. I remember making $90/hour a few years ago — now similar levels one would be very lucky to find $50/hour for a similar role.

I know H1Bs working at $40/hour for jobs their American counterparts are making $75/hour. They can’t move to higher paying roles at other companies because of the visa.

Also the termed “highly skilled” is an absolute joke. I can teach a person off the street to be “highly skilled” in a few weeks, based on the standard of what “highly skilled” means in H1B.

H1B needs to be highly reformed. It’s the tech equivalent of hiring construction workers from the Home Depot parking lot and paying under the table wages. I am not generally a fan of tariffs, but I suggest a 100% tariff on H1B wages paid by the hiring company. And that tariff would be a sliding scale — the more H1Bs you hire, the higher the tariff. If you need that foreign engineer so badly, paying $100/hour shouldn’t be a hardship. That would incentivize hiring the American/permanent resident at $80/hour. We’d find that “shortage” going away pretty quickly. Drive up the costs of Accenture/Infosys/etc., to make them unattractive. The only reason those companies exist is to provide cheap labor to companies like Best Buy, etc. The money collected from that tariff can be used to fund tax breaks for companies that don’t hire H1Bs. H1B isn’t about highly skilled labor. It’s about “highly” skilled cheap labor.