Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

A core strategic strength of the US over the last century has been that everyone with any talent wants to come here to work, and by and large we’ve let them do so. You can argue how well that’s worked out for us - having worked with a great many extremely talented H1bs in an industry largely built by immigrants, I’d consider it pretty positive - but it damn sure hasn’t worked out well for the countries those talented folks came from.

It's kind of sad to see the accelerated downfall of your country.

This is a double edged sword given that it means there’s less incentive to invest in US public education and fostering our own talent. Instead of brain drain we’re dealing with brain rot.

Looking at the politics in Europe and Asia today, the question of who is allowed in and why is a central point of debate that rages and threatens to tear apart much of the fabric that was built over generations.

Any suggestion that the program is dragging wages down instead of dragging wages up is not just misleading but factually wrong.

I think some people underestimate the power of those willing to migrate to the US.

I’m in my early 40s and moved from Western Europe to the US 11 years ago, and I feel I was the last generation eager to come, the perception of US is changing fast. This is not an H-1B problem but still a parallel one on how to attract people.

The H1B process is unfair to engineers because it drives down their compensation in a way that doesn't affect nurses or welders. If immigration were completely irrespective of profession and based solely around whether the imported laborers get paid enough to contribute more than they receive in taxes/public services, nobody would have any standing to complain about their wages being driven down because every single person benefits in the long run from the economic growth.

As things stand, tech workers and unskilled laborers get screwed by the current status quo because they don't reap the benefit of cheaper goods and services in all the other industries, but everyone else benefits from cheaper electronics/software and landscaping/housekeeping/food service while their wages grow.

You're not wrong on paper, the current immigration practices are just screwy.

EDIT - The hard statistical proof that most of the H-1Bs are tech workers:

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...

But that is your story you believe, consider that the parent commenter has the exact same (mirrored) mindset.

A useful segue to avoid you or them "being resigned": given that you say you're "skeptical", what would be the minimal proof you'd consider valid for you to change your mind?

Second, Indians have to pay their bosses to get a job. Their real pay is at least $20k lower. And there's far worse as well.

Often, the person may not have been as productive, happy, or well compensated in their own country.

Also, over time, some of those people make money in the US and take that, their knowledge and skills and go back home to share there. Everyone is better off.

I was discussing this elsewhere, and dug up something I wrote 11 years ago, and I think I'm still pretty happy with it:

https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...

Also, those numbers are bumped up by bigtech who doesn't discriminate by visa, so pays in bodyshops are even lower and tech salaries are way higher than that in US.

In such a world, why wouldn't you see 1. foreign R&D companies, 2. indexed into a thriving foreign equities market, 3. gathering the interest of domestic investors who want to diversify beyond domestic investments, by 4. moving their money and/or investing in domestic proxy investments?

I say this as a Canadian whose managed mutual-fund holdings are apparently largely composed of foreign (mostly American) proxy equities — and who has met many Canadian-based VCs who don't do much investment into Canadian companies. If not for talent immigration, the American investment landscape would probably look similar!

The employment environment in Silicon Valley has been extremely strange since 2022. I haven’t been able to find a job in my field since then, despite being at the top of my game. I’m practically bankrupt and currently making ends meet in a minimum wage job.

How are Americans better off in this scenario?

H1B holders are paid less for the same job, keeping wages down.

A huge reason we have so many unicorns is because doing business and scaling in the US is easier than EU or other places.

A huge part of why the Manhattan Project was successful was also because of substantial brain drain from Europe. I think Scott Galloway wrote about this or may have popularized it.

Once you are breaking the $100k mark and want to only save costs, you are better off opening a GCC in Eastern Europe, Israel, or India, which is what most companies started doing once remote work became normalized in the early 2020s.

All this did is make a free "Thousand Talents" program for India, especially in chemical, petroleum, biopharma, and biochemical engineering - industries where the delta between US and India salaries aren't significant but the talent gap in the US is real.

There are much smarter ways to crack down on H1B abuse by consultancies - this ain't it.

Edit: can't reply, but here's why this is dumb

Assuming I am in Dallas (a fairly prominent domestic IT services hub) and hiring an H1B employee.

In Dallas, a wage around $95k base is fairly standard based on JPMC, DXC, and C1's salaries in the area.

That $95k an employee is has an additional 18% in employer required taxes and withholdings. Add to that an additional 5-10% for retirement account and insurance plans. That $95k employee became around $115k-125k.

Once salaries start breaking into the 6 figure mark, that 23-35% in overhead starts adding up very fast. On top of that visa processing before this rule costed around $15-20k in additional legal fees on the employer's side.

If I'm at the point where I'm paying a low six figure salary, I'm better off opening an office in Warsaw or Praha or Hyderabad where I can safely pay $50k-60k in base to get top 10% talent while getting a $10k-20k per head tax credit over a 3-5 year period depending on the amount I invest building a GCC because my after tax cost at that point becomes $50-60k per employee. These credits tend to require a $1M investment, and with the proposed H1B fee, this made that kind of FDI much easier to justify than it was before.

At least with the current status quo, if I was hiring an ML Engineer at MS or an SRE at Google (a large number of whom are H1Bs as well), I could justify hiring within the US, but adding an additional $100K filing fee just gives me no incentive at all to expand headcount domestically.

You don't use the stick if you also don't have the carrot.

> You are not taking into account section 174, It takes you 15 years to depreciate foreign salary vs first year

That's a rounding error now that it costs $100K to renew or apply for an H1B visa. And for larger organizations breaking the mid-8 figures in revenue mark, section 174 changes never had an impact one way or the other - it was mostly local dev shops and MSPs that faced the brunt of the section 174 onslaught.

