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Since the HN reaction to layoffs almost always is about blaming H1B, here’s a few more things the headline misses: 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also inclu

Since the HN reaction to layoffs almost always is about blaming H1B, here’s a few more things the headline misses: 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees 3. 16000 roles are corporate roles, not just tech related, H1B program is not generally utilized for those roles 4. Expansion in India is not just tech. Amazon is a big retailer in India. Understandably if you’re seeing revenue growth in India, you will grow corporate presence in India. If Walmart becomes a massive retailer in EU, it will hire EU nationals in EU. That’s not shipping jobs to EU.

echelon 9mo ago
Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring? That keeps the facilities here, the local employment options here, the growth here, the tax base here... We should want more smart people moving to this country. More business creation, more capital, more labor, more output. Immigration is total economic growth for America, non zero-sum. Offshoring is not only economic loss, but second order loss: we lose the capacity over an extended time frame.
- autokad 9mo ago
  I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having to pay more for everything. While more taxes are collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of the economic pain induced by the people living there. and it is in fact zero sum. every spot filled in university or company is a spot not taken by a local, as its obvious by the numbers, more local people are not getting admitted into CS programs nor are they being hired. its 100% zero sum when we are looking at these numbers and %s.
  - Analemma_ 9mo ago
    You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children. The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To understand why, you might start with the fact that immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country employed in some way or another by consumer spending.
    - mc32 9mo ago
      Children are future taxpayers the majority with parents who were not a tax burden --net positive tax contribution. People without Children benefit from the taxes paid by the children of people who rear children -i.e. people without children aren't "cashing out" their tax contributed retirement --that contribution went to other retirees.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - repstosb 9mo ago
        And citizens benefit from the taxes paid by non-citizen immigrants, whether documented or undocumented. Not just income and payroll taxes that might be dodged by under-the-table arrangements, but sales taxes, property taxes (perhaps paid indirectly via rent to a taxpaying landlord), the consumer share (nearly 100%) of tariffs, etc. And much of that tax base is spent on benefits and services that are not accessible to taxpaying non-citizens. So from that standpoint, immigrants are a /better/ economic deal for the public than children are. At the end of the day, though, it shouldn't matter where people were born if they're contributing to society, and the grandparent post is 100% correct that the whole debate is stupid.
        irishcoffee 9mo ago
        Sales tax is actually paid by the vendor, they just pass the cost along. The landlord pays the property tax, they just pass the cost along. It is absolutely impossible for an undocumented alien to meaningfully contribute towards their tax burden in any meaningful way.
        lovich 9mo ago
        Oh, in that case no w-2 employee pays income taxes, their employer does. I guess we’re all just mooches on society and only the company owners do anything.
  - echelon 9mo ago
    Companies want to cut costs. They will. If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the jobs will be offshored. Look at what just happened to film labor in 2022-2023. The industry was burgeoning off the heels of the streaming wars and ZIRP. Then the stikes happened. Amazon and Netflix took trained crews in the Eastern Europe bloc and leveraged tax deals and existing infra in Ireland and the UK. Film production in LA and Atlanta are now down over 75%. Even with insane local tax subsidies - unlimited subsidies in the case or Georgia. Software development will escape to other cheaper countries. They're talented and hard working. AI will accelerate this. Then what? America lost manufacturing. I think we've decided that was a very bad idea. We need to move the cheaper labor here. More workforce means more economic opportunities for startups and innovation. Labor will find a way as long as the infrastructure is here. De-growth is cost cutting and collapse. Immigration is rapid growth, diversification, innovation, and market dominance. All those people start buying from businesses here. They start paying taxes here. It supercharges the local economy. Your house might go up in price, but way more money is moving around - more jobs, more growth, second order effects. America doesn't have the land limits Canada has. And we can set tax policy and regulations to encourage building. I'd rather be in an America forecasted to hit 500 million citizens - birth or immigration. And I want to spend on their education. I want capital to fund their startup ideas. I want the FTC/DOJ to break up market monopolies to create opportunity for new risk takers and labor capital. That was the world the Boomers had. Exciting, full of opportunity. That was the world of a rapidly industrializing America. Right now, the world we have ahead looks bleak. People aren't having kids and we aren't bringing in immigrants. We'll have less consumerism, less labor, and everything will shrink and shrivel and be less than it was.
    - dzonga 9mo ago
      > We need to move the cheaper labor here Very smart & pragmatic. however political sentiment is going the other way - which is an own goal
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      If you really think that companies are moving out of country because "there's not enough talent", despite having some of the more relaxed tax codes and most talented universities here: well, sure. That would be hopeless. It also sounds like you're buying snake oil. They had decades to off shore, and they chose not to. I don't think Ai in the near term (<15 years) is going to change that dial much. If they do leave, there's plenty of talent to fill the void.
- KerrAvon 9mo ago
  We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits. H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
  - jandrese 9mo ago
