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H-1B program grew 81 percent from 2011 to 2022

• mikece 1y ago
  Serious question: can the case really be made that American CS grads (and other entry-level tech folks) are clearly inferior to the potential pool of H-1B applicants? If the answer is in the affirmative then we need to study and address why that is. If not, then I'm curious how many qualified Americans are being pushed out of (ore prevented from entering) the high tech job market by H-1B applicants.
  • toast0 1y ago
    What do you count as American CS grads? A lot of H-1B holders have a degree from an American school. (Edit) If you hold an American CS degree, aren't you an American CS grad? If you close that pipeline, you'll lose those students, and then you have to find more funding, because international students usually subsidize local students.
    • laretluval 1y ago
      While I disagree with GP’s premise, there’s no sense in which H1B visa holders are American. It’s a nonimmigrant visa. They are required to specifically disavow any intention of becoming Americans or else the visa can be revoked.
      • quag 1y ago
        Yes and no. The H-1B visa is "dual intent" [1] and you are allowed to apply for and receive a green card (permanent resident card) while on an H-1B. After 5 years with permanent residence you can apply for citizenship. It is a common path, and the intention for the majority of people on an H-1B visa. [1]: https://isss.temple.edu/faculty-staff-and-researchers/international-employees/h-1b-applicants/maintaining-legal-h-1b-status/immigration-concept-dual-intent https://isss.temple.edu/faculty-staff-and-researchers/intern...
      • deleted 1y ago
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    • throwmeaway222 1y ago
      It wasn't until recently that I found out 40% of students at top colleges were not even American! I'm not specifically against foreign students, but 40%? That and the H1B issue and American's not having jobs at American companies. Something isn't right.
      • Ar-Curunir 1y ago
        Yes that something is the rapidly vanishing government funding for public universities.
        • lisbbb 1y ago
          I'm all for doing anything funding-wise that brings higher ed back to some kind of reality, even if we have to burn it all down to get there. The cost of education is outrageous and grads are not benefitting from their degrees the same way I was able to (at far less cost). We're at the inflection point there.
      • OkayPhysicist 1y ago
        That comes with the territory of have the vast majority of the top universities in the world. One of the things that has kept the US as the global hegemon for the last 100 years is the fact that every other country sends their best and brightest to study here, and a significant fraction of those people stay here to work. I agree the US could do more to take advantage of its position to benefit the average American, but torching exactly what put the country in that position is short-sighted at best, categorically stupid at worst.
        • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
          Colleges and Universities charge the non-local rate for international students which is considerably higher than the domestic rate (example from Georgia Tech: In state $30,154 Out of state $53,638 International $54,814 This incentivizes them to keep more slots open for those high dollar students making it even tougher to develop a domestic workforce.
    • lisbbb 1y ago
      I feel for all human beings, but US education should be first and foremost directed towards helping US citizens. That's not racist, that's just common sense. We haven't even been doing that here! We're failing as a nation because shitty short-term profits always supersede the creation of long-term prosperity. At one of my grad school classes, the prof could have taught the class in Chinese had it not been for me in there. And that was in the late 1990s.
  • proc0 1y ago
    At least from my experience it tends to be that outsourcing agencies who often supply H1B candidates are not finding the most experienced or talented people. i'm guessing that CS degrees are still better in the US on average.
  • superxpro12 1y ago
    Ive been directly exposed to the H1B candidate pool. The answer is no. It's 90% candidates with very similar sounding resumes. It's unnerving how templated all the resumes are. You really have to have solid, engaged recruiting and screening processes in place to filter the wheat from the chaff with H1B's. I would interview 10 H1B's, and then one domestic candidate, and the domestic candidate would outperform every time. This is obv anecdotal, but I would not be surprised if this pattern exists across the entire H1B pool. We do hire some H1B's, and there are some incredibly talented candidates, but only after great expense and time invested in screening and interviewing.
    • ToxicMegacolon 1y ago
      > I would interview 10 H1B's, and then one domestic candidate Do you ask people their visa status during interview? If you do not ask them about visa status, then how do you know they weren't a domestic candidate? Is it a judgement based on race/skin-color/accent? If you do ask them this question, How do you keep that information from influencing your decision in the interview?