> Honestly, even Germany is probably better bang-for-the-buck than Hyderabad

Germany needs to severely reduce employer contributions and taxes to become cost competitive against Warsaw, Praha, or Hyd for software and chip design jobs.

That said, this is a net positive for Germany's biotech, mechanical, biopharma, and other engineering industries that aren't software or chip design related.

I've worked with some extraordinary H1B sw engineers. I would say the ratio of great to mediocore is about the same as for non-H1B sw engineers.

But also, the H1b median salary for a software engineer is ~$120k, which is almost identical to that of the US median overall - so all of this hullabaloo seems pretty groundless.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

H1B visa abuse by consultancies and mass recruiters is a real issue, but this now incentivized companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Pfizer, Cheveron etc to expand their Indian offices.

Edit: can't reply

> Was there any reason for them not to? It's cheaper than H1B anyways.

Spending an additional $10-15k in visa filing fees isn't that big of a deal for an employer who's already paying around 25-35% in withholding and benefits, but at $100K that makes it enough that if you needed to sponsor 10 people on an H1B, you now hit the monetary amount to avail GCC tax rebates and subsidies in most of Eastern Europe and India, where they will give you an additional $10-20k in tax credits and subsidies per head.

Basically, opening a new office abroad just to save on $10-15k of filing fees per employees wasn't worth it, but now that it'll be $100k per employee, the math just shifted.

> Why is this parasitic organization allowed to incorporate?

VC now, not a director anymore. But help me find a new grad with 3-4 years of exploit development and OS internals experience in the US. I can't.

On the other hand, I can in Tel Aviv. There's a reason the entire cybersecurity industry has shifted outside the US.

Large sectors of the US tech scene just lack ANY domestic know-how.

Do you suggest that they check the immigration status and offer to some people lower compensation because of their status?

I don't think being against exploitive mass migration - which by its definition is brain drain of other countries, which every bleeding hearter likes to ignore - is the same saying no one should ever immigrate ever.

An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.

I also am not convinced that those statistics alone can be used to draw such a conclusion; there's more to it than that.

If you want to invest in another country, that's a big change. There's certainly opportunity there, but without knowledge and contacts, it can be very hard to get things done.

One track to investing in foreign R&D is foreign nationals come and work in the US to earn skills, knowledge, and capital, and then they take those earnings and invest them in their country of origin, maybe living here or there.

> you'd have to do a study to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the US, and that an increased supply of workers didn't drag down salaries, either short or long-term.

If the median H1B for software is exactly the same as the overall median, it makes you wonder if the median would be different if the H1B was not an option available to employers.

That's largely a myth, though. The vast majority of smart, driven people have no path to lawfully immigrate to the US.

By a wide margin, the main immigration pathway are family visas (i.e., marriages and citizens bringing in relatives). H-1B visas are a comparatively small slice that's available via a lottery only to some professions and some backgrounds - and the process is basically gamed by low-wage consultancies, with a large proportion of the rest gobbled up by a handful of Big Tech employers. And that's before we even get to the fact that H-1B doesn't necessarily give you a path to permanent residency, depending on where you're from.

For most people who aren't techies, the options are really very limited, basically "be exceptionally wealthy", "be a celebrity", or "be one of the world's foremost experts on X".

And its an easy argument:

The Manhattan Project engaged thousands of scientists, but over 16 notable principal scientists (with major published credits) were foreign-born and either retained their citizenship or became naturalized U.S. citizens only after escaping persecution or war in Europe.

As of 2025, about 10-12 CEOs of the top 50 Fortune 500 (F50) companies were born outside the United States, representing roughly 20-25% of F50 CEOs. This number has grown over the past two decades, reflecting increasing diversity among leadership at America's largest corporations.

Nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies in 2025—specifically 44%—were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, meaning the original founders were not born in the United States or were the first generation after immigration.

These are just three major examples.

What is "mid level talent" though? you're not getting that data from H1B wage filings, they're factually under-reporting compensation.

Base salary, not total comp, the first year

I don't buy the argument that there's a big shortage of talent for these jobs in the US, especially in a job market like there is right now.

Having said that, I do know quite a few people who have been in the US on H-1B visas, and many of them are exceptionally skilled. I think those are the kinds of people we should be granting H-1B visas. I also know quite a few H-1B holders who I wouldn't ever want to work with again, and there are too many people in that group. Not saying there aren't plenty of US citizens I wouldn't want to work with ever again, but that's a separate issue.

> Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.

So, it seems that if we remove H1b workers and assume that the demand would have stayed the same, then domestic salaries should have been higher. Assuming, of course, that companies won’t simply offshore.

Have you ever considered what causes income inequality? Maybe policy that favors globalist, ownership class over salaried workers? H1B in it's current form favors owners/managers over workers! We are saying the same thing. We have to analyze the causes of income inequality in order to solve it.

I will leave you with one last thought: the states with the lowest gini co-efficient are the ones that have been more conservative over time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

policy matters!

The upperbound for middle class pay is over $100k in all states, approaching $200k in a couple.

There is also EB with National Interest Waiver - including for profession like Doctors and such.

Not to mention a lot of employment based visa, if you work for a US employer - L1, EB1/2 directly etc...

There isn't a permanent resident visa for Driven people - but you can get entrepreneur visas if you run a profitable business.

You're just passing off your own speculation as authoritative, and you didn't even read my comment to comprehension.

