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

Won’t this mean that companies will move jobs to India, China or even Canada?

Why did they not do that before, if it was feasible?

They've already had the option to do this all along...

Most companies, even fairly small ones, already have a substantial number of contract tech employees in India, Eastern Europe, or South America.

before there was no $100k/year cost to H1Bs, see post title.

It didn’t save them 100k/worker per year at the time. That is a lot of motivation.

Hiring non-H1B visa workers would also save them 100k/worker.

I could be wrong but OP might be implying that hiring foreign workers in their own country might have always been much cheaper.

Would you rather pay your devs a living wage for India, or for the US?

I would much rather they move to India than to move India to us.

Nope, it means the people that would have gone to US will to to Canada instead.

If you believe the reason the program was started, the US doesn’t have enough workers in those fields.

I had a former employer with an Indian subsidiary for this very purpose. The problem is that there is no loyalty to the company and it becomes a revolving door of inexperienced people who couldn't get into H-1B. Always fun when they lie you about testing a feature that you haven't implemented yet. Incidentally, they also introduced ransomware into the entire corporate network (domestic IT was also barely competent).

Yes, see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2024/09/16/the-micros...

I don't believe it... I think companies just aren't hiring people (or maybe they aren't offering enough pay), not that qualified domestic candidates don't exist. But I could be wrong.

H1B hires are already expensive. Most large tech companies spend quite a lot on legal services.

The assumption that a lot of people make, apparently including Trump, is that companies are hiring H1B for no good reason. Or maybe because they think it's cheaper? It's not. In virtually all cases, H1B hires are because there simply aren't any suitable American applicants with the necessary skills.

Of course it depends on the nature of the business but push that too far and you can lock yourself out of projects that require work to be performed on US soil.

I work for a very small company and we've seen by that stipulation a couple of times on anything _remotely_ close to defense/MIC/security.

And the administration can tighten those screws further if it desires.

(I am the only H1B in the history of the company, now a citizen. It would have been impossible to have taken this path with this alleged financial burden)

Brazil and Canada will absorb a lot of big tech headcount. Google et al are already moving lots of headcount to both countries. This will accelerate it, even if it’s struck down

Infosys, Tata, and Deloitte are hiring basic programmers. There’s no shortage of American applicants with those skills.

I’m sure people will make the argument about FAANG but there’s plenty of Americans for that too.

Go look at the experience people are having right now with this job market. There were mass layoffs and new grads every year on top of that.

Because H-1B workers had the ability to demand higher compensation via sponsorship and relocation to the US. Employers could say "no we won't sponsor you" but these workers are in demand due to their technical skills and could counter with "then I'll join another company that will".

If you remove the option for sponsorship then these workers will still be working their jobs because they're talented and in demand, they'll just be doing it from their home country instead for lower compensation.

Because doing business in India isn’t that great.

the PE who bought the company I work for already have a large Indian subsidiary and effectively require a 1:1 ratio

Clearly companies place a dollar amount on how much they value having people work in country, otherwise they wouldn’t bring people over.

I think this move makes it likely companies will hire more expensive domestic workers.

> In virtually all cases, H1B hires are because there simply aren't any suitable American applicants with the necessary skills.

I don’t believe that at all. I believe the opposite, in fact. How do we decide who is right?

They do that already, lots of US tech companies have SWEs outside of the US. With the new policy, it will add incentive to do it even more. Companies will have to either lower the hiring bar or hiring offshore.

Silicon Valley's big H1B employers also have international engineering sites. US teams tend to pull in their favorites from the international sites, and the international sites can use the possibility of relocation as an incentive.

Canada has reduced immigration a lot recently though.

In my experience it is actually largely because H1B holders are locked in to their employers, so the balance of power is incredibly favorable for employers.

There are plenty of American citizens and permanent residents with the necessary skills, just not the willingness to put up with bullshit from B-tier employers.

Having interviewed hundreds of software engineers, I’m not convinced that the talent is out there but just hiding. Nor do I believe talent is fungible.

Pulling in smart people from all over the world is good for America.

I’m sure there are US citizens who would have been better candidates if we had a better education system or grew talent. Maybe this will encourage that, but it’s going to take a long time.

