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New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
- bearjaws 1mo agoNot surprising, H1B for my entire career was a cost cutting measure. Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B. Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid. I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.
- foxtrot8672 1mo agoyep. I see the same thing. Trump isn't wrong to hike fees for H1-B. For companies that shift development overseas they should face tariffs as well.
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoCall your congressional rep. The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 - September 2025 Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2976 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/297...
- throwawalien 1mo agois 25% enough to move the needle?
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoI don't know. Have to implement to find out and iterate. The number can go up until the preferred amount of offshoring has been drained from the system.
- techpression 1mo agoAlso curious about loopholes, could said company start another company out of state that was the outsourcing entity and then the parent company paid that company. You're theoretically hiring from within the US, because I assume said policy doesn't go all the way to sub-contractors etc?
- tuesdaynight 1mo agoIf you open an office in another country and hire people there, is that outsourcing? If so, would big tech have to close their "international" offices if they don't want to pay the 25% tax? I ask that because I'm seeing these offices opening a lot in the last 3 years
- vidarh 1mo agoSo you'd move companies overseas and buy services instead of outsourcing work. It's really hard to do this in a way that won't be trivial to work around, and often in ways where you're likely to like the work around even less.
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoThe US can tariff those out of country services if needed (through a combination of mandatory tax reporting and payment rails monitoring). An example of this today is SaaS taxes [1]. Please provide a non US service as an example and I'll propose how to rapidly replace it domestically. Out of country services can be cloned with LLMs if needed. The US government could sponsor tokens to US entities who employee US workers to clone these offshore or out of country businesses. Can overseas companies outrun the token dispenser and tax code disadvantages? You have to remember that outsourcing is primarily used by US businesses to arbitrage labor while having the US regulatory capture advantage. They want access to the US market without paying US labor costs. This is what laws are for. "You can just do things." > It's really hard to do this in a way that won't be trivial to work around, and often in ways where you're likely to like the work around even less. So is collecting taxes, you just have a government funded entity grind tirelessly to keep closing the gaps. You make it economically burdensome to attempt to workaround. There will always be some leakage. "Work is hard." We know the labor exists in the US. We know offshoring is used to improve profit margins and to disempower workers to get more out of them. It is worth the effort, imho, if you want to keep the capital in the US versus sending it overseas and prioritize domestic workers over someone else's profits. [1] https://stripe.com/guides/introduction-to-saas-taxability-in-the-us https://stripe.com/guides/introduction-to-saas-taxability-in...
- gamessucknow 1mo ago> This is what laws are for. "You can just do things." “China” “National Security” And with that, you’re argument is dead in the water.
- vidarh 1mo ago"SaaS taxes" are just sales taxes. They would apply if you create a SaaS for the stuff you want to outsource, sure. Except for it to be expensive enough to make outsourcing services unattractive you'd have to make them many times higher than they are today. > Out of country services can be cloned with LLMs if needed. Good luck cloning services whose endpoints are unavailable and documentation non-existent and that there would be no customers for, as they're built as a means of working around taxation of outsourcing.
- cogman10 1mo agoYeah, I'm generally pretty pro-immigration and I'm very anti-H1B. It's very abusive to the workers hired as H1-B and it's designed for wage suppression. You can stay an H1-B for years. If you lose your job, you'll face deportation. It gives your employer a VERY large amount of leverage over your life. It's supposed to be about bringing expertise when local expertise isn't available, but in practice it's companies saying "Oh, we can't find someone who will work for $50k as a software dev so we need to hire H1-Bs." Either the program needs to end or the minimum salary needs to be raised to something like $300k to compensate for the leverage the employer has.
- emodendroket 1mo agoThey’re doing the opposite and floating the idea of making the program more coercive by ending the grace period to find a new job, so that essentially ICE could wait outside an office after layoffs and start cuffing people. This is because “protecting workers” is a pretext and not their actual goal.