I didn't say we need less immigration in the tech sector. I said it hurts tech workers when there's a deflationary effect on their earnings but not the goods and services they pay for, and hence the same immigration practices should apply to every industry.

On paper, you would think this is the case, but in practice 64% of H1-B workers are in IT and 52% are programmers:

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...

Again, it stands to reason that if the deflationary effect on tech workers' salaries is disproportionate to the deflationary effect on all the other goods and services they pay for, then tech workers are worse off from the H1-B program. I've seen claims less ironclad than this accepted as fact in peer-reviewed life sciences-related research.

Your comment is just another classic HN case of speculation masquerading as authority.

Was there any reason for them not to? It's cheaper than H1B anyways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305623

Most of the companies that are paying salaries could (and already do!) have offices in other jurisdictions where they could hire the same talent.

Better to bring this talent onshore, where the wages are taxed, than force these companies to hire from satellite offices?

It doesn't make much financial sense for companies to stop sourcing talent globally just because they can't be brought onshore, especially given enough time.

Purely anecdotal, but for me personally this wouldn't change who or how I hire, just the location.

1. An American company benefited from their labor

2. American consumers benefited from the goods / services they contributed to providing

3. American citizens benefited from the services provided by the taxes they pay

4. Other American businesses benefited from their patronage

I think my HN karma right now would be over 1,000,000 if it wasn't for all the downvotes each time I've said this same thing. I ballpark 95.87% of all SWEs are mediocre-to-less-than-that. I have 30 years of experience behind me to back this up :)

This "10x engineer" jazz is really just someone who is good-to-very-good compared to the rest of the crew

https://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/publicrandd-aspx/

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20246

However, which startup can afford an additional cost of 100,000 dollars for a fresh PhD graduate who is essential for their niche?

The true economic benefit of the H1B visa program for the US economy lies in the long tail of smaller firms that require a limited number of specialized personnel, which, by definition, is scarce.

Lower supply tends to drive the price up.

Well sure, it depends what the counterfactual is. If those countries just physically prevented the people from leaving, and nothing more, I wouldn't expect that countries' outcomes to improve. But what the countries suffering from brain drain presumably want is for there to be attractive opportunities for those skilled workers in their own country.

Of course - they're connected. Taking advantage of labor is a big part of income inequality, including the way H1B is used/abused.

The stats you provide here don't support your claim.

H1B visa holders can be paid more on average while still having a downward effect on wages...

Imagine that some car model costs $200,000 to buy in the US. However, an entrepreneur realises they can can import the same car from a poorer country for just $100,000 then sell it in the US for less than the manufacturer themselves. The manufacturer finds out about this and says, "hey! you're selling my car for less", but the importer says, "no, actually, you'll find the median car in the US is $50,000 so I'm technically increasing car prices".

So what you're saying could be wrong in two ways... One you could be wrong in the sense that even if it does increase median wages, that doesn't mean it necessary increases the median wage of US citizens if now a significant percentage the best employment opportunities are going to H1B visa holders instead of citizens.

But secondly, and the point I was trying to make with the car analogy, is that you could be wrong about the average wages going up too if H1B visa holders are taking jobs which would pay even more were it not for HB1 visas. So if the average wage of a SWE in the US is say $150k, but the average H1B visa holder is being paid $120k, H1Bs are clearly not "dragging wages up".

And realistically it's far more likely H1B visa holders suppress wages given how relatively high US wages are.

I'll end this comment by saying that personally I think this idea that giving the best opportunities to immigrants is probably directly wrong for many reasons. Of course, allowing in businesses and individuals who will create jobs makes a lot of sense, but what you really want is the best opportunities going to your own citizens, then to bring in cheap labour to fill the crappy jobs citizens don't really want to do, but are now increasingly doing when they leave university like working in a bar or becoming a barista. If there's a great job a company can't fill with the domestic workforce perhaps they should train someone for that role or take a risk on a recent graduate like in the old days?

Companies already do a lot of offshoring - you think any rational actor in this space that was hiring H1Bs isn't going to simply relocate them to more friendly jurisdictions for immigration?

On top of this, these are workers who would have otherwise paid tax in the US!

I might be wrong, fully willing to cede the point, but this whole thing going on is more than _just this point_.

The flipside is that every american industry becomes less competitive globally without the H1b guys.

H1B visa is just a rank and file worker with a certain skill.

But if we were to take your argument at face value and I generally do because that's what the economists say and makes sense to me, why don't other countries encourage this specific type of immigration? China, for example, or perhaps Japan or Korea? What about New Zealand or Switzerland?

Yet again, we have classic HN speculation masquerading as authority.

Should software developer salaries be comparable to accountants or to surgeons? That's an arbitrary value judgment.

Software engineers have less purchasing power than they would without the H-1B visa program, and that's indisputable. 64% of the visas go to IT workers and 52% go specifically to programmers, which implies beyond all shadow of a doubt that their salaries decrease further than the cost of the goods and services they pay for.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...

It's all there, black and white, clear as crystal. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir!

For H-1B see report here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306919

This is precisely what HR and hiring managers at FAANG companies are instructed and trained to avoid.

First, I would like you to reconsider 'high income' and putting $120k in that category. It was a good chunk of change. In this year of our lord 2025, it is not. It is, for my region anyway, barely acceptable middle class income.

Creating low cost alternatives and taking advance of lax laws is part of that. If you can import 100k skilled workers per year under a scheme that gives you more power over them. Then you also offshore 300k jobs per year to countries with weaker protections.

