Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says (reuters.com)

"The hollowing out of the middle class in the US isn't because of immigrants, it's because of a sustained campaign by capital to reduce the power of labor over the last 50-odd years and to concentrate wealth as best they can."

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.

Labor share of US GDP is usually around 60%, which is comparable to Europe.

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.

It’s important to clarify that H-1B is a non-immigrant visa — you don’t get to stay if you lose your job. That matters because the debate isn’t about immigration itself but about how the program functions. H-1B was meant to supplement shortages in highly skilled roles. Over time, though, it’s reshaped whole categories of employment. Anecdotally, I see very few young U.S. devs compared to many late-career ones finishing out their working lives. If we dare to use the term “national interest,” the real issue is whether a temporary labor program has morphed into something that permanently alters the market.

The largest contributor to the shrinking middle class has been more and more people are moving into the upper class.

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.

The hollowing out of the American middle class is because the huge, wealthy middle class was a post-war anomaly, from a time when the US had the only intact industrial plant in the world, and lack of communication technology and logistical sophistication meant production had to be localized and centralized. So, if you happened to be living in the right places in the US, you could have a house and a car and put a couple kids through college on an (artificially-inflated) factory worker's wage. At the same time, 80% of the population of the world was on the edge of starvation.

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.

If by hollowing you mean the reduction of the size of the middle class, it is because it has become richer, not poorer over time, so I don't think your take is right.

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...

I've heard about the shrinking middle class in the US since around 1990. It somehow doesn't actually seem to be smaller now than it was 35 years ago. More and more ordinary from the bottom third of the population can afford things that used to be reserved for the upper third.

Are you sure it's really been/being hollowed out or are you just repeating something you've heard or read other people state so often that you think it's true?

The thing you're ignoring though is that main way you reduce the power of labor is by increasing its supply.

For instance one of the key factors in society escaping feudalism and moving onto market based economies was the Black Death. It absolutely decimated society and the labor pool. This gave labor the power to demand more compensation than a share of what they produced. But in times before if they tried that then nobility could simply have said no, as there were plenty of peasants willing to work for little more than food. But when the labor supply was suddenly cut in half? Now they had all the power in the world.

Labor unions can't really combat market forces. I don't even think ethical or moral arguments work either. If somebody, in the country legally, is willing to do your job for less money, and is capable of doing so, then by what right do you have to insist that you should be the one doing your job and getting paid more? It doesn't really make much sense. If you want to increase the power of labor then, by far, the easiest way to reduce so is to reduce the supply of labor. And vice versa for weakening it.

>The hollowing out of the middle class in the US isn't because of immigrants, it's because of a sustained campaign by capital to reduce the power of labor

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).

> to reduce the power of labor over the last 50-odd years and to concentrate wealth as best they can.

What happened 50 years ago? Hart-Cellar was in 1965. The foreign-born population dipped below 5% in 1970. It’s 15% today. This had major political ramifications. Democrats were able to move to the right economically because they could substitute labor voters demanding structural reforms with recent immigrant voters who would be happy with relatively small handouts from the government, or even just visas for their extended family.

Don't you see how immigrants "reduce the power of labor" though? Cesar Chavez opposed immigration.

this is why people cant afford anything

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Thank you for illustrating a point that's hard to make, which is ... on this website everyone understands the math for supply and demand. Except when it comes to immigration. When it's about immigration, it's the evil capitalists. Again, thanks. We should all know by now that when the supply of labor increases, there is Zero affect on wages.

Zuckerberg's compound didn't make the Bay Area housing crisis and Barron Trump isn't why NYU is expensive or hard to get into. Giving everyone involved $1 million from Larry Ellison's pocket wouldn't particularly change either.

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

The H-1B requires that the position requires a specialization.

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.

It was not H1.

It’s likely an H2 visa (assuming it’s not undocumented immigrants). Which is unaffected and unchanged, likely because Trump properties are heavy users and dependent on these visas.

The problem with your solution (and similar solutions - e.g. implementing "salary auction" for H1B - i.e. it's not a lottery, but it's that the most paid get the visa) is:

It requires changing the law.

Which is very difficult, and requires a broad coalition in 2 houses of parliament.

On the other hand, executive orders are very easy.

I wish the better solutions get implemented, but until they are, we have to seek alternatives.

I’ve never worked with an H1B software engineer from India that was anything but mediocre. I know they exist and my sample size isn’t huge but at least 3-4 of the H1Bs I’ve directly worked with in the past decade were completely unnecessary and could have been filled by a US citizen

From the reuters table it seems that the biggest H1B beneficiaries are FAANG.