- xhkkffbf 1mo agoNo. The fees definitely slow down the companies from trying to hire cheap replacements. Yes, the end of a grace period does make things tougher for people in a bad job, but I think the goal is really to end these bad jobs.
- emodendroket 1mo agoWell then it’s not working; they’re just hiring people abroad. That outcome would be a disaster if your goal is helping American workers but a success if your goal is just reducing the number of foreigners in the country without regard for American workers. Between the results of the policies they’ve chosen and the types of rants they go on television or social media to make that interpretation suggests itself.
- thayne 1mo agoI don't think raising the fee fixes the abuse problems. Unless maybe most of the fee goes into eacrow and is paid back to the employee if the employer terminates employment (maybe without a good, documented cause?). But that could produce its own misaligned incentives. I think the best way to solve it is to remove or reduce the restrictions on staying in the country after they have worked here for some number of years.
- ben_w 1mo agoRest of us really ought to put tariffs on US software. Not to bring in jobs or money (tariffs don't do that); just to push us away from your companies.
- alistairSH 1mo agoHow do you determine the "correct" location of a job? My employer sells software internationally - are you claiming any international job should be subject to some sort of fine simply because the company is HQed in the US? I suppose we could try slicing revenue or profit by sales region and comparing against headcount expense per region? But with salaries abroad being a fraction of in the US, that math might still work out in favor of keeping international employees. EDIT - I dislike the H1B system overall. Just not sure "fine companies that operate overseas" is something we should consider as a replacement.
- throwawalien 1mo agodevil's advocate - if they are HQ'd in the US, is hiring US citizens that big of an ask? why do they need cheap overseas labor?
- lokar 1mo agoIME it’s not cheaper, it’s the only way to find enough qualified people
- throwawalien 1mo agoIME at my org we have 3 contractors out of SE Asia to every 1 US FT role. They make less than a third of a FT US employee.
- lokar 1mo agoYes, there is a ton of abuse that drives down pay for many people. We should find way to improve the system.
- alistairSH 1mo agoMeh, not sure I really buy that argument. I've never had a problem hiring in the US. And this is for a mid-tier, mid-size software company that most people have never heard of, not located in SV, and PE-owned (not much in the way of big bonuses and no stock options).
- schnitzelstoat 1mo agoGiven that a lot of the 'offshoring' comes here to Europe (due to our much lower salaries) if the US starts encouraging their firms to cut jobs here via tariffs then the EU should absolutely respond - if this is how the US treats it's allies then perhaps closer relations with China are warranted?
- lampeli 1mo agothe year of the linux desktop is going to come faster than the year of Europeans not behaving like vassals to US interests
- abhiyerra 1mo agoI don’t think people consider the negative ramifications for this on the other side. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have a ton of H1B. Take India, as an example, since that is where a majority of H1Bs come from. It has been pretty lenient in allowing American tech into the country. Everyone uses Google, YouTube, Windows, WhatsApp and Amazon. All of those are profits that go to America. If H1Bs are dropped or Indian workers are tariffed I believe you will start seeing a reciprocal tariffs, fines or calls for domestication. H1B started off with the right idea, but has essentially become gamed to hell. It has created a new white collar slave class that companies exploit.
- adrr 1mo agoH1B should have never been a lottery. It should be a stack rank by salary to deal with the over subscription.
- cogman10 1mo agoOh that's a really good way to handle it that would actually follow the intent of the program. You can't find someone to do a job? Then you need to compete on wage with other companies to bring someone in. Or, you know, raise your salary for local employees.
- winstonp 1mo agothe salary weighted lottery today is a good step in the right direction IMO.
- lokar 1mo agoA simple stack rank and cut has the problem of where to draw the line. Also, how to value pre-ipo stock There are other good options as well (an auction, etc). They all have problems, but there are mitigations. It could be vastly improved even if it’s not perfect. It’s just the will to do it.
- schnitzelstoat 1mo agoBut at the moment there are quotas right? So it's basically the same - there are N visas to give out so you rank by salary and pick the top N.