It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306919

1) Hiring manager to have incentive to hire quality talent at the most economical price

2) Foreign talent be more desperate than domestic talent

The effect is practically guaranteed even if there is exactly zero intent by the hiring manager or any conscious 'discrimination.' Incentives beget results and people may not ponder how they got there, and they often don't.

Unless you change (1) or (2) all the discrimination legislation, lawsuits, and 'training' in the world isn't worth the paper it is written on.

But there's a parallel push around taxing American firms using foreign labor (https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...).

If multiple new policies are put in place at the same time, then... I dunno... it seems harder to predict...

It's corruption of the government.

Now, by the way I understand H-1B, $100k still seams cheap for essentially getting a slave.

(Or, if we really lean into the "alternate history" bit, then the US might not have so many rich investors to begin with, as those investors would have been the ones living in that other global R&D center country, who became ludicrously wealthy when their investments into the domestic R&D companies in that other country bore fruit.)

This is a pet peeve of mine, but there is an english name for that city and it's Prague.

There is no point in using the local spelling because it adds no clarity, is less obvious to pronounce for any reader and the locals are not really gonna thank you for doing this either. Just seems like a form of light cultural white-knighting to me.

You are not even consistent because Warsaw is not how locals spell that.

But only a tiny sliver of what you would consider successful, skilled people can qualify for O-1. To my original point: if you're "merely" hard-working and good at something, you - as a general rule - have no lawful pathway to immigrate to the US.

Here's another way to look at it: let's say that in any country, roughly 10% of people fall into the category of "talented and hard-working" - not superstars, but the kind of people who would conceptually enrich the economy. Worldwide, that's probably what, 400 million adults? Further, let's say that about 10% would be interested in living in the US. And before all the EU folks sneer at that: that's probably a big underestimate, because a good chunk of the world is living in places with a much lower standard of living. So that's 40 million who probably want to come. And the total number of employment visas is ~100k/year. We aim for the global top <0.1%.

It's great if you only root for the US, but taking more global perspective, let's have other countries improve their situation as well. There are almost 200 or so countries, I am ok with them improving their economy using their equivalent of H1-B programs.

This is a golden opportunity for others to step in an eat Americans' lunch so to speak, let's see if they capitalize on it.

Short term - shareholders win, long term - everyone loses except the country of origin, where they can bring the knowledge back and develop their economy.

It's like outsourcing, just the foreign workers are onshore.

There could be some rare edge case where you are undercut by a direct competitor, but overall America is much richer with H1Bs that without them.

On the other hand, those working for WITCH companies…

And trust me, I’m in no way “anti minority”. Not only are some of my best friends minorities - so are my parents…

O1 is unlikely to be granted to a student who has not graduated yet. What are they going to show for evidence? Manuscripts in preparation? Or class grades?

Not so straight forward. Ambitious people leave underdeveloped countries because there are little opportunities. It's not like they are going to build same great product there as in California.

Very chilling to think about.

Do we need more Facebooks and AirBNBs?

Sure, investors could just park their money in what few dumb domestic options there are. That's the "patriotic" approach, and in less-aggressive markets, you'll see some investors [esp. big institutional investors] building the hedge parts of their portfolios out of these kinds of investments. But when the only domestic options are dumb/boring, any "smart money" investor will either take their money and leave the country for greener pastures, or they'll pick up the skills required to play in foreign markets.

This was true before and after today.

Put another way, if all the H-1B jobs really can be offshored quickly and easily the way so many Indians and anti-Trump people here and elsewhere confidently predict, *that would have happened already*.

And how are “they” planning on determining who is “truly exceptional”? And what makes you think the “truly exceptional” ones are still going to have any interest in coming here when they see what happens to the people who the current regime deems “not exceptional”?

I sure as hell wouldn’t come to the US knowing I may be deported to a third world prison if I post the wrong thing online.

And your self-classification is questionable, but that is very common. Maybe a good trigger to experience gratefulness and satisfaction for the economical situation you are in?

A $120k job in any region of the country is 'high income'. You are feeling a different effect, which is that we have designed our country such that even high income people often do not feel economically secure.

It did seem in the past that there was much more of an all-hands-on-deck attitude towards education throughout US corporate activities, more broadly focused on the general fields the various companies valued the most. I suspect this fall off is very real, but don't actually know if that is just my impression or if there is a concrete effect from modern economic structures.

It's an important enough question it should definitely be studied and taken into account in policy.

However I can't agree with your conclusion that "Immigration helps the countries [sic] top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country". That requires meta studies that I have never seen to prove it is so. I could cautiously accept that "some types of immigration rarely help corresponding sections of the local population" much more than such a blanket judgement. Overall, it is just not true that economics is zero sum. It doesn't have to be. An entire people can in fact flourish.

But yes, as far as I know companies would usually offer an H1B applicant lower salary. They know the candidate will need visa sponsorship because the candidate has to say up front (usually in the first conversation) if they are authorized to work in the US. If the companies know they will have to undertake costly sponsorship, and as far as I know employment law leaves them quite free to offer a lower salary: foreign nationals are not a protected class so salary discrimination on the basis of who will need visa sponsorship is just to be expected in the current system...

If they offer below-market (for American workers) salaries and get no sufficiently-qualified domestic candidates, as they're required to promise they do, it's no surprise to anyone that they're hiring a ton of H-1Bs. They want that because they want to pay less.

I don't blame them for doing what's fiscally advantageous for the shareholders up till now -- but I think I'll be glad to see this change implemented, if it is, because I know companies write on those forms "domestic talent not found" when they know the truth is "domestic talent not available at the wages we'd like to pay".