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

Funny you're in so much fear of repercussions that you don't even dare to say which nationality and yet most people in tech know which one you meant

> it's equally easy to point to income inequality for this

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!

It's not the only reason, but it's one of the likely causes. Like most complex issues, it's multi-casual. You can't import 100k+ workers per year into a country and have no effect on wages! I understand the net economic impact is potentially positive, but I am speaking to the direct economic impact of the workers being displaced.

"it's equally easy to point to income inequality for this."

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

> But you have your story you believe, I'm resigned that the die are already cast.

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?

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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.

It definitely suppresses TECH worker pay and decreases mobility. For the H1B they become indentured servants often working 60+ hrs a week.

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

Your second paragraph doesn't follow the first. 90-118K might feel like a lot to you, or to many, but it doesn't mean that those wages aren't dragged DOWN. If you live in SF, NYC, Seattle or other HCOL areas, 90-118K is definitely not HIGH. And software jobs pay WAY more than that. H1's definitely are paid BELOW the prevailing wage for the same job, in the same area. So compare apples to apples.

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

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?

You aren’t accounting for hours worked. Your H1B are probably putting in 30-50% more hours and with put up with any bullshit you dish out.

That tells us nothing without knowing the median pay of the jobs they're replacing.

What's the median pay of big tech workers? I started at 150k 8 years ago as a new grad, for comparison.

Guest workers have no long term stake in living in the US unless they win a green card. Six years and they're out. Given this state of affairs, they will be compliant and not demand increasing compensation when they don't have to plan for a future in the US. Get too uppity and you get the boot. The suppression is hidden within this dynamic and sinks the prevailing wage for all workers.

Citations of broad H-1B visa abuse:

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

A better perspective is that the median H1B holder created $100k+ worth of value for some US company. Salaries are lower than the value you create, or else your employer would stop paying you.

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.

We would have to look at that by industry. For example, if median developer pay is $130k, then both of your numbers are below that and would bring the median down. $118k for highly skilled workers (purpose of H1B) seems low to me. Additionally, the upper bound for the middle class in all 50 states is above $100k.

I've seen other analysis showing the 80% of the wages are below the prevailing wage of the equivalent role. It's definitely about wage suppression and having an indentured servant.

Can you explain how those statistics support your conclusion? I don't see the link you're drawing between them.

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

Are you really not familiar with management and corporations? Firstly, stating those numbers does not prove your point but it is all belied by exactly the reason all of us that are aware of the realities know, which is that for the most part part H-1Bs are sought after because of them being cheaper. The implications from those like Gates, that the average person in the U.S. on an H-1B is a Turing or Wozniak or whatever is laughable, This is not to denigrate them but the so-called "genius visa" is a farce and the notion that there are not Americans that can do the jobs is also quite ridiculous. These things are heavily gamed and people from the countries that produce the majority of such applicants know that. I think you if you analyze it further, you may find it is all a lot more cynical than you might suspect. Why do you think H-1B visa holders in tech primarily come from a small set of countries that are not centers of tech innovation? Is it really that Europeans can't figure out bubble-sort?

That's WAY lower than typical tech salaries.

your link says that those numbers are after some time spent in US, and initial payment is 75k for 25p and 94k for 50p.

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.

Haven't you heard how cheating that works? This is what was filled in on the H1B applications. The government doesn't check that, and so companies don't pay.

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.

I don't think you need to define 'truly exceptional.' You just need to put in a limit and the scarcity will force the slots to go to the best and rarest talent. I'm all for bringing the truly best and brightest to the US. I'm not for replacing large swaths of the domestic labor force with an imported lower price equivalent.

> And how are “they” planning on determining who is “truly exceptional”?

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 think there's an H1B category for online political edgelords anyway -- we have enough of those already on both sides of the political spectrum, so I don't think anyone cares if that type of person is afraid to come here. If anything, maybe it's better to have less of that kind of thing so we can focus on getting things done instead of political partisanship?

Given this administration? Truly exceptional are the ones who pay personal bribes.

For exceptional ability, you have the O-1 visas.

>$125-150k are middle class?

I would think healthily so, even if on the upper bands [0]. I personally see "middle class" solidly as $50k-150k household income (2 adults 1 kid)... but I live in the South. Two decades ago I lived in the bay area for less than $100k (electrician)... and that was regionally closer to the lower end of "middle class," even out in Hayward.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_Sta...

$100k signing bonus and $150k salary was normal for fresh grads back in 2014, pretty sure big tech can afford this no problem for actual talent.

Same basic question -- at the price of $100k/ea, it does seem cheaper to build-out more satellite offices.

