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

    (www.reuters.com)
    1245 points mriguy | 16 comments | 19 Sep 25 19:59 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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    roughly ◴[19 Sep 25 20:40 UTC] No.45306289[source]▶
    I think there’s plenty of interesting debates to be had about immigration policy and its effects on the labor market, but one thing worth noting here is that the primary problem that damn near every other country on earth has isn’t immigration, it’s brain drain.

    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.

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    jpadkins ◴[19 Sep 25 20:49 UTC] No.45306392[source]▶
    The top end of H1B has been great for America. In the last few decades, there has been growth of abuse of the program to get mid level talent at below market rates which really hurts the middle class in America. People need to understand that most reformists don't want to get rid of the truly exceptional immigration to the US. We need to limit the volume, especially the immigrants that are directly competing with a hollowed out middle class in the US. Let me know if you want further reading on this topic.
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    legitster ◴[19 Sep 25 20:56 UTC] No.45306474[source]▶
    The median pay of an H1B visa holder is $118k. The 25th percentile is $90k. This is from the government's official data: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/O...

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

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    dgs_sgd ◴[19 Sep 25 21:05 UTC] No.45306586[source]▶
    You seem to be suggesting that the H1B pulls wages up because the median pay is higher than the median overall pay in the country? That’s not a valid comparison, you’d have to compare the H1B’s salary to the median pay in their specialty.
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    legitster ◴[19 Sep 25 21:16 UTC] No.45306723[source]▶
    You can! If you look at the report it breaks down H1b pay range by occupation and education level.

    An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

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

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    1. reliabilityguy ◴[19 Sep 25 21:27 UTC] No.45306846[source]▶
    > An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

    > 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.

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    2. skydhash ◴[19 Sep 25 21:33 UTC] No.45306916[source]▶
    Maybe? But what about training and talent pool? Imagine how many companies would not take off because there’s no one to implement the founder’s idea. Imagine you’re a startup and you have hiring difficulties because all the good ones are over at Oracle or Microsoft (doubting the existence of FAANG).
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    3. valkmit ◴[19 Sep 25 21:42 UTC] No.45307012[source]▶
    The assumption that companies won't offshore is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

    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!

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    4. reliabilityguy ◴[19 Sep 25 21:42 UTC] No.45307017[source]▶
    Maybe, maybe not. Too many factors to consider, and it’s extremely hard to get a definitive answer.
    5. myrmidon ◴[19 Sep 25 21:44 UTC] No.45307040[source]▶
    You also get the baumol effect increasing wages even for unrelated sectors (sounds helpful at first).

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

    replies(1): >>45313686 #
    6. TMWNN ◴[19 Sep 25 22:09 UTC] No.45307311[source]▶
    >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?

    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*.

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    7. sciencesama ◴[19 Sep 25 22:11 UTC] No.45307334[source]▶
    We can arrest all of them and send them back like in hyundai !
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    8. nxm ◴[19 Sep 25 23:05 UTC] No.45307841{3}[source]▶
    If they don’t have valid visas for the kind of work they were doing, like was the case for Hyundai, then the indeed were breaking the law
    9. jameshart ◴[19 Sep 25 23:07 UTC] No.45307856[source]▶
    Overall the US economy employs about 800,000 software engineers, with 200,000 or so of them being H1B holders.

    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?

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    10. valkmit ◴[19 Sep 25 23:25 UTC] No.45308006{3}[source]▶
    I'd argue that it doesn't happen more because it's (relatively) easy to bring labor onshore.

    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.

    11. evan_ ◴[19 Sep 25 23:32 UTC] No.45308061[source]▶
    you'd really need to look at the median pay for specifically companies that hire a lot of H1b SWEs. I'd suspect that would be higher.
    12. Tadpole9181 ◴[19 Sep 25 23:34 UTC] No.45308082[source]▶
    It feels as if you're insinuating that we shouldn't be taking measures to prevent offshoring and there's nothing to do but allow our labor markets to be subverted.
    13. mbac32768 ◴[20 Sep 25 02:58 UTC] No.45309860[source]▶
    It's ludicrous. US companies will not be able to dig up 200,000 qualified software engineers in the domestic population while every other skilled profession is experiencing a similar brain drain.

    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?

    replies(1): >>45310292 #
    14. mlrtime ◴[20 Sep 25 04:13 UTC] No.45310292{3}[source]▶
    "Computer science ranked seventh amongst undergraduate majors with the highest unemployment at 6.1 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."

    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.

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    15. jiscariot ◴[20 Sep 25 11:50 UTC] No.45312518{4}[source]▶
    I wonder what effect the US's heavy reliance on HB1 visas (and off-shoring more broadly) has had on the size of the cohorts graduating with CS degrees.

    All I have is anecdotal conversations of people avoiding tech under the assumption that writing code would be off-shored.

    16. geodel ◴[20 Sep 25 14:25 UTC] No.45313686[source]▶
    Yeah, right India has 10-100 times more H1B level talent that they send to US.

    And it is the 10 times more competitive economy compared to non H1B importing nations.