      • morgannewman 1y ago
        [dead]
      • lisbbb 1y ago
        I never asked about visa status during interviews as that was purely an HR issue or something the hiring manager needed to deal with. My job was to assess people purely on technical ability and to a lesser degree, ability to communicate effectively (in English). We never really even bothered with cultural fit--if the person seemed decent, we gave good feedback on them. There was so much fraud to wade through, however. I got so that I could spot those "templated" resumes very quickly. It's kind of a tell when someone has worked say, five different 6-month contracts in five geographically dispersed US cities! That would be ridiculously expensive to keep bopping around the US like that! If their skillset and work was any good, they would either get renewed or find another gig in the same locale.
    • 1y ago
  • Aspos 1y ago
    One can trap an experienced seniour dev for a few years for a price of a fresh grad which may or may not turn out to be a valuable resource and which may leave at any moment. In this context quality of the grad is not much relevant.
  • renewiltord 1y ago
    Well, not clearly inferior but it’s a mathematical property that if A is a subset of B then max(A) <= max(B). I’ve hired people for a decade in tech and through that period people have been bellyaching about this stuff throughout. The absolute truth is that if you can’t hit $500k annual income in 5 years despite trying to do so, you’re not good enough. The H-1B workers I know are making millions. If you’re getting pushed out by them it’s because American competitiveness is enabled by this. And I care a lot more about what’s good for America as a whole than trying to protect someone’s income.
    • selimthegrim 1y ago
      Clearly, you think that every tech job exists on the coasts.
    • adamrezich 1y ago
      > And I care a lot more about what’s good for America as a whole than trying to protect someone’s income. Uncharitably, it sounds like you think of your nation as a generic economic zone whose growth you want to continually increase at all costs, regardless of the fate of its citizens. But what is a nation, if not the people that comprise it?
      • renewiltord 1y ago
        Sure, that's one way of looking at it. But the truth is that there is only one force for civilization in the World today and that is America. The end of USAID illustrated something: America stands alone against the entropy of nature. She is humanity's only vanguard against ruin. The Chinese are dedicated to their own advancement, the Indians are currently bootstrapping out of poverty, the Europeans are primarily concerned with wine, cheese, and luxury goods. Fair play to all of them - may they live in peace. But one nation, alone, fights Humanity's cause. Trump et al have cast off the mantle, but it's only another 3.5 years and we have a shot at donning it again. The nation is not for the people - or we would simply rapaciously consume its resources to feed the present. The people of the nation are not for the nation or we would consume them to fuel the engine. The nation and the people are both there to advance the principles of the group into the future. And I believe America's principles deserve to exist into perpetuity so long as they adapt to meet shifting weather. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
  • lisbbb 1y ago
    Let me stop you right there: "Qualified Americans" is a highly subjective phrase. If a young person did well in physics and math in High School, are they "qualified?" Or is it really some esoteric and hard to define set of tech skills that makes someone "qualified?" There are millions of Americans who could be trained to be excellent software engineers, but we don't bother doing that anymore, because companies like the sugar high they think they are getting by hiring semi-skilled foreigners. That's the truth. I've been all over this issue over and over again at multiple different companies and it's always the same thing--the resume has to have X, Y, and Z or the person is overlooked, despite them being more than capable of becoming skilled at X, Y, Z, K, W, R, you name it. Time and time again! And it's even worse in 2025 because now every product has 2-3 other competing products that do the exact same thing and we're supposed to be experts at all of them!
• richwater 1y ago
  Both political parties are selling out citizens employment opportunities to let corporations pay as little as possible and import foreign labor.
  • mikece 1y ago
    What if there were tariffs applied to importing laborer or using offshore contractors? That wouldn't do anything to address any supply shortages of workers for certain skills but would at least level the playing field for citizens looking to get into fields like tech, nursing, medicine, and more.
    • sickofparadox 1y ago
      If you tax remittances at 50%+ I have a feeling that suddenly many of the incentives for the H-1B workers themselves would change for the better.
      • henry2023 1y ago
        If we tax remittances at 50%+. I'd buy so many BTC call options.
    • scarface_74 1y ago
      And then large companies can just set up entire offices overseas - all of the large tech companies already have large offices and subsidiaries overseas.
      • lisbbb 1y ago
        One major firm I worked at built a giant campus in Mumbai, I believe it was. The huge office building here in the US was sold off and was just recently torn down to make way for I don't know what--a whole lot of lower paying jobs, if anything. Their footprint here in the states is now laughably small. It's beyond ridiculous that such a stable employer for decades would now look like this.
