A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it).
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids.
The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Old news. This has been going on for decades. If you even look badly on youtube you will find corporate videos from "HR Consultants" teaching companies how to bury job listings so noone will be likely to find them.
Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
For those curious, a common method is to publish the job listing in the newspaper classifieds.
This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.
Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.
There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..
> Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
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The thing this article didn't mention and the author likely doesn't know is that there's a guide going around instructing people on how to apply for H1B jobs on forums like 4chan.
I'm Indian so I can be excused for this,
but there is a MASSIVE number of execs -> hiring managers that are Indian and focus primarily on hiring only other Indians. It's extremely racist.
I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
> It's extremely racist
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
There are also Indians who loathe being on such teams and actively seek diverse meritocratic teams, as one of those Indians.
Out of curiosity, do they favor hiring Indians in general, or Hindu Indians in particular. (To the exclusion of Muslim Indians)
Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.
It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
Do you see them selectively picking based on the caste of the Indian?
What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.
Why is hiding the jobs necessary? I applied for one of these jobs years ago.
The recruiter told, "I have no idea how you applied for this job, but its not available for you. let me have you interview a different, but similar, role."
What was I supposed to do other than say, "ok! Send over the other job description."?
So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface.
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
Isn’t it funny that in the past the only thing you had to do was simply show up?
"The "hacker ethos" seems to be in decline, for any number of interconnected reasons"
Instead of having job openings posted by those who don't want them found what if people posted willingness to work, perhaps in some sort of registry. That way a company would have to prove that none of the people willing to work are qualified. I'm sure many qualified people would be open to moving.
For some visa types, companies are obligated to prove that they advertised the position to American citizens. Failed, hence they needed the foreigner.
This is a huge dealbreaker for campus hires, and specifically masters/PhDs who are, well, by definition, specialized in their field and hence very rare.
So you recruit at her graduation the girl who has done groundbreaking research in deep neural nets and is the key to one of your big projects. She happens to be non-American (because the majority of graduates are non-Americans).
Now what? You know that there is nobody else on the planet that has done this research, yet you have to start recruiting for this position for Americans.
What is the incentive you have as a company to pour a ton of resources on this effort? Recruiting is very expensive. Time is also very expensive when you are at the forefront of innovation.
And what percentage of H-1Bs are these PhDs with groundbreaking research backgrounds? The vast majority of the H-1Bs are hired by a handful of consulting firms (mostly indian) to do mundate SWE/IT jobs that don't require any special skills but a few months of bootcamp.
Also, don't forget that truly exceptional researchers can self-file for green-card using national interest waiver categories: EB1NIW, EB2NIW don't require employee sponsorship.
So, I think your point is moot.
For every job like that, there's 100 jobs that are "Write basic Java CRUD app against RDBMS backend"
To anybody playing attention it's very clear SV tech vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local. It has been this way for multiple decades now (and gets worse every year.) I don't see this changing any time soon. Sure they get the occasional slap on the wrist, but the wage suppression saves them way more money over time.
> vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
Nope, Infosys and friends aside, in SV companies would rather hire green card holders and US citizens because you have to sponsor the H1B/park and get a L-1, and sponsor the green card process. You just can’t ignore foreign talent, otherwise you’ll miss out on an incredible number of good employees
> the wage suppression
Do immigrants earn less than locals?
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
It's just outsourcing training/education (again, the first wave already happened circa 2009-2013).
So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.
>It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
Then work for a body shop for 1/4 the billing rate in Arizona, Lansing or whatever. You can get a better gig at Burger King.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
Outsourcing needs to be eliminated. If the company is doing 20% of their business in Ohio, 20% of their workforce needs to be in Ohio. 12% in NY State, 12% of the workers need to be in NY State etc.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
I have no problem with giving the job to someone overseas but they can do that on their home turf.
Reminds me of the shenanigans you see when a govt job is required to be posted for open bid, but the dept already has an internal hire lined up.
From experience: big tech has to post jobs to US citizens before it can hire on a visa or sponsor a green card. So the trick is to put an ad in a physical news paper and present that as evidence.
>Should the system rely so heavily on asking out-of-work Americans to act as goalies — if or when they happen to have the time?
A zinger of a concluding line if ever there was one.
I see everyone is for maximizing shareholder value until they are reminded they are workers first.
All the h1bs constitute less than 1% of the jobs in us. They just want to divert the focus ! This is propaganda!
That's not the only way you can work in the US. "In 2023 17.9% of employed workers were immigrants"
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percent-of-jobs-in-the-us-...