- cromka 1mo agoSame experience. NYC location of a high street investment bank.
- heywintermute 1mo agoBeen pretty much my exact experience
- ransom1538 1mo agoWait? People do not know this? This war was lost a decade ago. Google employs more than 4,100 H-1B visa holders.
- kccqzy 1mo agoGoogle doesn’t underpay H-1B holders. In my experience any difference in actual pay is more likely caused by the H-1B people having worse salary negotiation skills than native born people.
- lokar 1mo agoNot my experience in big tech and HFT. We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else. When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.
- andrewla 1mo agoI can't speak to your particular situation, but in my experience this has been two factors; one is location -- it is sometimes hard in some locations to find senior talent whereas H1Bs are (naturally) more amenable to moving. The other is pricing, which is echoing the GP's point. Senior talent is expensive and you can get it at (apparently) considerably lower cost by looking for H1B applicants.
- lokar 1mo agoI found that once you are paying mid to high 6 figures the company is not trying to save by hiring a foreigner.
- sokoloff 1mo agoHow many H1-B or non-H1-B jobs are “high 6 figures”? That’s a tiny, tiny minority of the tech employment market and one which would readily shrug off a one-time $100K expense. (That would be less than 2 months’ salary for a high-6-figure position.)
- lokar 1mo agoMost of my friends and colleagues ended up in that range (or higher). It’s more common then people think
- sokoloff 1mo ago$600K+ is around 1% of the US tech market and tends to run in clusters (so your circle is more likely to have people near you in comp than a random selection). I'm not doubting your first statement. For your second statement, I think people probably estimate it reasonably accurately as "rare, but not extraordinarily rare nor unheard of".
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- paulddraper 1mo ago> Not surprising, H1B for my entire career was a cost cutting measure. > Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid. Yes.
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- da_chicken 1mo agoI have definitely seen job postings that were so detailed and narrow that they couldn't possibly find anyone "qualified". They were clearly making it so that it would be easier to claim that nobody in the country was qualified. But I will say that the only people I have met that are here on H1-B have been uniquely qualified for their position. Such as, they invented a way to scale a given chemical manufacturing process, and they were developing it further. But I got the impression that they were not particularly well paid like I would expect an American in the same position to be.
- peezd 1mo agoIt definitely varies a ton. I've observed more that H1B's keep employee mobility lower, so employees on H1Bs tended to be paid less due to the natural bumps that come out of switching jobs every few years, especially going from an associate to senior/staff level where often the company throws a small raise with promotions that don't keep up with market rates. One other factor that I experienced is when I was in senior leadership we absolutely tracked 'flight risk' that factored in to retention programs for top talent, and H1Bs were by the nature of it viewed as lower flight risks so less likely to fall into these programs.
- unified101 1mo agoI think this will go hand in hand with tech compensation and jobs falling off a cliff. In the AI world too, we can't have our cake and eat it.
- jvanderbot 1mo agoYeah, fine. Honestly I think most of us have been overpaid our entire career. But I'm not sure I see it necessarily. Take these stats, which can cut either way on this topic: In USA there are more software engineers than all other engineers combined. There are 10x more software engineers than the next highest engineering discipline. If you could subdivide s/w engs into 10 equal categories ("I'm not just a run of the mill s/w eng"), each of those would be the top engineering employment category. The top 10% of software engineers outnumber the next highest engineer class. At 10% unemployment, there are more unemployed software engineers than the next highest employed engineer category.
- azinman2 1mo agoAre there not 10x the need of software engineers compared to other engineers, particularly in the US?
- jvanderbot 1mo agoIt would seem there are! The question is: Will there continue to be?
- unified101 1mo agoI don't think you'll find this community welcoming the idea of lower pay (and hence a more volatile employment). Overall if in the next 12 months I fully expect compensation on average to be down 30-50%. It's impossible for it not to, given the sudden exodus of talent from US to open up remote consultancies that can offer same skill at 1/4th the price.