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...

corporate charters should be treated as the tools they are. such businesses do not exist without being tied to a particular set of laws in a particular jurisdiction.

The U.S. is where the money is. In canada between public and private sector about 30 billion dollars are spent on research and development. Across the entire EU, this figure is more like 440 billion dollars. In the U.S., the figure is 885 billion dollars.

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

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

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

If you're a US investor, investing in US R&D is easy, you have a good idea of how things work and how to get justice if you're defrauded.

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.

Gifted architects and builders are presumably born every year in Silicon Valley, but we are far too rich, developed, and democratic to want new buildings.

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

I'm not sure they actually are extremely high. It's just that most other salaries have fallen below what we'd normally consider middle class.

Stated another way, the things that software engineers can do with their wealth generally seem like normal middle class things. They can own a home but they can't afford a yacht. They can take nice vacations but they aren't part of the jet set. They can start businesses but generally not in capital intensive areas like resource extraction or heavy industry.

I'd say that software engineers, at least the higher paid ones, are probably on the higher side of middle class; but they are still solidly middle class.

The median is like 140k. Is that extremely high? I know some cops who make more.

I'm writing this reply not to the lazy commenter, but to anyone reading this thread...

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!

This also impacts non-software tech: see recent layoffs statistics at Intel, what percentage are H1B and why aren't companies required to re-prove H1B necessity? Can we just over-hire and claim we need H1Bs because we can't find enough talent to fill the rolls, then submit that we over-hired and lay off all the US talent? This seems to be a bit of what happens even if not intentionally.

I'm writing this reply not to the lazy commenter, but to anyone reading this thread...

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.

A few ways:

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

They generated economic activity while they were in the US, no? That seems to be a net positive. You'd otherwise have to be able to argue that, if you replaced them with a US citizen during the time they were here, the greater economic activity would have been generated.

American companies are overwhelmingly owned and operated by Americans who can extract value from the H1B employees well in excess of their salaries (even with the new cap and fees)

The more smart people we have working on the world's hardest problems, the more likely it is that we'll have breakthroughs that make the world better

Is it? When you consider that Trump can exempt the corpos that cozied up to him.

Why thank you! That's kind of you to write.

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.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Yes, if you're truly exceptional, you can get in the US. You can also get into any other country in the world. And the Trump administration doesn't seem to be interested in changing 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%.

Not sure if it applies to H-1B but if a company does mass layoffs, it automatically makes it so that the PERM applications (required for green card, which you need to keep the employee past the visa validity period + extensions; up to 7 years iirc) will be automatically rejected for some time. So it screws over your existing H-1B holders, making your company way less attractive.

Source: I came to the US on H-1B in 2012. I may be misremembering which stage of the process the mass layoffs affect.

Part of the problem is you don't know ahead of time (certainly not with 100% certainty) who's going to be an exceptional unicorn wrangler, and who's just going to be a pretty good engineer, unless they already have an incredible track record elsewhere. This will filter out a lot of possible future unicorn wranglers.

"Where is the term coming from suddenly"

I don't think it's new, I've been hearing it my whole life

"and why is it used to uncritical?"

I ... can't figure out what this means.

Nearly every country besides the USA has been experiencing "brain drain" to the USA since at least the end of WW2, and discussing it for just as long.

Who else is going to pretend to rewrite my ancient CRUD apps?

You mean generalizing population groups by saying they are no better or worse than the general population?

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

No, I spent multiple months working in the US and concluded I didn't want to live there long term. Not so much guns and healthcare as how screwed up the culture is and how little community there is. You guys are lonely and you really don't seem to get why.

I'm in the UK and can relate to this view strongly. As a software developer myself looking for hires there simply isn't the talent, especially in the North East of England so we have to cast our net further and accept applications from abroad.

Yes? Do you want hundred of thousands of jobs?

It’s just populism with no long term planning. They’ve decimated the job market, people are hurting, have given folks someone to hate, it’s an easy win for them.

A lot of Trump's support comes from people wanting to and happy to blame immigrants (of all kinds) for legitimate grievances - such as unemployment, expensive healthcare, housing, and inflation. The distinction between legal and illegal immigration is blurred not only by Democrats but also the economic populists occupying Trump's base. This is aimed at them.

I believe it is. Every one of Trump's decisions has been populist, simple and guaranteed to harm the US in the long run.

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

I won't claim to fully understand it but by PPP they're close.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...

In English west/east has two meanings; geographic, and cultural.

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

That's the ultimate expression of capitalism isn't it? The richest are obviously the most competent to solve government (see Elon Musk) and whoever is in power must become richer by exercising their power. For money is the reason for everything, and the ultimate mark of prosperity. I mean, if the President is 3 billions richer since he retook office, that means everyone is more prosperous right?