1% of all jobs is still a huge number of jobs in total terms. Spitball math put's h1b's much lower than that actually, .4 to .5% of all FTE positions.
That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.
Ranges from 20%-80% in tech roles from my experience.
What percent of tech jobs?
Fun fact: the payout from the meta settlement they reference works out to there being less than 4,000 members of the eligible class. Otoh getting a large check is always a pleasant surprise. I kept the letter cause it’s a huge amount
> According to the Justice Department, the companies absurdly required applicants to submit applications by mail [...] How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
I always wondered how they made sure no one applied to the position they wanted the H1B to fill
I recall there being a proposal to prioritize H1Bs based on salary, which would at least lessen or eliminate the race to the bottom and stuff like people training their lower paid replacements
If Apple and Meta have had to pay $38 million for engaging in these practices I don't understand why they used the subtle "chronically-online" dig against people trying to expose it:
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
What the… Yeah, I’m with you on that one. “We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling chronically onlines seeing if we’re obeying federal law!”
The whole thing seems to oddly disdainful of the people being impacted:
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
I feel like there was a lot of nonsense ideas for what is such a short, and supposedly journalistically rigorous article
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
Ok, come on, this is just an insulting "kids these days" throw-away line that is absolutely not necessary.
Doubley stupid because the task is about mailing a letter, which does not require a post office.
That's an editorial point, not a substantial one. Obviously requiring an application be submitted by an inconvenient and antiquated method that isn't used by the demographic in question is going to create friction and reduce the number of applications.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
> However, in order for applications for permanent residency to be successful, companies must certify their inability to find a suitable American candidate to take the position they’re looking to fill with a foreign national
I mean, you know, if you already have an employee working on H1B, why would you take the risk to hire someone else to replace them? The perm process is pretty broken in that way.
One popular trick was to advertise the jobs in newspapers. The dead-tree edition only.
We effectively replaced 43 h1b’s with AI. Looking to do more soon.
Didn't Apple used to post job openings in small local newspapers in the Midwest?
The crucial thing if you’re a foreigner is to look at the comments here and be very careful as to whether you’d empower a software engineer union full of these people to deport you.
In Savannah, the local unions got the Koreans deported from the Hyundai factory.
This crime has yet to be addressed.
There's another thing happening which people haven't really heard much about, which is basically ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments. And so people that previously would never have filed something like a discrimination lawsuit can now use ChatGPT to understand how to respond to managers' emails and proactively send emails that point out discrimination in non-threatening manner, and so in ways that create legal entrapment. I think people are drastically underestimating what's going to happen over the next 10 years and how bad the discrimination is in a lot of workplaces.
> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
That's all well and good, but anyone who does this will likely just be terminated asap without cause, possibly as a part of a multi-person layoff that makes it appear innocuous.
While I don't support the general intention of what MAGA and this movement to get H1bs out via the tactics described in this article, it's total bullshit to try to silence them in the legal tactic that instacart is using. I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
A lot of WASPs got very mad when Vivek wrote that tweet calling them out for being behind a lot of H1bs in quality but he's right on the mark. Sorry Peter and Paul, but you really did get B+'s when the H1b who takes your job got A+++ in everything for 4 years.
Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c... | https://archive.today/7JX9A - June 27th, 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (citations)
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
HN Search: h1b - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).
That's the real reason for the job market crisis; it is not AI, it's just corporate greed to have borderline slaves to lower job wages and workers willing to work extra hours for peanuts. AI is just the scapegoat, easy to blame it on something that's still new while also milking investors' money by promising how it will reduce costs and increase profits. If the job market crisis were really from AI, not only should it happen within a few years of adopting such new tech, but we should see its impact on other industries like lawyers, medical doctors, administrators, and lastly on tech workers, not the other way around.
That's why I keep saying and repeating: the tech industry and especially the engineering one should be further regulated and restricted just like other professions out there, otherwise, you are only allowing anyone to scam and game the system with any potential bubble currently happening.
I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).
Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.
The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
This will incentivize foreign intelligence services to fund their own market of conveniently cash flush moles.
I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).
"On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens."
This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
Essentially, they want to hire a specific person, while the law requires that they post the job and prefer American citizens, so they don’t want American citizens to apply not that they prefer foreign workers in general they just have a specific candidate in mind.
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
If they had someone specific in mind the usual method is to have their resume next to you when you write up the job app. Make the requirements perfectly match their skills. Now you can say when you picked them that they were the best candidate all along.
This is hilarious.
It isn't just corporations, its the federal government. The same ones hiding the rampant student rape issue at UIUC Champaign