    > H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test. The job description is a senior full stack product developer fluent in all programming languages and frameworks. Salary is $70,000/year. Somehow they can never find Americans to fill those jobs. They'll go on Linkedin complaining that Americans are too lazy and don't have the right hustle culture and talk about made up concepts like work life balance when the bosses demand 100 hour work weeks without overtime pay.
    - echelon 9mo ago
      Our competitors in another country will have no problem building those products. Then they'll be sold in America to American consumers. Then our industry deflates, because we can't compete on cost or labor scale / innovation. If we put up tariffs, we get a short respite. But now our goods don't sell as well overseas in the face of competition. Our industries still shrink. Eventually they become domestically uncompetitive. So then what? You preserved some wages for 20 years at the cost of killing the future. I think all of these conversations are especially pertinent because AI will provide activation energy to accelerate this migration. Now is not the time to encourage offshoring.
      - jandrese 9mo ago
        Turns out this is a difficult problem with no one good solution. Subjecting labor to a race to the bottom is probably the most efficient individual system from a capitalist standpoint, but it destroys itself just as much as your customers can no longer afford to buy most of the products made. The selfish strategy ruins the entire system if everybody does it. Capitalism and Communism have opposite problems. Communism attempts to manage the markets from a top down approach, making it relatively easy to handle systemic problems but almost impossible to optimize for efficiency because there is far too much information that doesn't make it to the top. Capitalism by contrast pushes the decisions down to where the information is, allowing for excellent efficiency but leaving it blind to systemic problems. So the best solution is some kind of meet in the middle approach that is complex and ugly and fosters continual arguments over where lines should be drawn.
- jimbob45 9mo ago
  Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear engineering). Trump made the cost change some months ago to address those concerns but I haven’t seen any studies showing whether or not those changes had a positive effect or not.
- Gibbon1 9mo ago
  > Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring? That's my opinion. However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the other hand whats the difference for someone in San Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey? Not much. And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.
  - learingsci 9mo ago
    Guy in San Francisco can move to NJ easier than Mumbai.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  I want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept to get foreign talent that found domestically. But these days is a shell game that's turned into a way to put shackles on employees who can't job hop. It hurts both groups in the long run.
  - dlahoda 9mo ago
    would job hop allowance help?
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      Not fully, the problem is much deeper than compensation. Let's not have large companies game around the slots allotted and using various means to get more slots. And put some serious enforcement on how they justify their H1b's to begin with as a start.
    - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
      Yes, but also salary minimum at top industry percentile to prevent use for wage suppression domestically. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229180 (Top 40 H-1B employers) Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 - September 2025 (526 comments) Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments) H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments) Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 - December 2024 (65 comments) How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional citations)
      - aprilthird2021 9mo ago
- incr_me 9mo ago
  Wait why doesn't India get to have these things, too?
  - int_19h 9mo ago
    There's no reason why it shouldn't, but why should American corporations subsidize it?
    - IncreasePosts 9mo ago
      Because they can hire 5 programmers in India for the cost of 1 in America, and American programmers aren't 5x better than Indian ones ? Amazon is an online shop, not a jobs program. I'm sure they would rather eliminate a position altogether even more than sending it to India.
      - int_19h 9mo ago
        Let me rephrase that. Why should American citizens allow American corporations to do that?
    - incr_me 9mo ago
      Seems just to me, honestly.
- learingsci 9mo ago
  GDP matters very little when I’m homeless.
  - aprilthird2021 9mo ago
    If you're homeless due to losing your job, then you'll be homeless whether your job goes overseas or to someone else in the US. At least in the latter scenario the job is still here for you to get back one day
    - learingsci 9mo ago
      Based on the "Worst Case Housing Needs: 2025 Report to Congress" released in late 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that foreign-born population growth accounted for approximately two-thirds of the increase in nationwide rental demand between 2021 and 2024.
      - aprilthird2021 9mo ago
        Of course. In any growing services-based economy you will have foreign born population growth. If you eliminate that population growth, economic growth will decline with it. If we were a growing manufacturing-based economy that wouldn't be the case as much. I'd also recommend you read this. Many government reports since Trump took over and fired long standing professionals and hired loons are suspect: https://www.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025_12_22_The_Worst_Case_Housing_Needs_Response__Final.pdf.pdf?ct=1766440689 https://www.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025_1...
FilosofumRex 9mo ago
> 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees Hell no, Amazon has been a top 10 filer of H1-B LCAs for decades. The only H1-Bs being laid off, if any, are the older ones (over 39) to be replaced with cheaper models https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8LNhxJq9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8LNhxJq9Q

echelon 9mo ago

Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring? That keeps the facilities here, the local employment options here, the growth here, the tax base here... We should want more smart people moving to this country. More business creation, more capital, more labor, more output. Immigration is total economic growth for America, non zero-sum. Offshoring is not only economic loss, but second order loss: we lose the capacity over an extended time frame.