Right?

All you're doing is having a gold card program but where the immigrant pays the applying company rather than the government. Seems pointless.

As you'll see from my other comments about H1-B visas, I agree. However, it doesn't change the fact that the person's suggestion would just be another way to kill the program, not a way to fix it.

> as long as you can find a job that meets the requirements in a reasonable time

how long is that reasonable time in europe? For H1b it's only 60 days

Really? Most if not all EU work permits, especially highly-qualified ones are tied to an employer for at least the first 2+ years. If you get fired you have up to 3 months to find another employer who is willing to take over your residence permit.

No, what they wouldn't be interested in is paying $100,000 to help someone enter the country, with no compensation if they ditch you on day one.

Part of the proposal is that the employer pays the government a large fee to sponsor the visa. They're not doing that for local workers; it's an entirely incomparable situation.

I totally support bringing in actual specialists, or fantastically talented people from abroad… but it’s painfully obvious how infrequently that happens. I worked with an H1B doing L2 support in the mid aughts. The position required significant knowledge of networking, but nothing close to even a mid-career enterprise network administrator, and it wasn’t a rare skillset for the area. We had plenty of very local candidates when we hired people before, but suddenly, new management decided it was an incredibly specialized, difficult-to-fill, rare job that paid locals an eye-watering 70k/year to start but paid an H1Bs far less than that I assume.

Then it's not H1B visa anymore - internal employee transfers use different mechanisms.

That's what they're doing, it's going to be $100k per year to sponsor, up to 6 years.

I was a person training Disney’s replacements. In reality a major tech company hired a small consulting company and had them (me) train Indian replacements on the software. It appeared as regular training that we did in foreign countries and nothing was amiss. Until the news broke. So maybe Disney had a plan for replacement all along, the training wasn’t necessarily done by Disney employees and the contractors surely did not know either

You're taking a all or nothing stance. There must be a middle-ground where employers don't risk getting "scammed".

The fees apply to every application.

Signing bonuses almost universally have a 1-year clawback (or are otherwise only doled out periodically and not all up front), so not a good analogy here.

I mean, yeah, I was assuming that we have immigration at all.

A lottery allows a natural influx of people, who are free to find their way into whatever jobs are needed. It's another form of market solution, but more of a push model than a pull model. But it also, logically, reduces wages across the board (to some degree).

A pull-based model, where companies compete to bid for visa slots, lowers wages in high-end roles, because visa holders are beholden to their sponsor company, and uprooting and moving back to your home country is not something to be taken lightly.

If you see near, but you don't see far, that's myopic. Even you agree with this in your post. Therefore, I don't see where the confusion comes from.

You can argue you only care about the now and, sure, if that's all you care about, who am I to say your priorities are wrong?

I do think that you're wrong though, I think it doesn't make you better off neither now nor in the following years. But, again, who the heck am I to tell you how to run your country. I guess we'll see how this plays out.

I wish I lived someplace where we could take the huddled masses yearning to breathe free instead of a place where they're literally rounding up my neighbors for the crime of wanting a better life.

For what it's worth I know multiple people who have been turned away from Canada because their immigration laws are even stricter than ours. So I don't know how much you can attribute your lack of housing to immigration.

I agree the current process is broken. I disagree that you don't replace it with something workable. Like many govt regulations, it's several decades out of date. Heck, a simple "I submit under the penalty of perjury that at least 10 US permanent residents have had good faith interviews for this position." type submission would be sufficient for me. HR people aren't going to want to commit a felony for their company, so the scams are going to go way down.

They're crazy outliers, and that's fine. The point of H1B is hiring talent outside of the United States, not hiring normal webdevs or commodity software engineers. A fee like that, where a large salary for an exceptional job would make the cost relatively small, brings the program back to its original goal.

If you just need a normal worker, there are plenty of CS grads and unemployed SWEs you can hire in the US right now. If you need a specialized foreign worker because he or she is not available in the US, then chances are you are going to pay a premium anyway; that's the point.

>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.

> 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.

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

> Even if it's implemented, how do you rise tariffs on intangible works?

If you are an American company (or a subsidiary thereof), and you have an employee resident in another country who does IT work, then you pay a tax to the US Treasury on that employee's salary. This tax can be varied depending on the country of the employee's residence.

Alternatively, if you pay OutsourceCo or whomever to provide you with IT services, then, depending on OutsourceCo's incorporated location, either you pay a tax on the services you buy from OutsourceCo, or OutsourceCo pays the tax on salaries just described.