Cap-exempt H1B holders working for universities are restricted to switching only to other cap-exempt employers, but even then I never felt I had to work 60+ hours a week.

The incentives ensure that it will happen with zero intent, and probably without the people doing it even realize they're doing it. It's not illegal to see someone, think of them as a 'sucker' but not even realize why, then lowball them, which is far more likely than for a person to actually consciously confront themselves they may be a racist.

In any case, even if they know it's illegal, it's not so easy to enforce, the fact that people get successfully sued or jailed a small fraction of the time isn't going to be some solace.

The only way to actually solve it is to remove the incentive in place, namely either the market pressure to get the best developer at the cheapest price or the vulnerability of being an immigrant.

The whole premise of your original contention was that we should measure like-profession salaries to see whether or not there is an effect. Then when no effect was shown, you switched it up in favor of an argument that (again, incorrectly) predicts that such an effect can't be shown at all. That's not good faith discussion.

[1] Immigrant labor is arriving, by definition, in a pre-existing market. If immigrants can't be hired more cheaply than existing labor, by definition they can't be pulling wages down.

Honestly, even Germany is probably better bang-for-the-buck than Hyderabad, but Hyderabad has the volume and the offices.

You're not locked into one employer on an H1B. Once you are here it is possible to switch jobs relatively easily since you do not need to go through the lottery again.

> as far as I know employment law leaves them quite free to offer a lower salary

"The H-1B employer must pay its H-1B worker(s) at least the “required” wage which is the higher of the prevailing wage or the employer’s actual wage (in-house wage) for similarly employed workers."

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-require...

The elephant in the room is that many of these highly successful people who have brought great economic advantage to the US over the years happen to have brown skin.

As for why this policy is being adopted: sometimes an elephant is just an elephant. The huge price increase hurts brown people (mostly), and possibly curbs immigration. It will play well with a certain segment of Americans.

There are many subtleties to the H1-B visa debate, but I don’t think they are at play in this policy change.

H1B program == leverage over the H1B workers due to the employment tie-in to residence, leverage over other non-H1B workers as well, due to the wider talent pool at LOWER wages.

I don't know whether Trump is doing is good, but the H1B program helps Owners more than it helps Workers.

As of now, both the K12 system and college education seem in freefall in terms of quality and applicability to careers. No doubt those companies will devote their money to lobbying to keep hiring H1Bs instead of training the talent they need here, since they're just profit-optimizing functions, rather than humans with morals.

WITCH companies are not hiring the best or the brightest. Their entire value play is contracting out mediocre developers at mediocre wages.

A few select tech and financial services companies, and their shareholders, benefit the most from the program.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...

https://www.pewresearch.org/?attachment_id=201754

Then that $120,000 salary median can still represent a 50% undercut of similar Urban salaries for a profession.

I'm going to contend that that is the case. But I don't have time to chase down the statistics

Other countries are free not to want the things that Silicon Valley talents generate. More for us!

Now you can argue you would prefer that those 200,000 jobs go to Americans, but on the scale of the overall economy, it really doesn’t matter. What’s far more important is the massive impact those 800,000 software engineers have on the rest of the economy. Four million IT jobs, the entire finance and healthcare and retail industries that are propped up on technology built by those people; whole technology companies like Uber or doordash that create entirely new labor markets.

Risk 25% of that capacity on the idea that we would rather have those industries built solely on domestically-grown engineering talent? Why would that be a good tradeoff?

I'm from the US, but lived in Europe for quite a while, and my kids have dual citizenship. I think that people moving to places where they are better off is a good thing.

The ethics of emigration is an interesting area that's under explored, especially in non-emergency scenarios. We have obligations to our own societies, for example, but how this affects emigration requires clarification.

This is not just a hypothetical, this is something that already happens when companies are looking to optimize their tax burden. Corporate structuring and income shifting are big businesses in their own right and serve to find the minimum amount of changes required to be able to legally reclassify income.

In the case of this bill specifically, in the unlikely even it passes, a simple corporate inversion will solve this problem. Instead of the US company owning foreign subsidiaries, the structure is inverted: the parent company becomes foreign, which will own a domestic US corporation. When the multinational wants to hire or retain offshore talent, it simply pays out from the parent company. Again these aren't hypotheticals, these are real tax avoidance strategies that are already in place and are well-trodden paths.

You can come up with an infinite amount of regulation to try to halt this (this problem is also called tax base erosion) but it ends up doing more harm than good - eventually you end up with a tax code and regulatory environment so complex that that alone disincentivizes new investment.

The goal is not just to retain existing capital and talent by forcing them to be locked in - it's to compete for the next dollar, the next startup, the next factory - new investment will follow the path of least resistance, while older companies eventually close up shop due to one reason or another.

If your worldview is one of "We already have the best capital and talent, so we don't need to bother to compete to acquire new capital and talent", the world you live in will stagnate and wither with respect to societies that will bend over backwards for this.

We would have to filter for these more. In reality the majority of H1B visa are issued to companies like Infosys or Tata who often have below average people.

Though there's pretty hard limitations on what you can transfer with - it has to be the same sector, similar limitations on minimum salary, and requires work on the new employer's part to move the H1B to them (so you can't keep it quiet, and it's another barrier as it's non-zero cost for lawyers etc. to actually do that).

If 150,000 people buy the app, then I have ~$150,000 of revenue. I can pay a programmer $100,000 a year and have $50,000 left over. 150,000 people benefited from the app.