- jvanderbot 1mo ago
- nekusar 1mo agoI'd be happier if H1B's (read: employment slavery) was completely redone and not tied to a single sponsor company, or gotten rid of completely. I know so many IT folks who are unemployed. And compounding that is unmitigated slop machines for both generating resumes and filtering them. Its fraud all the way down every where I look.
- rfgplk 1mo agoYep. Taking advantage of desperate people from developing countries who think a $90k salary is something extravagant.
- r_lee 1mo ago> who think a $90k salary is something extravagant I guess Europe is then part of these "developing countries"
- rfgplk 1mo agoYes, but H1B visas apply only for those working IN the US, not remotely.
- ben_w 1mo agoEverywhere else but the USA (and possibly Luxembourg), $90k will buy you a fantastic quality of life. If you really want to make $90k seem as bad to the rest of us as it feels to you, you need to get the exchange rates changed, have USD devalued compared to other currencies until they're at purchasing power parity. Of course, doing this would mean forcing yourselves to accept that China's got the biggest economy and the USA is only a little ahead of the EU, instead of thinking China and the EU are about the same as each other and significantly behind the USA.
- vehemenz 1mo ago$90k gets you a good quality of life in most of the US, too.
- micromacrofoot 1mo agobut no, you can't work remotely
- superjose 1mo agoWow. This will affect universities and negatively impact the US in the coming years. How many of the talent from frontier labs is immigrant?
- tonyhart7 1mo agoI think its more of equal counter force as other commenter pointing out, those visas is for high skill job that lacks candidate on US soil but company uses that for hiring Immigrant so they can underpaid them effectively reduce US born origin competitiveness
- nicechianti 1mo ago[dead]
- tquinn35 1mo agoIt won’t because universities, national labs and non profits are exempt from the fee. Under the proposed rule, the additional fee would not apply to H-1B petitions that are not subject to the cap, such as petitions filed by certain nonprofit research organizations, governmental research organizations, and institutions of higher education. https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-proposes-additional-h-1b-fee https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-proposes-ad... I do believe it’s going to push a lot of jobs offshore though. I have already seen it at my job.
- rayiner 1mo agoThat's an insufficiently granular question. How much of the talent in frontier labs has an H1B rather than an O visa? Out of the people who have an H1B, how many employers would be willing to eat the $100k fee because those employees are so valuable?
- dyauspitr 1mo ago50% of US unicorns are immigrant founded.
- mvdwoord 1mo agoSo it was never about the talent, but just about cost?
- stego-tech 1mo agoSeems like, if the $100k fee is too high a barrier to clear for talent they claim they cannot find domestically.
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoFirst time? meme here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49540700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49540700 (citations) (was always about cost, the US produces ~2M more college graduates per year than it needs, the system wants a labor surplus to contain labor costs) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378010 (citations)
- binlog 1mo agoThe H1B problem could be fixed overnight if the government handed them out by a simple test of ability rather than an idiotic lottery. Having world class researchers and engineers who command million dollar salaries enter the same line as a $60K worker at a slop factory like Infosys or TCS is beyond idiotic. And a high visa fee ultimately hurts more than it helps because it drives away both groups, and US tech needs the top talent from across the world to continue to remain dominant.
- lokar 1mo agoThe government can’t measure ability
- binlog 1mo agoSo then why do they hand out visas that require “extraordinary ability”?
- lokar 1mo agoThe company documents it and files an application. It’s pretty formula and a bit random. I’ve written recommendation letters for colleges to get these. My impression was the person evaluating it knows a bit about the field, they are no where near as informed as we were. AIUI, the pay was a bigger factor.
- esalman 1mo agoSpot on. USCIS adjudicators decide if an application has merit. While they are supposed to be financially self sufficient and good at the adjudication process, there is A. pressure from current administration resulting in rejection of application with merit, and B. pressure from the applicant pool to game even O1 or EB2 processes, just like H1B. The government/USCIS could invest in the adjudication process to make it more robust. But they choose to leverage it for political gains instead. It helps nobody, not US, not US workers and not non-US workers who actually have merit and rather not cheat.