All this can be avoided by hiring American workers, of whom there are many currently looking for work (mainly because of offshoring and immigration).

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

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

Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us all to be kind; they're the first words in the "In Comments" section:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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

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

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

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

Where does that per year come from? I dont see it in the proclamation.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...

> unnamed White House official told

In important cases like this one should read the bill's text and not watch some random video on the Internet which has no legal power.

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The odds are now per candidate, not per application. If they submit multiple applications, it does not up chances for that candidate in any way.

And yes, it does work, because we have data from the year before this change, to the year after to compare against. The "Eligible Registrations for Beneficiaries with Multiple Eligible Registrations" dropped from 47,314 for FY 2025 to 7,828 for FY 2026. Source: https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-announces-strengthened-i...

Wasn't the application linked to the candidate's passport number?

There's also a bunch of organizations that are desperate and can't pay. E.g. a lot of rural and VA hospitals are staffed by H1B physicians. A rural hospital in the middle of Idaho won't attract a cardiologist through salary (i.e. the 500k/yr they can make in cities) and probably won't be able to afford a 100k application fee to get one. Also for lots of researchers and post-docs, 100k is more than their annual salary.

This fee is a great way to ensure that there's very little medical services available to rural populations and to help kill science in the US among other things.

It might be that in that industry, paying someone the $200k might mean the position doesn't make sense compared to the value delivered, and that you should instead open up another offshore office

> To go further, I believe there’s good data on cost of living, geographically.

I like the goal of making sure visa works are paid well for where they live.

I would not want to restrict the visa worker geographically though. Or alternatively I am unsure about the overhead of tracking the location visa holders and enforcing salary changes.

Might also have unintended knock on effect of encouraging job growth in low cost of living areas.

This is why I say about the median salary across a branch of industry. A company is free to bring in anyone they want, but not free to pay them entry-level salary then. They should rather pay entry-level salary to local folks, e.g. recent graduates. The point is to bring above-average workers from abroad, as you say.

I don't think it's easy to game the median number, or the third quartile number if you prefer. Unless the salary distribution is severely bimodal, it should work reasonably.

This makes sense if H1-Bs are about lack of talent instead of cheap labor.

It also prevents wages from rising, can't find anymore local talent at 80K/year so you hire H1B at that wage. If that didn't happen, wages would rise until they found someone local. I think something like equal pay and then a 10-20% fee that is funneled into american education/up-skilling efforts.

As my manager at Amazon once told me, “Amazon prefers H1Bs because they take more abuse.”

Didn’t IBM try this with Dubuque?

Because there aren't enough "equally qualified nurses".

> There is a lot of under-employment for highly qualified US citizens.

No, there isn't. Even with the current AI mess, the unemployment for highly-qualified software engineers is 2.8%: https://www.ciodive.com/news/june-jobs-report-comptia-data-I...

The AI is now decimating the jobs for the recent CS graduates.

We know that the US is not the only country with shortage in healthcare workers. Most countries with an ageing population face this.

We know that's not going to happen.

What now?

Nurses would be TN or in the past H-1C.

That's why you've got to pass the background check. It doesn't seem any more prone to abuse than the existing H1B program.

Isn't that Trump golden card ?. Pay $5mil and boom, welcome to the US, rich drug dealer.

Done above but that's a senate proposal. Sorry for the confusion.

Multiple registrations are being filed for the same person in order to game the system. This is discussed in some details in a USCIS report [1]. The increased application fee is presumably to stem that practice.

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

"If a company can't find someone for a specific job or role then I don't care if they go abroad to find that person."

You're believing and repeating the propaganda. The H1B was sold to Americans as for this purpose and then very deliberately turned into a loophole for importing massive amounts of foreign labor.

How silly is it to accept the idea that Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Tesla are not be able to hire Americans for any role they want. They're the richest companies on the planet!

These companies use the H1B to increase their labor supply, suppress wages, and gain indentured workers.

If they couldn't cheat by importing cheaper foreign labor they would have to compete against each other much more than they do for American workers.

This is all about big companies rigging the system. They do not care if it's good or bad for America, the foreign workers, or anyone else. It's simple greed.

The fee should help ensure that only higher paying jobs or truly hard to find roles would be worth paying for as well (not that this is the right option, but playing it out). You would gladly pay 100k if the role already is high paying, it will be a small fraction of the cost, you won’t do that if it’s a couple year salary. It will also help curb abuse through multiple applications. I agree hard to find jobs for highly talented people (who are paid well) should be brought in.

>If a company can't find someone for a specific job or role then I don't care if they go abroad to find that person

It was never, ever that they "can't find someone".