Now say I have to pay an additional $100,000 visa fee for my programmer. My cost of $200,000 is less than my revenue of $150,000. I don't build the app. I don't get $50,000. 150,000 people who would have bought the app don't benefit from it. The biggest loss is to the Americans who don't get to buy the app.

There are other possibilities, maybe I increase the price to $1.99 or I hire an American. We can see that those are both bad. The former extracts $150,000 extra dollars from American consumers. Since unemployment is low for Americans and an American programmer can't have two jobs at once, the later just means that some other project that the American programmer would have worked on is not completed.

But yes, if that path doesn't exist, I don't think that global companies are going to start hiring American, they're going to continue hiring globally but take the path of least resistance towards bringing this talent onboard.

https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...

https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...

If you divide the GDP by the number of employed people (including self-employed and entrepreneurs), you get a bit over $180k/person. The median full-time income is a bit over $60k. In other words, as a gross simplification, the mean worker earns 80% more than the median worker.

The comparable numbers for Germany are a ~€100k, ~€45k, and 35%. If something is hollowing out the American middle class, it might be the high earners rather than the capital.

The American electric car market is never kickstarted, none of the American employees of SpaceX or Tesla are hired, there is no space renaissance.

Keeping out Elon Musk is somewhat good for United Launch Alliance and for Ford, but it's worse for all the Americans who have to buy worse cars and pay more for satellite internet.

https://layoffs.fyi/

Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45306539 - September 2025

Ask HN: Recent unemployed CS grad what do I do? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43211153 - March 2025

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-tech...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/it_job_market_july/

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/job-market-report-c...

https://www.axios.com/2025/07/06/unemployment-job-market-edu...

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1kcc40j/what_happ...

https://apnews.com/article/college-graduates-job-market-unem...

A better test may be comparing company performance worldwide instead of only in the F500. That's a different list, the Global 500.

That's a weird definition for "middle class", there are only 65k H1b visas issued every year. If you really are talking about the middle 60% or whatever of all workers, immigrants on H1b's are irrelevant noise. At most, these visas might be seen to impact specific professions (tech in particular, lots of doctors too) that most people don't consider representative of the "middle class".

https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-e-chapter-...

It's not just a supply and demand equation; it's a fundamentally different environment that changes the social payoff for mentoring, networking, and building a reputation.

Ultimately despite all the propaganda trying to convince us that diversity is inherently beneficial, we are trading economic benefits for social costs. So we need to carefully restrict migration to make sure the economic benefits are actually there.

If an employee is exceptional and a skilled unicorn wrangler... 100K is nothing.

Importing cheap foreign labor to undercut unions and lower wages is one of the spokes of the wheel used by capital to reduce the power of labor (and always has been).

You can look at Pew's survey here: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/1-the-h....

The upper-income tier grew from 14% -> 21% as the middle-income tier shrank from 61% to 50%. To be perfectly fair, the lower-income tier class did also increase from 25% to 29%. The story is complicated.

What study does one "have to do" to support _this_ claim?

Why's that? The jobs and lives of individuals in those countries are better than the alternatives present otherwise to them. Globalization may hurt certain America jobs but certainly countries like India is grateful for all of the engineering roles.

High consumerism is harmful to the environment but I don't think the link between offshoring jobs is direct to environmental harms and certainly it's helpful to giving more job opportunites.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3lz...

This compares medians across to huge populations. I have seen many H1Bs making less and working more.

U-6 (the most inclusive unemployment rate) is 8.1 as of this comment, the highest it’s been in the last five years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE

So, start cutting labor visas until the unemployment rate improves. The domestic labor clearly exists.

Maybe at FAANGs what you say is true. But at every place I've been when H1Bs ended up added (normally via consultancy or outsourcing) it was always to cut costs. And the only costs we were cutting was staff.

Funny things is the agencies/consultancies/outsource companies all solds us on it would cut costs when the only thing changed was labor. But apparently they could cut costs without cutting labor costs? How does that work?

People with actually talent and intelligence realise how messed up the USA is (and has been for some time) and prefer things like healthcare and gun control.

And if they really want the lack of work life balance and/or high paid roles, they can consult from US company like I do. Now I get the money, but I live in a decent country.

I don't think there is any amount of money you could offer me to move to the USA. Well ok, maybe when it gets to $10 million / year I would have to start considering it.

In reality, this will just be used to show fealty to trump and a fastlane visa will be opened to companies willing to join the fascists.

Again, good faith argument against something that isn't bewing done with a reasonably democratic outcome.

You can't really expect a company hiring PhD's in a niche field to show that they couldn't have spent 7 years training an American for the work.

Suppose I'm not an American--like plenty of HN commenters--or alternatively that (as in reality) I am an American but I have good reasons to think that the personal benefit I derive from the presence of immigrants is greater than the cost to me as an individual, even were I to concede more generic economic arguments about wage competition. Then... why am I supposed to prioritize the interests of American tech workers over foreign immigrants?

I don't in general endorse an "I got mine, screw you" approach, nor one that says "hey GDP is going up so screw the losers", but if someone else is taking exactly that attitude just with a nationalistic inflection, it's hard to extend them a lot of empathy.

Instead they'll be made unemployed by AI and a crashing tech economy.

But that isn't the point of this. It's leverage - much like the tariffs.

Big companies making significant donations to the Donald Trump Presidential Aggrandisement Fund will receive carve-outs and exclusions.

It's a grift, like everything else done by this benighted administration.

most of us here have been hiring managers in the bay area so we have been exposed to this. My exposure was you are fairly locked into one company. I had friends who had to go home abruptly when fired. We would have to buy their cars so we could sell them slower at non-fire sale prices for them. But this was late 90s through early 2000s. Maybe it's different.