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- rayiner 1mo agoThe H1B debate has a lot of factions, but one thing is clear: AI is going to be replacing some to a lot of entry level knowledge jobs. Even if it doesn't get any better than what we have now, it'll create a pipeline problem where senior engineers are more valuable than ever and we'll have to figure out how to make room for junior engineers so that eventually they can become senior engineers. Given that, it seems prudent to pump the brakes on H1B--which has become a way to get bodies for entry level work (while top talent has shifted to O visas and the like).
- AE9283F6D36A 1mo agoI suspect the real answer to that is that we'll need 10x less engineers than right now long term.
- stego-tech 1mo agoAlmost like if the $100k fee is the sticking point, then maybe the talent being brought in isn’t world class talent we can’t find domestically so much as easily exploitable manpower that can be replaced with another H-1B if they start asking for reasonable treatment or higher wages. Sorry IEEE, but offshoring happens regardless of the H-1B fee. I’m a pretty flexible dinosaur but you’re never going to get me to feel sympathy for employers leveraging a visa that’s tantamount to employment slavery in its onerous restrictions and lack of direct pathway to citizenship.
- Sol- 1mo agoIt's funny how quickly tech employees turn MAGA when it comes to qualified immigration. Bad zero-sum intuitions about work abound across all strata of society, it seems.
- tekla 1mo agoIt is pretty interesting to watch. "I'm pro immigration EXCEPT specifically the kind that directly affects me"
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- happytoexplain 1mo agoThis is the fallacy of inventing a hypocrite by combining individual opinions from multiple people. Not one single tech person I know in person has ever been "pro immigration" or "anti immigration". They all want reasonable immigration, and part of that has always meant not harming the livelihoods of existing citizens. That's the subjective part. Edit: This is also a good example of the problem where we assume a person's opinion when they are not loud/explicit about a topic. E.g. a tech person might not have loud opinions on H1Bs, or they might loudly denounce e.g. Trump's immigrant detention centers, and you might falsely then slot that person into a blunt binary like "pro immigration". Then, when their lives are negatively affected by H1B policy, they speak against it, and you then think of them as a hypocrite even though they did nothing hypocritical.
- r_lee 1mo agoI've seen the whole "nobody is illegal" be quite a popular sentiment in recent years and that (when talking about the US) that as long as they're ok people, they should be let in, seemingly oblivious to the incredibly strict US visa requirements for people from Europe etc. I'm sure this is at least partly a case of the loud minority, but it's hard to tell sometimes
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- bix6 1mo agoIndia has become super popular for US VCs. Why not invest domestically? Cost and control I guess.
- ben_w 1mo agoThe other half of "cost" is "return on investment". If I had a plan to e.g. copy-paste specific success stories from any rich country to any poor country, something that might e.g. raise the per-capita income of the poor country to that of the rich country over 30 years, I'd be glad to have the chance to make that investment in India. The per-capita GDP difference between the USA (94k) and India (2.8k) would imply 3300% growth over 30 years, which is about 12.5%/year compounding average annual growth for the whole period. This feels small enough to be plausible, and big enough to be massively tempting. Extremely fast growth, but not quite pushing absurd.
- bix6 1mo agook great but this hollows out American Industry which is a primary concern right now.
- Hippocrates 1mo agoI'm seeing a lot of "offshoring" and go to Canada at the moment in my co.
- aluminussoma 1mo agoOn the whole, this is a good thing. There are policy responses that can be enacted as needed, in an easier and more humane way. The goal of the US government should be to protect the interests of the American citizen, as much as the goals of India or China should be to protect their own interests.
- azinman2 1mo agoIts goal to protect the American citizen is fulfilled by economic security. If you let your industries leave, you have done a disservice to your citizens. That’s how trump got elected in the first place, and ironically it’ll only get worse because it’s the wrong solution.