The opposite, there's a US corporate tax loophole for having operations overseas.

https://thefactcoalition.org/tariffs-manufacturing-tax-break...

it is very difficult to determine this. Companies that do h1Bs are all multinational, so they can locate dev offshore and just say they did it internally. There's also the reality that even if you go out and try to evaluate the revenue that comes from IT, you basically can't get clean attribution even if you want to. many H1Bs are not working on customer facing product, but internal projects and that makes treating things like application maintenance or service desk pretty difficult to calculate for ultimate revenue outcome.

That would just make the top companies get all the talent and new players and startups to stop hiring internationally.

You're right it does not say it, I based my statement on what Lutnick said in the office. Looks like the 150k number is from a senate bill that has not passed yet

https://www.newsweek.com/h-1b-visa-change-proposal-2132484

Maybe it’s true they can’t find citizens:

- at that price - in the Bay Area

But certainly they don’t have grounds to say they can’t find citizens to write JS or make apps.

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A common problem in latam and other geos is brain drain. Most of their best minds simply leave the country looking for better opportunities. That is impactful for the countries economies, the country invest a lot in people,but others see the benefits.

During last century, USA has been the most benefited from that kind of immigration.

Personally I think that this is a very short sighted decision by USA administration. But overall, I think that this will benefit the rest of the world. Maybe in a few years even USA will start exporting their best minds abroad!

> How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.

/me

I started in Slovenia, considered London, actually got an offer in Canada, but ultimately chose San Francisco. Figured that if I’m going to the trouble of moving abroad, I might as well go to the center of the industry.

Got lots of friends who chose various EU companies based on desired lifestyle/work/partner balance. You have lots of options as a good engineer. Especially before the last 3 years of market shenanigans.

>There is a global competition for coming to Western Europe, Canada, and the US.

As someone who lived in all three geographies and interacted with immigrants who lived in there, here is my raw take:-

Western Europe:- Love it and people are so nice but they are also (I am sorry to say) racist. Proof:- How many immigrant CEO's do you see from companies based in Western Europe? The top 4 largest tech companies in the US have two indian CEO's for more than 10 years now.

Canada:- Super nice and immigrant friendly more than the US, but the size of the country (approx 10% of the US) doesn't have the financial/economic/social infrastructure that is needed to support a large number of immigrants. Also tech salaries are miserable compared to the US

US:- For all its faults, US is truly the only country where immigrants looking for a better future can immigrate and assimilate into. For how long this lasts remains to be seen but I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.

> How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries

Hi!

I know I'm just a datum, but I gotta represent myself.

Not yet.

The slate of policy choices in the US is removing it from that list of countries, and will strengthen those countries' labor forces.

Right now SV salaries command a huge premium, because all of SV is predicated on increasing productivity, increasing the economic pie, and rewarding those who do so with a fraction of that gain in GDP.

Treating SV labor like plumbing or construction labor fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics and the creation of wealth.

Because of our historical strength. If we drive people away, that just makes room for other contenders. How is that smart?

Exactly, and especially SV and the US has seemingly been almost entirely locked down by Indians.

For FAANG engineers this will likely mean moving to Vancouver, Zurich or Singapore with their job, salary, rsus and taxes.

How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.

Mmmh...How about four countries?US,UK,Canada &South Africa.

As a student,though

I had to choose between California and Germany. It is a thing.

Only two?

I am an American-born worker at a giant tech corporation. My coworkers are all immigrants, my job was created by immigrants, if they left I'd be unemployed because there's no way I can build this whole thing by myself. The work would simply disappear without them.

and so who owns the shares of "corporate america"? Newflash: Teachers' and firefighters' and cops' pensions are all invested in "corporate america". As well as pensions of union workers. As well as 401ks of all the other middle class people. Come on.

"the exploitation of American worker" ? American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.

That classification already exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer

... and is done for these employers already (though not to the level that is being proposed)

    Public Law 114-113 (December 2015 to September 2025) : additional fee of $4000

    Public Law 114–113, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, imposed a fee of $4,000 on H-1B petitions and $4,500 on L-1A and L-1B petitions. The additional H-1B fees would apply to all petitions postmarked on or after December 18, 2015, and until September 30, 2025.

Good. I’m sure you and the 10 other individuals who choose to boycott all of FAANG will ensure that this all balances out in the end.

very real risk ? it's a certainty not a risk.

Right now. What happened in the future? When the job market recovers will it happen in the US or elsewhere?

It has nothing to do with “skin color,” but economics, culture, and worldview.