For example by implementing a $100 000 fee for their H-1B visas, which ensures that companies will only use those visas to contract truly exceptional talent. That's a very small price to pay for a company to be able to hire a person who is among the greatest in the world in her field.

I don't quite agree that much with causes: high housing, Healthcare & med bankruptcy, and high education costs (correlating with high housing) are bigger factors. However non tech/lawyer/doctors have been adversely effected by the fact they've seen no real income gains in 25 years overall.

Now, the top 5% and corps need to be made to pay more taxes... thats another subject.

A couple elderly people i know are quite concerned Trump will take their snap benefits, or decrease medicaid/care etc while the tax reductions were given on the bb bill. Thats not acceptable.

As you said, the story is complicated. Even in 2015, a decade ago:

> There is one other stark difference: only upper-income families realized notable gains in wealth from 1983 to 2013.

During the period of analysis then, either consumption among the lower two tiers eliminated their available savings ability, or the real purchasing power over this period declined, leading to the same effect.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec...

    The occupation requires:

    Theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge; and
    Attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree in a directly related* specific specialty (or its equivalent) as a minimum for entry into the occupation in the United States.
    
    The position must also meet one of the following criteria to qualify as a specialty occupation:

    A U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, is normally the minimum entry requirement for the particular occupation;
    A U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, is normally required to perform job duties in parallel positions among similar organizations in the employer’s industry in the United States;
    The employer, or third party if the beneficiary will be staffed to that third party, normally requires a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent, to perform the job duties of the position; or
    The specific duties of the offered position are so specialized, complex, or unique that the knowledge required to perform them is normally associated with the attainment of a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in a directly related specific specialty, or its equivalent.*

Chances are this was done as a seasonal H-2B non-agricultural worker (likely under a seasonal need)

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

    To qualify for H-2B nonimmigrant classification, the petitioner must establish that:
    There are not enough U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available to do the temporary work.
    Employing H-2B workers will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers.

In my experience recruiters saw H1B transfers as routine but would ghost me once I explained that I required a new visa sponsorship since I worked or a cap-exempt employer and could not simply transfer.

That's not to say you shouldn't do it! But the problem is elsewhere.

This is especially true for immigration that is not tied to employment. If you can choose to only take the top, which America mostly could as it is the most desired immigration country in the world, you would prioritize the top.

If there's a limited amount of spots, why won't you prioritize the superstars over just talented and hard working?

So the top 0.1% of the total population, that's likely a good deal (on top of the employment oriented visa which have less of a strain on the economy).

That’s certainly one version of how events may have been different - a sort of “It’s a Wonderful Life” scenario. (Though comparing Elon Musk to the kind and ethical George Bailey would be quite a stretch!) But it’s not inconceivable that other possibilities would have emerged.

People who are purely consumers (usually living of real estate gains or entitlements) are of course a huge part of the population, and benefit from everything brining consumer prices down - including cheap labour.

And many people are both consumers and workers, so they are benefitted from lower prices at the same time as they're disadvantaged by lower salaries. If they've already got real estate and the biggest expenses in life paid, they are more interested in lower consumer prices.

Then you have the people who have a much bigger interest in higher salaries than in cheaper consumer goods. Primarily young workers who need to get a foothold in life. For them it is of utmost importance that salaries increase, even though consumer goods get more expensive, because without a foothold in life they have nothing to live for.

We may be reaching the breaking point where Americans view any solution to this problem as worth trying. We’re near 2 generations of flat real income for the vast majority of Americans. When your grandparents are the last generation to remember rising living standards, it’s hard to buy that the system is working for you at all.

Environmentalism is similar. Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets.

You seem to be arguing that globalism makes the world better off. I agree, but that is because pro-labour and pro-environmentalist ideologies are pretty explicit that they aren't trying to maximise the general welfare. A situation where one soul works very hard and happily for little pay making things for everyone else could be a good outcome for everyone (see also: economic comparative advantage). The pro-labour position would resist that outcome on the basis that the labourer is not making very much money. And the environmentalist would probably be unhappy with the amount of pollution that the hard work generates. The globalist would call it a win.

The sheer balls on people to suggest that high absolute value automatically means it is high. And that is before we get to how those jobs are are not even in the same category...

I am going to stop here, because I don't want to get mean.

But, and this is the most important part, just because I am in better situation than most, does not make the overall state of the population that much less shitty.

Am I getting through to you?

It damn sure hasn't worked out well for a lot of talented, perpetually underemployed (many deep in perpetual debt) US kids. And I'm pretty sure that what those talented folks learn here in the US has made its way back to those countries, considering (e.g.) the level of competition we see from Asia these days.

Are they underpaid, or are they swimming in cash to buy up all the expensive housing? Make up your mind.

https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/home-affordability-in-c...

No, we aren't! We have statistics on this (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). Median real income is up substantially since 40-50 years ago, depending on what you count as a generation. And we have stories and records of what life was like in the 1970s, when 80% of households had to hand wash dishes and 50% had to line-dry clothes. The reason people believe living standards haven't risen since their grandparents' day is that they get false nostalgia bait depictions of how a typical person lived in their grandparents' day.

(What is true, and what I'm sure contributes to the power of the nostalgia bait, is that real income stagnated with the dot-com bubble and didn't hit a sustained rise again until the mid-late 2010s.)

So sure, while the fewer jobs that they can fill could have higher wages (not a given, because lack of labor can stunt or kill companies) there could be much fewer people employed overall, which is clearly bad overall.

