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

Everyone in these threads always points out all sorts of issues with the H1B system, which are mostly true, but it's not like there's a suggestion for a replacement here. This is a de facto shutdown of the program, not a reform. I'd be happy to see a reformed skilled immigration program for the US, but this isn't it.

The US makes up about 4.5% of the global population and it seems silly to think that the FAANG companies and the new AI startups chasing behind them are going to restrict their hiring to this tiny slice of the global talent pool.

The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India, Europe and Canada, which is a net loss for the US.

I myself became a US citizen two years ago after being on a H1B. I was paid the same as all my peers and for all its shortcomings the program worked for me. It stunning to think this has been closed off, killing the main path for skilled immigration into the US.

> This is a de facto shutdown of the program

Is it?

Some AI recruitments have seen 9-figure contracts. $100K is actually a surprisingly well-considered number and would still see the intake of legitimate talents, obviously contingent on the specific details. Indeed, those people wouldn't have to compete with masses of consultant trash and the whole lottery system could be done away with.

$100K actually seems perfectly coherent with forcing the program to winnow down to actual talents. People truly good enough to get the employer to pony up $100K to pull them in -- presuming there isn't some kickback fraud happening -- will truly be the best of the best.

> The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in

Paradoxically the #1 reason H1B employers bring in H1Bs is to bridge offshoring work. Pull in a dozen Indians and they're your bridge to the big Indian office, which is precisely why Infosys, Tata et al are such H1B users.

> Some AI recruitments have seen 9-figure contracts.

These are crazy outliers who would go through a different visa path anyway. US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures. Weirdly O1 visa holder spouses will get an O3 which doesn't allow them to work, making it worse than the H1B/H4 visa for some set of people. (H4s allow spouses to work)

Yeah but no offense if you're paid the same as your peers, you're not necessarily exceptional.

There's literally millions of talented Americans out of work in the tech industry right now while companies continue to hire H1B.

The companies post impossible requirement job ads in obscure locations..to get around the requirements to hire Americans first.

> Yeah but no offense if you're paid the same as your peers, you're not necessarily exceptional.

Says you. I work in Lake Wobegon.

I'm happy you're here but the H1B program needs to slow down in America for a while.

> These are crazy outliers

They are. And in the truly talented spaces there are many at all of the ranges in between.

> US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures

$100k for three to six years seems entirely reasonable if it's really such a critical need.

>The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India

Such offshoring was possible 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*.

Big Tech chose to get elect an anti-immigrant candidate while relying on immigrant labor. Let them burn themselves down.

There's between 5 and 16 million tech workers in the US depending whose definition you use. The tech sector unemployment rate is 2.8% per https://www.comptia.org/en-us/about-us/news/press-releases/t...

That is, at most, less than half a million people in the field and the majority of those jobs aren't the ones looking for overseas hires anyway. If we take CompTIA's number of roughly 5M tech workers it's 140,000 people, not "literally millions."

If you have better numbers, please, let us know.

> This is a de facto shutdown of the program

Is it? $100k per hire isn't much of a cost to pay for large companies. Smaller companies may -- may -- end up having some trouble with this, but consider that $100k often amounts to less than a yearly base salary (and will pretty much always be less than a year of total comp/total employee cost), not to mention the costs of legal staff that they're already paying to deal with this stuff.

What this may do is cause some of the "body shop" consultancies to drop some of their "low end" business, so they'll focus more on targeting positions with higher salaries. That's... probably a good thing.

And yeah, we may see some higher rates of offshoring, but I don't think that will be significant. And I'm not even really convinced: offshoring is already possible, and in strict dollar terms is already cheaper than going through the H-1B process to bring someone to the US. If companies preferred offshoring, they'd be doing it; clearly the already-higher-cost H-1B program is still their preference.

I agree that this isn't going to fix the H-1B visa system, and is not a reform or even a particularly positive step toward a reform, but I think you're overestimating the negative impact. I really don't think this will change things much at all.

Out of curiosity, why do you believe that's the case?