- jasonlotito 1mo ago> The goal of the US government should be to protect the interests of the American citizen Except this is doing the opposite. Pushing jobs offshore does not help American citizens.
- profdevloper 1mo agoI think it lessens the damage -- offshore workers do not consume finite resources in their host countries (e.g. housing, medical care) leaving those to the native citizens. Eventually AI will replace the "need" for these visa holders -- cancelling a contract with an offshore firm is more tenable than remigrating thousands of families.
- afavour 1mo agoI'm a former H1B visa holder and I feel very conflicted. My experience was a great one: I was hired by a startup on an H1B, successfully transferred to a different startup, then eventually went to work for a bigger company that sponsored my green card. I wasn't underpaid by those startups and I know this $100k fee means a similar company will never hire someone like me again. But over the years I got to know many people on H1Bs who were indentured servants to their employers: once their green card application was in they were stuck. And if you're from a country like India that can take a decade or more. The whole thing feels like a scam and the $100k fee isn't going to deter those companies from doing it, it's still well worth the money to them. I wish we saw sensible, well thought out reform here. Instead we get the Trump administration.
- peezd 1mo agowell said, thanks for sharing your perspective.
- calvinmorrison 1mo agoI worked at a company that depended heavily on one of the major 4 Indian suppliers. Their employees were treated like garbage. they would bring them here for months at a time. It was like indentured servitude. they lived in a bunk house and worked all day and slept and a bus picked them up and they worked. 6 days a week. If they fucked up, they were gone the next day. All for the chance to make it here. Once we added a resource and had a sham hiring process in which the supplier supplied an expert with no less than 10 pages of experience in our niche project. To his credit, he did not lie to me, and told me he could try to figure it out but had not worked on the product, but that he needed to do well. We were forced to hire him Later our team slated to replaced by that firm to maintain a major product while we went to green field stuff. I resigned and my team flew the coup over the next year or Disgusting we should have a tax or tariff on "W2" employees or firms outsourcing labor. Minimally a tax that helps pay for our social safety net. We depend on new employed young people and sending that work afar does not help us.
- bijowo1676 1mo agoCanada is jumping on this opportunity to invite the US tech workers who are frustrated with US H1B visa restrictions and GC backlog by offering an express permanent residency in 10 days https://canadabychoice.com/services/move-to-canada/usa/occupations/tech-workers/#global-talent-stream-a-work-permit-in-10-business-days-43461-1 https://canadabychoice.com/services/move-to-canada/usa/occup... Canada also floating idea of alliance with Europe for travel and job opportunities https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-european-union-eu-membership-poilievre-trump-tariffs-usa-9.7342604 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-european-union-eu-me...
- orangedog 1mo agoDoes Canada not already have an issue with not enough jobs available?
- repeekad 1mo agoThe US says they don't want them, the point of the article is the new visa requirements (surprise) aren't converting into hiring US citizens but instead pushing the roles offshore.
- philipallstar 1mo agoWell yes, what difference does it make to bring people over to the US vs them doing the work overseas? Bringing people over has negative consequences in the US (housing demand goes up; water demand goes up; power demand goes up) and in the person's home country (money doesn't flow to the local country; good people leave who should be staying and building their own country).
- Ar-Curunir 1mo agoThe only population growth the US gets is from immigration. Cutting out skilled population growth is not a good idea!!
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- emodendroket 1mo agoNobody is willing to state this but it’s pretty clear if you look at the way officials behind the policy talk: they’re OK with this. They don’t mind economic harm. The purpose has nothing to do with protecting workers and everything to do with creating a more ethnically homogenous country.
- happytoexplain 1mo agoPeople state this constantly. It's a very effective distraction (a distraction based on reality, to be clear - there are plenty of plain old racists out there, of course).
- emodendroket 1mo agoWhat do you mean it is a distraction? I don’t think the fact that people at the highest level of power go on TV and give racist lectures about how Haiti had problems because Haitians themselves are defective should be ignored when we look at the policy the same people are making and tell us it’s motivated by something else.