Of course, that assumes there is enough room for companies to grow. There are strong indications (e.g. the various labor and unemployment surveys) that this is the case in the US. In fact, there is a credible theory that the reason the US managed the inflation crisis so well was due to the immigration crisis.

I elaborated more (along with a couple of relevant studies) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308311

What?

https://www.uschamber.com/economy/the-state-of-housing-in-am...

"The shortage of housing can be attributed to a range of regulatory and policy failures. These include burdensome permitting processes, outdated zoning regulations that dictate everything from lot sizes to parking requirements, complex legal frameworks, price controls, and restrictive financial regulations."

The problem (for them) is that pay scales (and cost of living) in that area are above average. A friend of my son got a job there about 8 years ago and it paid about 63k plus benefits, whereas the average home depot employee makes about 32k. No idea what it’s like post COVID.

See also Understanding H-1B Minimum Salary Requirements for Eligibility - https://day1cpt.org/news/understanding-h-1b-minimum-salary-r...

So... if you see it, report it. https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...

And there are actions on it when it is caught.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/two-executives-plead...

Ignoring visa fraud is one of the ways that it becomes established and in turn makes it harder for the companies that are following the rules to be successful.

The prospect of a $100k/year/employee visa tax makes opening an office in Europe so much more compelling.

I guess the people who can't be offshored will see their salaries go up so that's cool?

While you are correct that real wages are up around 25%, productivity has nearly doubled. While various consumer goods, and technology have seen large improvements - ignoring the measurable and qualitative ways that affording basic aspects of life have become more difficult is not wise.

Sorry for hijacking, but this is quite possibly one of the funniest American poverty markers around.

This is if you believe that lower wages for high skill work is not an issue.

However high migration rates lower social trust, this is well studied.

If you take a smaller example, hiring internationally vs domestically. If you have to go domestic then you might have to settle for a less ideal qualification, requiring more training.

This is repeated everywhere, so companies that train better are more likely to succeed. Leading to conditions that encourage upskilling for locals overall.

Importing people short circuits that idea.

The admin has been cutting billions in funding to universities which makes this argument easier.

Need an expert in arithmetic combinatorics? Well Terry Tao lost his grants so now you've got to look elsewhere.

https://www.newsweek.com/computer-science-popular-college-ma...

Obviously there is not going to be a drop of 200k overnight, but I think the graduates of CS will be thankful there are more opportunities for them. These opportunities will drive more students to take CS classes in the US.

I'm in New Zealand, which is far east of Japan, but still a western country.

Sure it's sound to argue that wages would be higher with more constraint supply.

BUT: The network effect of all SWE talent from across the globe moving to the US is also huge.

Probably, you'd have a smaller overall tax base without H1B. Make no mistake most countries would like to keep their H1B expats :)

If you really wanted to grow US supply of engineers, you'd have to start by fixing the education system, making it cheaper, and then wait 5 years.

This could be a tactic to force lower end to go home and accept a lower salary at the same company for their same role.

up or out. or in this cause, over or out...

I don't believe for even an instant that there is a significant amount of immigration happening to bring in people who are that specialized

Some, maybe. But not the vast majority of it

If you don't fix the supply constraints, you'll depress growth.

You could fix the education system - good luck - and then wait 5 years before you cut H1B.

But yes, obviously it depressed wages, which at a certain point is probably a good thing.

Has it ever been better?

Not saying it shouldn't, just that we might have unrealistic expectations.

I have also worked with amazing H1B visa people.

Just make sure they're actually talented.

Now, thanks to better logistics and communications, companies can move jobs to where labor is cheaper. This has pulled billions of people out of poverty, dramatically reduced the price of goods, and generally improved global well-being--but that was at the cost of the 1% of the 1950s, which is to say the American working class. Now, if you work in a factory in the US, you only make a single-digit multiple of what a factory worker in Korea, Mexico, Germany or Italy makes (though you still have a double-digit advantage on much of the world).

It wasn't sustainable to have a tremendously wealthy middle class in a world that was mostly starving. No amount of trade barriers could maintain that: you're relying on a world market with very little competition, and the other 7 billion people aren't going to be content to sit on their hands.

What you want to do instead is to develop new, cutting-edge, high-paying industries, and thereby keep a competitive advantage on the rest of the world. Maybe you could, I dunno, develop top-notch schools to lure all the best and brightest people from around the world to your country, invite them in, encourage them to stay, and get them to innovate and create here rather than elsewhere. That might just result in whole new, massive, high-paying industries that pick up the slack left by your diminished industrial dominance.

Seems like a good idea to me! But hey, instead, you could always try slamming the door shut, chase out all the dirty foreigners, and just rely on your inherent and intrinsic American superiority to carry you forward. I'm sure that'll work just as well.

I’m not saying the system is perfect, we definitely need to work on clearing out these fraudulent consultancies and such. But FAANG H1Bs are good engineers and we would definitely be worse off without them. I much preferred the proposal to only allow H1B after a certain salary threshold of ~200-250k which seems like it would solve the issue.

It’s not because of the other jobs which the H1Bs aren’t even allowed to do abd have seen falling salaries and degrowth.

Global trade as made consumer prices competitive in many things, but those are a big three.

Nostalgia was not at root of my original comment.

Specifically when you say:

>Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets.

We can observe that the Globalist organizations regard not just pollution, but carbon consumption to be something which markets cannot be trusted to manage. Instead they propose top-down regulatory management on a supranational level.

https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/pressbriefings/pages/imo-...

Can you please share your reading material that links H1B software engineers with decline in middle class jobs from this list?