I think there are certainly abuses of the system, but we should be focusing on stamping out that abuse, not just generally "slowing it down". A $100k price tag is not going to affect abuse all that much; yes, it will make it less profitable, but probably not to the point where it will fix anything.

As a US-born citizen working in the US, I would rather work with a smart, motivated person from another country than a mediocre person from the US. The problem is that there are a lot of non-exceptional people being brought in on these visas, so let's focus on stopping that as much as we can. And while there are plenty of exceptional people who are US citizens, there are also many more who are mediocre or worse; we should be importing talent in order to raise that average.

>> Is it? $100k per hire isn't much of a cost to pay for large companies.

It is $100k per hire per year.

https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d3969...

The offshoring has started happening in the last 2 years in some of the big companies, by for example opening offices in Eastern Europe.

I suspect it didn't happen before because these companies were more focused on growth than efficiency.

That being said, thanks to AI parts of the big companies are again focused on growth at all cost.

1400 x $100,000 is $140 million, not $1.4 billion

To be clear the H1B is not for exceptional workers. There’s a separate visa category for that.

$100K per hire per year.

That's almost as much as the media H1B salary. It's a huge cost overhead. I don't understand how you can be dismissive of a number almost as high as hiring another engineer.

> The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India, Europe and Canada, which is a net loss for the US.

I’m honestly tired of hearing the argument “if we do X then business will move to another state or out of US”.

Good riddance to the companies that flee from jurisdictions enforcing workers rights, don’t allow exploitation, etc.

The most important thing is protecting people, not fearing the cries of money-making machines.

Particularly in tech, where the network effects and first mover advantages are so strong.

California could introduce a million dollar minimum wage for software engineers, ban electricity on Thursdays, raise corporate taxes to 60% and still probably have more new unicorns founded in the subsequent year than Europe.

The sole purpose of companies hiring foreign workers is to pay less in wages. This results in lower wages for Americans. It’s that simple.

You think 4.5% of the world's population is smarter and works harder than the other 95.5%? Maybe there's other reasons.

> This is a de facto shutdown of the program

No, this is just another tariff. If it costs $200k/yr to employee an H1B Software Engineer, and you expect them to work for you for 3 years, it raises the cost of employment from $200k/yr to $233k/yr. It'll discourage people from applying on the margins, which will bring the application rate down and acceptance rate up.

Don't be so sure of that. Network effects are still subject to tipping points.

The H1B program isn't for exceptionally smart workers.

AP is reporting that It's $100k/yr. So it wouldn't amortize like that.

They'll still end up in the US as they can work a year abroad and come in using L1-B program for 5 years (3 + 2 years on renewal).

L1 has no PWD, no min wage requirements (beyond min wage law in US) and is completely uncapped.

It sounds like this expired each year. So it is 100k extra per year.

It's an annual fee. It would raise the cost to $300k/yr.

https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d3969...

Subsequent year, probably. In later years, no. Massachusetts is case study on this.

The business must go where the talent pool is if the talent can't be brought to the money. This H1B change is intended to remove a sizable portion of the talent pool from the US, so companies will have to follow (and spend US investor money on wages abroad).

$100,000 per year.

Is it weird that there are like entire orgs practically of H1Bs at big tech companies these days? And if you hang out in the towns where the big offices are, the demographics are completely different from not that long ago and it’s not from the general demo shift in America since Chinese and Indians are not that large of a percent of immigrants overall. Like is there such a big shortage of workers that all of Redmond needs to be Indians now? If serving the economy demands that, perhaps we should reconsider whether serving the economy should be our top priority.

> Smaller companies may -- may

Really? 100k on top of a salary per year? Why would anyone do that?

> People truly good enough to get the employer to pony up $100K to pull them in -- presuming there isn't some kickback fraud happening -- will truly be the best of the best.

And what stops those people, best of the best, working somewhere else, with much better living standard(EU) ?

In the past, it's because of salary, but now, the 100k/year will either make company to lower their package, or try to extract much more from the employee.