“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family. The opinion advanced in the Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived, or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.” — Alexander Hamilton

Don’t play the race card, you sound emotional saying that.

You admitted that there were tons of abuse. This gets back to the law’s original intent. This is the best fix that corporations “pay up” for.

It’s just politics. You have CS grads facing employment headwinds against AI, H1B, and high interest rates. They aren’t going to vote for the incumbents if they’re unemployed. Now they’re going to have a $100k discount to hire them instead of from a WITCH company. FAANG will still hire H-1Bs.

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.

Probably you can go most countries

Yep. There is a huge amount of American talent wallowing in low-level, dead end jobs because corporations have been actively incentivized to hire cheap, captive foreign labor rather than foster American talent. I am absolutely thrilled to witness this return to sanity.

you know what's really stupid? when we give someone a student visa and then don't have a easy to keep them in the country on a work visa

There are studies regarding that: almost half of S&P 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children https://www.brookings.edu/articles/almost-half-of-fortune-50...

These other visas are incredibly complicated to get. And funneling everyone through student visas is just inflating demand for uni degrees.

What someone's labor is worth is up to the market to decide. Also those $100k are taxed out of the employer and employee's value.

On the benefits of people moving to the US: it's been widely studied and it's basic economics, immigrants bring both supply and demand, so the size of the economy grows and so the opportunities to current residents.

Take the extreme: when people leave a country or city the economy there collapses, see Detroit or the increasingly old and depopulating European countries.

Or take the extreme on who comes: fiscal studies show that even low skilled immigrants are net positive fiscally. Only very old and unskilled immigrants are a fiscal burden.

Finally, thinking that we can capture the world's economy in a bottle and live lavishly without competition is delusional. If we stop letting people build here, they will build elsewhere and without us. We are increasingly less relevant.

Let's turn this around - would the US win if young, skilled people were net-leaving it?

Imagine spending 25 years raising, educating, feeding, and clothing a person, investing over a million dollars of money and labour in them, and then they just pack their bags and leave.

Educated, skilled, young immigrants are a colossal gift to the host country, and a crippling debit on the welfare and prosperity of the country they have left.

---

Anyone who has ever given it more than thirty seconds of thought knows that countries become wealthy when people living in them work - and make stuff. So what do you do to improve a country's prosperity?

Obviously, in backwards-logic, you start raising barriers to people who want to do useful work in it.

(Because dealing with the systemic issues that have resulted in the country becoming prosperous not being correlated with the plurality of people in it not becoming prosperous would upset wealthy people who don't actually build anything.)

Have you never met an H-1B worker?

Yeah exactly. And they embrace that fraud and turn it into a cornerstone of their economy. I too have worked with extremely talented people from the subcontinent and not one was on an H1B. The H1Bs I worked with were less competent than an undergraduate intern. Thankfully I only had to do that once during an on-prem install in Tyson’s Corner.

Yep.

Why are you using quotes around steal as though I used that word somewhere? Read what I wrote, repeat it to yourself when you fall asleep, come back tomorrow.

reform is a type of action that tries to identify a concrete set of issues and fix those issues, implies a positive change.

this is a change in the direction of significantly reducing hiring of foreign workers by American companies, which is bad for everyone. It's bad for American companies, because it will reduce their growth. It's bad for American workers because when our companies don't grow, neither does our economy and that hurts Americans. So it's a change, but it's a dumb change.

In other democratic countries, reform is mostly proposed in parliament. Experts and other government institutions are publicly consulted. Reform is seldomly passed under emergency grounds, and H1B rules are an unlikely area for emergency executive action that has a transition period of not more than 2 days.

Reform is done legally. The statute this falls under requires the fee be based on the administrative cost to process the application.

Changing the statute requires Congress to act.

So the replacement is the talent stays in their own country, making local wages there where their talents are leveraged via offshoring instead. They still work to their skillset, wages remain suppressed but their country of origin get their personal taxes instead. But at least the talented individual gets a lower quality of life, that will teach them to roll the dice wrong on the geography they were born into.

Yes I would prefer just faster road to skilled immigration. It also doesn’t help string people along with this distant hope of permanent residency

Economy isn't a zero-sum game. Foreign talents were the enabler of the growth in this field.

I am an American-born tech worker and every job I've had that didn't involve bagging groceries was created by immigrants. Without these workers my career wouldn't have been possible.

Why does America have all the tech jobs in the first place? It is because of people like Elon Musk immigrating to the US and building the tech industry.