autokad 9mo ago
I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having to pay more for everything. While more taxes are collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of the economic pain induced by the people living there. and it is in fact zero sum. every spot filled in university or company is a spot not taken by a local, as its obvious by the numbers, more local people are not getting admitted into CS programs nor are they being hired. its 100% zero sum when we are looking at these numbers and %s.
- Analemma_ 9mo ago
  You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children. The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To understand why, you might start with the fact that immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country employed in some way or another by consumer spending.
  - mc32 9mo ago
    Children are future taxpayers the majority with parents who were not a tax burden --net positive tax contribution. People without Children benefit from the taxes paid by the children of people who rear children -i.e. people without children aren't "cashing out" their tax contributed retirement --that contribution went to other retirees.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - repstosb 9mo ago
      And citizens benefit from the taxes paid by non-citizen immigrants, whether documented or undocumented. Not just income and payroll taxes that might be dodged by under-the-table arrangements, but sales taxes, property taxes (perhaps paid indirectly via rent to a taxpaying landlord), the consumer share (nearly 100%) of tariffs, etc. And much of that tax base is spent on benefits and services that are not accessible to taxpaying non-citizens. So from that standpoint, immigrants are a /better/ economic deal for the public than children are. At the end of the day, though, it shouldn't matter where people were born if they're contributing to society, and the grandparent post is 100% correct that the whole debate is stupid.
      - irishcoffee 9mo ago
        Sales tax is actually paid by the vendor, they just pass the cost along. The landlord pays the property tax, they just pass the cost along. It is absolutely impossible for an undocumented alien to meaningfully contribute towards their tax burden in any meaningful way.
        lovich 9mo ago
        Oh, in that case no w-2 employee pays income taxes, their employer does. I guess we’re all just mooches on society and only the company owners do anything.
- echelon 9mo ago
  Companies want to cut costs. They will. If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the jobs will be offshored. Look at what just happened to film labor in 2022-2023. The industry was burgeoning off the heels of the streaming wars and ZIRP. Then the stikes happened. Amazon and Netflix took trained crews in the Eastern Europe bloc and leveraged tax deals and existing infra in Ireland and the UK. Film production in LA and Atlanta are now down over 75%. Even with insane local tax subsidies - unlimited subsidies in the case or Georgia. Software development will escape to other cheaper countries. They're talented and hard working. AI will accelerate this. Then what? America lost manufacturing. I think we've decided that was a very bad idea. We need to move the cheaper labor here. More workforce means more economic opportunities for startups and innovation. Labor will find a way as long as the infrastructure is here. De-growth is cost cutting and collapse. Immigration is rapid growth, diversification, innovation, and market dominance. All those people start buying from businesses here. They start paying taxes here. It supercharges the local economy. Your house might go up in price, but way more money is moving around - more jobs, more growth, second order effects. America doesn't have the land limits Canada has. And we can set tax policy and regulations to encourage building. I'd rather be in an America forecasted to hit 500 million citizens - birth or immigration. And I want to spend on their education. I want capital to fund their startup ideas. I want the FTC/DOJ to break up market monopolies to create opportunity for new risk takers and labor capital. That was the world the Boomers had. Exciting, full of opportunity. That was the world of a rapidly industrializing America. Right now, the world we have ahead looks bleak. People aren't having kids and we aren't bringing in immigrants. We'll have less consumerism, less labor, and everything will shrink and shrivel and be less than it was.
  - dzonga 9mo ago
    > We need to move the cheaper labor here Very smart & pragmatic. however political sentiment is going the other way - which is an own goal
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    If you really think that companies are moving out of country because "there's not enough talent", despite having some of the more relaxed tax codes and most talented universities here: well, sure. That would be hopeless. It also sounds like you're buying snake oil. They had decades to off shore, and they chose not to. I don't think Ai in the near term (<15 years) is going to change that dial much. If they do leave, there's plenty of talent to fill the void.
KerrAvon 9mo ago
We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits. H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
- jandrese 9mo ago
  > H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test. The job description is a senior full stack product developer fluent in all programming languages and frameworks. Salary is $70,000/year. Somehow they can never find Americans to fill those jobs. They'll go on Linkedin complaining that Americans are too lazy and don't have the right hustle culture and talk about made up concepts like work life balance when the bosses demand 100 hour work weeks without overtime pay.
  - echelon 9mo ago
