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

(www.reuters.com)
1245 points mriguy | 3 comments | 19 Sep 25 19:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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bhouston ◴[20 Sep 25 01:12 UTC] No.45308820[source]▶
This is actually smart. Many H1B visas are used to undermine fair labor wages for already local talent. We should ensure that H1B visas are for actual unique talent and not just to undercut local wages.

H1B is ripe with abuse - this article by Bloomberg says that half of all H1-B visas are used by Indian staffing firms that pay significantly lower than the US laborers they are replacing:

- https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c...

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epistasis ◴[20 Sep 25 01:20 UTC] No.45308920[source]▶
This is very short term thinking, in that it assumes a constant amount of work and ignores the global competition for labor.

If the US loses its massive lead in the network effects of a large labor pool, the amount of work in the US will shrink, both by moving to other countries and less overall innovation.

This is not a beneficial move for most software engineers.

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1. mc32 ◴[20 Sep 25 01:48 UTC] No.45309278[source]▶
Do you think those countries will be nice and invite us to be reverse "H1Bs" into their countries or will they keep the pie to themselves? If they think like you they'll invite the whole world talent pool into their countries.
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2. ttsemih ◴[20 Sep 25 02:08 UTC] No.45309486[source]▶
Probably you can go most countries
3. epistasis ◴[20 Sep 25 02:51 UTC] No.45309823[source]▶
The US has the nicest biggest pie in the world. Why would somebody move to a place with less opportunity?

The opportunity created in the US is due to the concentration of talent, high productivity, and extensive networks of people creating innovation that inflated the pie even larger.

Go ahead and move to any of those countries from the US, it's prettt easy, because everybody wants to be like the US! The only possibly better passport was a Canadian one!

Something deeply sick has infected the US when we no longer recognize the source of the wealth of our nation. Nobody could touch us. At least until we started to intentionally make ourselves poorer.