Doubtful. Not sure I'd be hired. I was hired at like $160k/yr. Would my employer have paid over half my wages to import me? I'm not so sure. Am I not bright enough? Do ya'all not want me here? It's possible. I'm no genius but I think I'm pretty good at my job and I dare say above average, and I don't think my employer could fill all the positions they have with equal or greater talent with only American citizens.

$15K extra per year? Absolutely. $100k pre-payment? No. That's impractical since the visa holder may get hit by a truck or return home due to an emergency, etc.

Sure - to those that can afford it. But this basically wipes out the ability for smaller companies to use H1Bs as an incentive to draw talent when they’re already behind the gun compared to the FAANG’s of the world from a hiring perspective.

The rich get richer.

why not just hire them in Canada or literally in any offshore office and not pay the 100k tax?

$100,000 per year.

I could not read the full article so I don't have all the details about the report, but the scope pretty limited. There are equally numerous reports about e.g. BigTech H1B salaries being much higher than typical. So that raises the question, which is the greater effect?

Better instead to look at larger scale studies out there, including the ones I mentioned in the comment I linked. The results are much more nuanced, but generally they find negligible or mildly positive impact on native workers, suggesting they are largely orthogonal to foreign workers.

The point is that the dynamics are more nuanced than simple supply vs demand.

How is that possible ? Doesn't h1b have to pay within a set range of wages?

Every h1b role I see posted at my bank pays more than I make so I don't get the lower paid comments

Having learned more about the details, it's honestly not as heavy-handed as I originally thought. The Reuters article linked said it was "$100,000 fee per year" - but it has now been clarified to be a one-time fee per new H1-B petition. I also thought initially that it would apply to existing H1-B holders, but it does not. And I've learned is that it's structured as a temporary change lasting for 12 months (of course it could be extended in the future).

So - it's less heavy-handed than I thought. Given recent layoffs and the current state of the job market, I could maybe even be convinced that it's a good thing in the short term.

I do still have concerns about US comptetiveness in the longer term though if we incentive companies to hire in other countries vs bringing talent to the US.

GROUP BY profession

So there were no American immigrant success stories pre-1990, when the H-1 program started?

You don't think this administration would cut off their nose to spite their face?

We are seeing it in real time.

Might be, but that's how you end up in a situation where all the technical skill is outside the US and the products inside are a marketing layer over technical efforts.

Similar to what ended up happening with china and manufacturing.

O-1 requires yearly assessment of the exceptional status though. You can hardly plan your life around a visa that is quite subjective in itself and may depend on the mood of the USCIS officer reviewing your case on that particular day.

Basically all of South America is in US-friendly timezones. I worked with a few quite bright folks from Argentina, for instance.

I suspect that flying someone from Buenos Aires to SF or NYC for onboarding and then and back would cost significantly less than $100k.

Remote work from Europe is harder in this regard, and from India... would be night shifts only.

I find that Employers of Record (EoR) make this a non-issue.

I work for an American startup, remotely from S. America. I'm hired according to the (extensive, and expensive) local labor laws, while my startup likely knows absolutely nothing about the intricacies of how my countries' labor laws work, the EoR just handles everything and sends the employer a bill every month.

But the EO is only good for one year, and anyways it's always subject to change, next week, next year, next President.

> it does amortize if the employee stays long enough.

And I expect workers on H-1B change jobs much less frequently than citizens & green card holders (and holders of "safer" visas), since changing jobs on an H-1B involves more risk that can end up with you being required to leave the US.

The H1b salaries are public. And the L4 prevailing wage for software engineers in the Seattle area is $200k.

H1b also only takes into account the actual salary, it completely ignores stock bonuses.

H1-B visas go to more jobs than just software engineers. I totally believe H1Bs in the tech industry (startups, faang) make 150k median.

Because the person they are importing is probably brighter than you. If you're talented and smart you come to the US and likely the Bay Area (or west coast) to work in tech. Why? For the same reason that baseball players all end up in the US and Soccer players end up in Europe: they all want to play against, and with the best in the big show.

All the H1B's I have worked with are whip smart, hard working, and in general amazing people. I cant say the same for all my localy sourced colleges. The tragedy of the economics in most of these cases was that they were making the same amount of money as their peers and not more...

In a lot of cases companies are getting a Steff Curry or a Lionel Messi and paying them the average of the rest of the team...

Yeah that would have been the way to go, if not for two generations of dumbing down the American education system.

Why would they, if they don't have to? What a strange question...

I don't see how nearly killing the H1B program goes against that pledge. If anything it sounds like something that they could spin as following this pledge.

> He has been pretty good at sticking to his campaign promises.

I wouldn't be too surprised if you genuinely believe that Ukraine war has been over since Jan 20 and that grocery prices are at all time low.