• silisili 1y ago
  This is an absolute farce. I'm not so cold hearted or extreme to say 'shut it all down tomorrow', but it feels like at the very very least, in this job climate, we could suspend new entries? But it just keeps humming along like everything is rosy.
  • avidiax 1y ago
    I feel that 2 simple rules would capture all the value of H1-Bs but naturally limit their abuses: 1. H-1Bs applications are ranked by total comp. 2 years of that comp is unconditional (no PIPs, no performance management, no excuses). I can see an argument to bucket this by industry. 2. Only job codes where the YoY median pay and total employment are currently at a 3 year high are eligible to receive H-1Bs. The comp requirements would devastate the body farms. The unconditional comp will put major pressure on the system of working H1-Bs to the bone, and not thoroughly vetting those hires. Companies that layoff in the thousands, or layoff their highest paid (oldest) employees are simply poisoning the H-1B well for that industry. Deep cuts can't be made up with H1-Bs for 3 years or until all the layoffs have been recouped industry-wide.
    • k8sToGo 1y ago
      So only people who would work in high COL areas would be eligible?
      • Analemma_ 1y ago
        That's not actually all that unreasonable, despite how it sounds on the surface. High COL areas are high COL because people working there are more productive. If it's worth it to import an H1-B worker even in the high COL area, they're contributing that much more to the economy than someone in a low COL area. If this still sounds crazy, I think your objection is more to there being a cap at all. If there is going to be a cap, it makes sense to order it by total comp even notwithstanding the COL.
        • selimthegrim 1y ago
• tboyd47 1y ago
  I'm all for importing top talent to work at American companies. In fact, I think H1-Bs should be allowed to start businesses and move from job to job like anyone else. If it's about innovation, why force them to stay in one job while they're here?
  • toomuchtodo 1y ago
    Indentured servitude to depress domestic wages.
    • jjtheblunt 1y ago
      as an American who worked in Silicon Valley for years, but is not from there, i'd say it's also "captive real estate customers" created by H1-B people.
      • throwawaybbq1 1y ago
        Can you clarify this? You saying non H1B's would not pay the crazy high rents of SV's housing?
        • jjtheblunt 1y ago
          I once asked an (American) director where i worked just this question. He said what you surmised: while there are plenty of qualified American engineers in the United States, citing Motorola headcount reductions as an example, it was a challenge to convince them to move to California's cost of living.
      • lisbbb 1y ago
        Seriously. All I needed to do to be filthy rich was move to Silicon Valley back in '97 when I got my MS, then eventually have bought a house or two out there. That's it. To recap: 1. Move to the Bay Area circa 1997 2. Buy houses 3. Profit enormously in the 2020s Mind you, I had no idea...
    • lisbbb 1y ago
• 486sx33 1y ago
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• paxys 1y ago
  How much did the entire tech industry grow in that period?
• steveBK123 1y ago
  I'm not sure thats even a lot in the context of 2011->2022 tech hiring though?
• deleted 1y ago
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• eitally 1y ago
  I don't understand the point of this chart. It essentially shows linear growth -- all 65k H-1B visas were allocated every year, until the past two years where layoffs have started impacting this labor pool. The entire tech industry has expanded by far more than 65k FTEs/yr so unless the OP does the leg work to figure out whether a disproportionate fraction of new jobs are being given to immigrants vs eligible Americans I don't see how this is useful.
  • itake 1y ago
    I think the point of this graph is to demonstrate that there is a large jumper of temporary workers and high unemployment. The program was to address labor shortages, and if we don’t have a labor shortage, then we should be reducing our temporary worker pool, not US citizen pool.
    • Ar-Curunir 1y ago
      You seriously think that in the period of 2011 to, say 2021, there wasn't a massive labour shortage in tech hiring?
      • mushroomba 1y ago
        Yes. As a US citizen, I, and many of my college cohort, spent many years unemployed during that time period, despite applying to thousands of positions. The reality is that businesses hire attorneys to create a legal fiction that I and my peers are unqualified so that businesses that desire it can hire H-1B employees. Shortages are, always and everywhere, a pricing phenomenon.