- Cipater 1mo agoThe ship sailed on this one a long time ago. The US is going to be more and more ethnically diverse regardless.
- emodendroket 1mo agoYou may well be right but that’s where the urgency for massive action comes from.
- kypro 1mo agoMay I give a more balanced perspective here while acknowledging that there are bad actors with malign incentives on both sides of this debate? I think we should all be able to agree that in the limit both sides of this debate are wrong, and therefore what we are arguing here is where the balance is whether this fee helps strike the right balance. A nation cannot simply open its labour market up to the most qualified workers in the world and not have most of the best job openings going to foreigners. This is simply just a matter of numbers and probability. If you're very skilled already, then you may not see this as a problem, but if you're just coming out of education looking for a skilled job and must compete with the the entire world for a decent job in your own country, you might feel this isn't a great deal. Similarly, a nation which does not accept any foreign talent, regardless of what those individuals can provide clearly harms that nation's own economic growth potential, and ultimately longer-term that costs everyone. Maybe some people disagree, but it seems obvious to me that a nation somewhat owes its best jobs to its own citizens, and it should seek to have labour markets which are tight enough that employees will be occasionally incentivised to hire someone fresh out of education and train them up to be able to work high-skilled and well-paid jobs, rather than simply taking the easy option of hiring someone from abroad. However, sometimes training someone isn't feasible. From time to time a company may really need talent and is simply unable to reasonably train or source that domestically regardless of the salary they might offer. If this is the case then they should of course be welcome to hire foreign workers, but there should be a financial disincentive to this so that companies are always incentivised to first look for workers domestically. So I must admit I struggle a bit to understand the opposition to this $100k fee. If this causes talent to be lost then the assumption that they are extremely valuable surely must be wrong?
- giantg2 1mo agoBringing new labor into the market isn't an optimal solution in the current market either. If it's a problem, simply tax offshore labor.
- OutOfHere 1mo agoThere is indeed no need for office jobs to be done in the US, and that's the hard truth.
- happytoexplain 1mo agoYou're right, there is no need physically. Luckily governments exists to exert power over human behavior (ideally to the benefit of its citizens), and not over the behavior of physics.
- draginol 1mo agoThe $100k fee is such a bad idea. I would be fine for there being a minimum salary to get rid of the undercutting of available American labor. But there are certain niche jobs that there just isn't any local talent for that will just result in contracting with them overseas which is a lose-lose.
- drgo 1mo agoHopefully this helps stem the brain drain from developing countries
- rvz 1mo agoThe point of the these visas is to hire outside talent which cannot be found in the US and qualifies as the "best and brightest" and specialized "talent" that is beyond outstanding. Everyone knows this has been heavily abused for years. Now the word "talent" has lost its meaning or most commonly means "anyone" for cheap even though the employer knows that they are unqualified and hires them anyway for cheap labor to reduce their operating costs (expensive US employees). You can't say "we are hiring the best and brightest" and then decide to then go for those who are unqualified. Now this $100K fee is pointless when AI agents, and data centers (homes for the AI agents) are getting hired over both US employees and off-shored employees. One more thing. The big question is who would you rather trust to hire to not create a disaster like in [0][1] (Human or AI agent, hint one of them cannot be held accountable.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061682 [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata-data-leak-that-exposed-apple-iphone-secrets-2026-07-03/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
- sebastiangrill 1mo agoGood, H1B is just modern servitude. But there should be an incentive to hire local workers instead of just hiring foreigners in their own country.
- gosub100 1mo agoThet should pay into a tax fund that is applied toward student loans of American grads who are unemployed.
- rbanffy 1mo agoBut that would increase taxation over corporations. That won't work for as long as corporations can make the vast majority of campaign donations. Every citizen should have the right to one vote. Large scale campaign financing distorts that.