    Our competitors in another country will have no problem building those products. Then they'll be sold in America to American consumers. Then our industry deflates, because we can't compete on cost or labor scale / innovation. If we put up tariffs, we get a short respite. But now our goods don't sell as well overseas in the face of competition. Our industries still shrink. Eventually they become domestically uncompetitive. So then what? You preserved some wages for 20 years at the cost of killing the future. I think all of these conversations are especially pertinent because AI will provide activation energy to accelerate this migration. Now is not the time to encourage offshoring.
    - jandrese 9mo ago
      Turns out this is a difficult problem with no one good solution. Subjecting labor to a race to the bottom is probably the most efficient individual system from a capitalist standpoint, but it destroys itself just as much as your customers can no longer afford to buy most of the products made. The selfish strategy ruins the entire system if everybody does it. Capitalism and Communism have opposite problems. Communism attempts to manage the markets from a top down approach, making it relatively easy to handle systemic problems but almost impossible to optimize for efficiency because there is far too much information that doesn't make it to the top. Capitalism by contrast pushes the decisions down to where the information is, allowing for excellent efficiency but leaving it blind to systemic problems. So the best solution is some kind of meet in the middle approach that is complex and ugly and fosters continual arguments over where lines should be drawn.
jimbob45 9mo ago
Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear engineering). Trump made the cost change some months ago to address those concerns but I haven’t seen any studies showing whether or not those changes had a positive effect or not.
Gibbon1 9mo ago
> Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring? That's my opinion. However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the other hand whats the difference for someone in San Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey? Not much. And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.
- learingsci 9mo ago
  Guy in San Francisco can move to NJ easier than Mumbai.
johnnyanmac 9mo ago
I want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept to get foreign talent that found domestically. But these days is a shell game that's turned into a way to put shackles on employees who can't job hop. It hurts both groups in the long run.
- dlahoda 9mo ago
  would job hop allowance help?
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    Not fully, the problem is much deeper than compensation. Let's not have large companies game around the slots allotted and using various means to get more slots. And put some serious enforcement on how they justify their H1b's to begin with as a start.
  - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
    Yes, but also salary minimum at top industry percentile to prevent use for wage suppression domestically. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229180 (Top 40 H-1B employers) Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 - September 2025 (526 comments) Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments) H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments) Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 - December 2024 (65 comments) How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional citations)
    - aprilthird2021 9mo ago
incr_me 9mo ago
Wait why doesn't India get to have these things, too?
- int_19h 9mo ago
  There's no reason why it shouldn't, but why should American corporations subsidize it?
  - IncreasePosts 9mo ago
    Because they can hire 5 programmers in India for the cost of 1 in America, and American programmers aren't 5x better than Indian ones ? Amazon is an online shop, not a jobs program. I'm sure they would rather eliminate a position altogether even more than sending it to India.
    - int_19h 9mo ago
      Let me rephrase that. Why should American citizens allow American corporations to do that?
  - incr_me 9mo ago
    Seems just to me, honestly.
learingsci 9mo ago
GDP matters very little when I’m homeless.
- aprilthird2021 9mo ago
  If you're homeless due to losing your job, then you'll be homeless whether your job goes overseas or to someone else in the US. At least in the latter scenario the job is still here for you to get back one day
  - learingsci 9mo ago
    Based on the "Worst Case Housing Needs: 2025 Report to Congress" released in late 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that foreign-born population growth accounted for approximately two-thirds of the increase in nationwide rental demand between 2021 and 2024.
    - aprilthird2021 9mo ago
      Of course. In any growing services-based economy you will have foreign born population growth. If you eliminate that population growth, economic growth will decline with it. If we were a growing manufacturing-based economy that wouldn't be the case as much. I'd also recommend you read this. Many government reports since Trump took over and fired long standing professionals and hired loons are suspect: https://www.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025_12_22_The_Worst_Case_Housing_Needs_Response__Final.pdf.pdf?ct=1766440689 https://www.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025_1...

FilosofumRex 9mo ago

> 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees Hell no, Amazon has been a top 10 filer of H1-B LCAs for decades. The only H1-Bs being laid off, if any, are the older ones (over 39) to be replaced with cheaper models https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8LNhxJq9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8LNhxJq9Q