        • roadside_picnic 1y ago
          Do you think it's possible you were overestimating the skills in your particular cohort? Being more senior, my world of coworker and colleagues has been a mix of highly skilled people, largely in the AI/ML space. There are many H1Bs among them, but there has been no difference in the ability of the US citizen subset and the H1B subset in getting jobs. Even closer to the entry level, the H1B pool all came from very competitive and elite universities, and all of them also had advanced degrees. I do believe the market for fresh out of college software engineers without much specialization is tight, but I also don't see many H1Bs in that category either (but again, that could just be because of my own cohort I'm surrounded by). A PhD from NYU/Harvard/MIT with an undergrad at a place like IIT or Tsinghua is not in the same talent pool as newly graduated undergrad students from a standard US university.
• forinti 1y ago
  That's less than 0.2% of the total population (340 million) and about 0.3% of the workforce (163 million).
  • alexpotato 1y ago
    There was a survey post on HN a while back stating that <5% of the US workforce can write any code at all. So it's fairer to it's really ~490K vs 8M.
    • preciousoo 1y ago
      That's ~6% of the 9M. Not nothing but not a glaring amount. I'm seeing that there are 1.7M total SWEs in the US, which would bring the H1B % to 30%, assuming all are SWEs. This would make it a significant amount, not sure if it's enough to suppress wages / pass on US persons if they attempted it. One look at the top H1B employers should stop this narrative however, because those companies do not pay near peanuts. https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employer-data-hub https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
  • itake 1y ago
    I don’t think these workers are competing directly with 100% of the population. How many unemployed Americans could be employed right now if there was less temporary workers?
    • dmix 1y ago
      It's very difficult to tell. Employment isn't a finite thing, especially in white collar jobs. High quality workers will generate economic activity which generates new jobs. For ex: imagine a Chinese AI engineer working at OpenAI develops a new tool that generates enough $$ to support a whole team. How much of that is reality or how much is is suppresses wages will always be hard to pin down. A basic starting point would be cracking down on H1B mills that explicitly do wage suppression + more scrutiny on big companies like Amazon using it. There's some big H1B consultancies designed to undercut gov contract tending who are much more blatant despite hard rules in H1B meant to stop it. Biden admin passed some new policies to help combat it but enforcement has always been problem #1, not a lack of rules meant to protect American workers.
• basiccalendar74 1y ago
  curious how much of the growth is solely due to renewals since the cap on first time H1-Bs has stayed the same at 85k per year. the green card queue is severely backlogged for India (and to some extent China, Mexico). this causes people who would usually get a green card after 3-5 years be on a continuous H1-B renewal cycle every 3 years.
• apwell23 1y ago
  for reference india graduates 1.5 million in just 1 year.
• rationalfaith 1y ago
  [dead]
• randomizedalgs 1y ago
  For perspective, in the same time period, The number of employees at Google multiplied by five. It seems likely that the number of highly educated positions, in general, increased by quite a bit during that time.
• randomizedalgs 1y ago
  For perspective, in the same time period, The number of employees at Google multiplied by five. I wouldn't be surprised if the growth of the software industry, at least, actually outpaced the increase in H-1B visas.
• kappi 1y ago
  In 2023, American colleges graduated 134,153 citizens or green card holders with bachelor's or master's degrees in computer science. That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That's equal to 82% of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma.
• daft_pink 1y ago
  A better approach would be to implement a significant application fee, less than the $5 million Trump implemented, but indexed to a multiple of the median wage, which would prove an employer's genuine need for talent not found in the U.S. In exchange for this premium, the employee should receive a green card, granting them the freedom to switch employers. This would create a more honest system, ensuring these highly sought-after professionals are paid competitive market wages and the company has to pay a large premium to hire the foreign worker. Not engage in this fictional market studies to prove they can’t find people to find the role. Make them pay a premium and don’t lock them into the employer. Further there should be a separate program for graduates of US universities and us university graduates shouldn’t be competing against Tata gaming the system. People invested in the USA that we’ve invested in should get a preference over random people from a consulting company.
• wippler 1y ago
  This chart is entirely misleading. In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas. That's it, it has not grown nor shrunk. Reason for increase in population shown here is H1B renewals. Normally the way this works is H1Bs convert to permanent residents, but due to the country caps, Indian/Chinese H1B holders keep renewing their visas contributing to this increase. Again these are people who are already here and got their approval sometime in the past, so its not like in 2022, companies collectively hired 685,117 (which is also why you see the decrease in 2023 since due to covid, a very little bit of backlog for residency cleared). (Not to mention the sentiment of comments here is entirely disappointing, but I guess that's the vibe these days)
  • Aspos 1y ago
    What about cap-exempt H1Bs? There are tons of new companies which streamlined the process and which are offering "nearly-guaranteed H1B with no lottery"
    • jatins 1y ago
      How can _anyone_ bypass lottery when that's a USCIS process?