- jasonlotito 1mo agoI remember when this was announced here on HN. So many right-wingers were on board with this because it would bring jobs back and make companies pay. A win-win as they said.
- threecheese 1mo agoIs this just posturing (I won't speculate on the intended audience), or does the admin believe this will actually net more jobs for US citizens? TFA doesn't go into great detail about how this actually pushes offshoring - the variety that I'm familiar with at least (X/Y% blend of US/"near-shore" aka anywhere-but-west-asia roles). I have no doubt however that Y is just going to get larger while X stays the same or decreases (not even factoring aipocalypse). What constraint specifically makes them believe this is going to net in the way they want us to believe?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- vjvjvjvjghv 1mo agoIt's the same with the tariffs. My company has a huge "globalization" effort that expands offices and manufacturing facilities in countries with cheap labor and no/low tariffs. Instead of everything centering around the US, almost nobody gets hired in the US, except top management.
- Hippocrates 1mo agoI worked with and hired tons of H1Bs (and non) over the years and the idea that they earn this visa with exceptional talent is a farce. I work in bog standard web services. We fill seats with H1Bs to write ho-hum crud apps and do UX testing work. Some have been great! Others terrible. Could be wildly different for someone in a very high-tech org or medical field, but at places I worked it was used as a convenience, but not necessary.
- dominotw 1mo agowhy did submission change the title to clickbait? title is false. There are no jobs "pushed" offshore for the fee dang really sleeping on his job these days :D
- 0xfacfac 1mo agoI feel like this is what the U.S. is not getting. If a company wants to hire a person, it will hire in or out of the country. They not allowing this form of *legal* immigration, is just making the country lose tax revenue and money circulating inside of the country...
- arjie 1mo agoTerrible own-goal in my opinion. I know loads of startups that only exist because the founders were here on H1Bs originally. But it can’t be avoided I suppose. For all the complaints about VCs, they’re tuned into something innately that most people are simply incapable of reaching for - the idea of the bet on the not-yet-great population in order to get wins. People are usually quite high-time-preference by default and “if I had bought Bitcoin/nvidia/etc” is the norm. The United States, like Europe and the UK, has hit the population wealth distribution where loss aversion dominates growth policies. Consequently, most Americans aim directly at the same targets as Europeans have succeeded at - constraining the total success of their country in an aim to extract maximal personal piece of the existing pie. The resulting shrinking in economic growth often causes much lower wealth for everyone but it’s very attractive. This leads to nonsense like dockworkers constraining US shipping to the cost of the rest of the economy or landowners successfully prohibiting the construction of more homes. Local constituents like these block growth and prosperity for most other Americans. But just like massive minimum elevator size regulations are “estimated to not have any cost impact” so are these. The common thread, I suppose, is an absence of systems thinking. I wonder if it is inevitable among countries that hit wealth. We will have to see what happens to the Polish and Latvians as they overtake the British and Germans in prosperity. People think in their lifetimes. The challenge for civilizations is thinking in longer terms when comprised of shorter individual lives. In my opinion, American cities should be towers to the sky. America has easily space to build more New Yorks. The H1B is America’s hukou for the world and the US should attempt to test-select people in and unleash coastal megacities. We shall see where we get. Datacenters are good, ships are good, factories are good, power plants are good, space launch is good. And the people we will need to get all that now that we don’t make enough locally are also good.
- BatchJob 1mo agoAs a SWE I would prefer offshore labor remain offshore. I have no problem with it.
- klipklop 1mo agoIsn’t this part of the assumed plan? Seems to me the fee would have never been done without the blessing of big tech. Trump admin gets a perceived win that they are protecting US jobs and big tech gets to fill the massive campuses they recently built in India and Canada (oh gee what are the odds?) with no option for these employees to get higher wages in the US. Seems like everyone wins but labor… No more additional US tech jobs (seems like a perma-hiring freeze) and visa employees get routed to cheaper areas which is a massive savings for the companies.
- garrett_ilands 28d ago[flagged]