Yeah, I don't understand how people can be arguing that there aren't enough Americans to do this work when we've just gotten off a round of mass layoffs all throughout the tech sector and there are stories about CS grads being unable to find work now.

It's transparently obvious that the draw of these employees isn't skill, it's cost. The bottom/middle rung in this field is being hollowed out when it comes to domestic hiring because companies don't care who fills the position so long as they can keep the salary low and the employee locked in, and H-1Bs are the perfect fit for that.

you don't believe it why ? you look at American education system and you think it produces multitudes of talented engineers? is it so inconceivable that we need a lot of smart people and we don't produce enough of them locally ?

But if they're hiding, you wouldn't have interviewed them in the first place, right? I don't see how this is comparable.

All the smart engineers that I know absolutely struggle to find jobs. There are regularly job threads here on HN or freelance subreddits and other places, that are chocked full of great people desperate for work.

But maybe that's really just a small fraction of the people, I can't know for sure.

That's a misguided assumption that doesn’t hold up in practice because it assumes H-1B workers were "brought over" based on employer need for a domestic worker. The need isn't for a domestic worker, its for a skilled worker and the skilled workers want to work in the US because it yields higher compensation and opportunity.

Many H-1B workers request sponsorship from employers despite having the ability to work from local offices because they have in-demand skills that give the leverage to ask for it knowing that it will result in better opportunities.

Tech companies are extremely motivated to have people working in person in their Bay Area offices. That's why you see the extraordinary numbers that you do on levels.fyi along with the insistence on RTO. But no matter how high they get, these numbers will never meet highly capable Americans' lifestyle demands, because the Bay Area doesn't have and will never build the housing or commuting infrastructure to support them in that quantity. Wage gains go straight into real estate.

The question is, if tech companies can't have their Bay Area offices filled with the caliber of people they want (who will accept being forever-renters or super-commuters), will they relent on US remote / small sites, or will they instead try to shift their trillion-dollar Bay Area office cultures to their Bangalore sites? My money's on the latter.

So let's have a thought experiment. We can agree, even if the US primary education system is crap, that the university system is world class. After all, people wouldn't come from other countries to study abroad in the US if it were not competitive.

So our CS graduates take the same courses, study the same material, and pass on the same grading scales as these international students from countries like China, India, etc that have come to attend American universities. Therefore it seems unlikely that they are categorically incompetent due to a flaw in their education, even if we make some allowance for them not studying as rigorously as their international peers for whatever reason.

However, if the news can be believed, we're now seeing a significant number of CS graduates who are unable to find employment. This is coming on the tail end of a bunch of highly publicized layoffs.

The notion that there "Aren't Americans to do these jobs" just doesn't track. I'm sure that there are lots of corporate executives who are saying that there aren't enough qualified Americans to do these jobs, but they're saying that because it's in their best economic interest to say that, not because it's actually true.

They do already. British Columbia is a really good place to open up shop because it's on the same time zone as Silicon Valley. Many companies have done so. I'm surprised there haven't been more tbh, but maybe now with this change we'll see an acceleration.

US is #2 on this list so I think it's safe to say they produce more engineers than most countries, other than Russia.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-...

Canada is going through a bit of a moment in scaling back relatively unskilled immigration as it became clear a there were heaps of scam colleges bringing in folks to get useless "hotel management" degrees etc, but IMO there will be sustained interest in Canada in continuing to have eased immigration pathways for real engineering talent.

I suppose we are about to find out.

The cost of hiring in the US versus elsewhere is already greater than $100k for the type of tech firm that can just open an international office. I took the base salaries of Google SWEs on levels.fyi for NYC, London, Bengaluru, and Toronto, multiplied them by the standard 1.4 for overhead, and realized the US is already significantly more expensive than most developed countries, let alone the Global South. Companies clearly value employing in America despite the cost.

What is this chart and why isn’t China on it?

Saved them more than 100k/year/worker

this news is tied with the tax code corrections... All R&D work in a foreign country is to be depreciated over 15 years, it can immediately be depreciated for an American worker.

there are too many CS grads without experience who are not very good. We have world class universities, by no means that implies that every new CS graduate is world class. A median CS graduate most likely cannot pass a basic interview in CS

Maybe Canada but Brazil doesn't have political and economic stability for this.

> if we had a better education system or grew talent

What about yale CS grads working at chipotle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854263