      • Aspos 1y ago
        I understand there are some exceptions made for academic institutions so these companies employ people into a "participating university" for a token number of hours per month, person comes in and once they are in the country they can pursue different opportunities to get employed and change their status. This cap-exempt H1B bypasses lottery, can be obtained in about 3 months any time during the year.
    • atlgator 1y ago
      Yes - When Microsoft requests 14,000 H-1Bs after laying off 9,000 American workers, it's above and beyond the 85k cap.
      • 1y ago
• lurker919 1y ago
  Does this conflate the number of new visas issued to new workers, with the existing visas renewed by already settled-in-US workers (that must be renewed every 3 years)? Because due to the GC backlog, the existing visas do not go down for 2 major contributing countries.
  • basiccalendar74 1y ago
    Yes, the renewals are included
• siliconc0w 1y ago
  This is the classic problem with american policy, well known to be abused and terribly implemented but too politically difficult to change. You could easily move from a lottery to a total comp auction process. IMO if your company does layoffs it should automatically void your ability to participate for 5 years. It's pretty gross to see tech CEOs whining about how they can't get the talent they need on a Monday and then mass laying off on a Tuesday.
  • lisbbb 1y ago
    To hear Elon tell it, the only way forward is to keep raping the US citizen workforce by flooding the market with cheap talent from overseas. Hey, as long he is still on course for becoming the first USD Trillionaire, it's all good, right?
• desolate_muffin 1y ago
  This phenomenon really frustrates me on behalf of my peers. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but anecdotally I've observed many others struggle to get their first jobs in tech, while, meanwhile, I am mostly being assigned to interview people who require visa sponsorship. Most of my referrals for my low YOE peers are rejected before the recruiter call. I have observed this at both very-big tech and my current medium-sized tech company. I have also observed that on my team, more than half of the people are either currently on immigrant visas or were previously on immigrant visas. Just to be absolutely clear—these people are great, and I don't fault them or hold any ill will for them having coming here to work. At the same time, it seems that most hiring is done at the mid and senior level. If we only hire senior talent and rely on immigrant visa labor to fill these ranks, where exactly is each subsequent generation of seniors supposed to come from? I feel there should be some requirements in place to ensure that companies aren't perpetuating this shortage by hiring very few domestic workers at the entry level.
  • lisbbb 1y ago
    This is the critical "inflection point" that I've been posting about--we've lost the pipeline of novice -> senior and it's going to blow up in our faces.
• joshcsimmons 1y ago
  This is mind boggling considering how rampant unemployment is in tech right now.
• bradlys 1y ago
  I’d like to see percentage of tech workers in SV that were American citizens then vs now. Regardless of whatever cap we talk about - it’s quite obvious that this has changed dramatically over the last 20 years for those under 40.
  • lisbbb 1y ago
    We are in an absolute crisis at both ends of the wage scale--there's no entry level, and over-50s are being deleted from the workforce in huge numbers, never to see the same level of pay ever again.
• websap 1y ago
  As someone currently on the H1B program, and working in tech for the past 10 years, how do I navigate the current climate in the US? Especially when sentiment around H1B workers is at an all time low - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606374 ? I love working in the cutting edge of tech, but no other part of the world has been able to replicate this model the way Bay Area, SF, Seattle, and now NYC has. Great companies, ambitious people, new emerging tech, and large compensation. Are there other countries where YC sees companies originate from and they prove with a path to citizenship for software engineers?
  • lisbbb 1y ago
    Demand a competitive salary. If you stay in the US, your pay is a logistic curve that tops out when you reach your late 30s. You will start to feel the pressure of not keeping up wage-wise in your 40s, and you will be completely excluded from being able to work at all sometime in your 50s. That's the reality.
• sitzkrieg 1y ago
  H1B exists at this point solely to slave cheap labor domestically. absolutely nothing else to it whatsoever. it hasnt been exceptional candidates ever
• potato-peeler 1y ago
  Management makes the decision to hire. What is stopping American management to continue hiring American professionals instead of others or to look at it another way, what is stopping them to rise through the ranks and keep the employment number balanced amongst American and h1b holders?