>US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures

Yes, and there are plenty of US citizens to fill these roles.

In this supposed competition with China, Trump is deeply dedicated to giving China every advantage possible.

From defunding science, fining the biggest universities, defunding green energy, making hiring ambitious foreign workers economically unfeasible, replacing technocratic administrators with incompetent lackies with quite literally zero experience, imposing inordinate tariffs ... It's just win after win for the CCP.

Couldn't possibly be more generous

Id much prefer the companies pay $150k so that it entices someone to move from Nevada to California.

$100k for a startup is a no-go from the onset. This makes foreigners basically unhireable for startups, and probably shuts down founding startups as well?

Why is it a problem? Indian people are great.

What happened in Massachusetts?

I think it's pretty reasonable line that it should cost the company at-least 2x normal to import someone.

As humans, Indian people are as great as any other humans. In my experience, though, first generation families from India and China practically tend to be quite insular socially. They hang out amongst themselves. Which, like, I don’t blame them for, if I were them I’d probably do it too, but it has a strongly detrimental impact on the social environment for people who aren’t in those groups. When a house goes to one of those groups, it feels as if it disappears from the neighborhood. If the flow is slow enough then they are in theory functionally forced to integrate socially with the existing inhabitants, but the flow is not slow.

And by the way, what reality do we live in that your local megacorp can decide to radically alter your population demographic and people support the megacorps ability to do that? There was no vote for the existing inhabitants about whether they wanted to take the trade off, the decision was made for them by businessmen. It’s pretty weird when you think about it.

Seems like the point is what’s not happening there

Yes, but all these things will have bad long-term effects. The short-term effect would be payment into the federal budget and increase in local employment.

Even with tariffs, the initial effect was to increase purchases before the tariffs hit. Later the companies started eating from their margins instead of increasing prices right away. So it all resulted in increased economic activity and then increased tax payments into the federal government. However, because this is tax on consumption, it will eventually reduce business profits and personal wealth of the consumers. Meanwhile, Trump can claim that the economy is booming and he is collecting huge tax revenues without any negative effects.

I wasn't aware that we've already reached the end of 'work that needs to be done'.

Does this utopia come with four-day weekends?

Countries become wealthy because people in them work and make stuff. It's incredible to see people actively advocating for making their country poorer. "No, no, we have too many people working..."

Because they bring their racism here. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/12/922936053/california-workplac...

I have personally witnessed it myself. I have countless Indian friend who are candid with me. They are biased against whole communities. Blacks, Muslims, etc.

Indians hire Indians.

It is very in the air on what the details are, as is often the case with this administration.

American immigration has functioned this way for years. Where do you think Little Italy or the Greek sections of town originated? This is how immigrants have behaved for centuries, it's not exclusively a phenomenon among people of color. European immigrants did the same thing and continue to do so. If you mention a street name in NYC to some longtime New Yorkers, they can tell you which community or immigrant group is known to live in that area.

What ultimately matters is whether immigrants are law-abiding and contribute to the local economy. Indians rarely appear in crime statistics and generally comprise part of the highest-earning immigrant demographics.

> I have personally witnessed it myself. I have countless Indian friend who are candid with me. They are biased against whole communities. Blacks, Muslims, etc.

So are Americans. People are going to bring their biases. If you are serious about this, start vetting all immigrants about thier biases or racism. Are you saying Cubans or Latinos don't bring their own racism? Or other Europeans didn't do it? Why is this cherry-picking going on?

As an IT worker, I honestly don't see many/any Cubans and Latinos in my day to day.

However I do see a ton, and I mean a ton of Indians and their hiring practices. Hence why I started my sentence with "I have personally witnessed it"

So who is going to pay taxes to fund the country? Particularly as the population ages, meaning more costs and fewer workers.

O1 is there for that

> The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India, Europe and Canada, which is a net loss for the US.

Offshoring can, and ought to be, heavily tariffed.

One more reason to replace the job with AI or outsource it.

[delayed]