Yeah, 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.
I 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.
> I don't think raising the fee fixes the abuse problems.
It doesn't totally fix them, but it does make it so the applicant is more fairly compensated for accepting a more abusive work environment. It also stops companies from using H1-Bs as a mechanism to reduce overhead.
> 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.
I'd be for that as well. If someone comes in on a work visa I want them to either have full access to the labor market with all the freedoms any american citizen has, or I want their compensation to be high enough to justify locking them to a company and out of the general labor market.
> but it does make it so the applicant is more fairly compensated for accepting a more abusive work environment
How so? It increases the cost to the employer to hire an H1B employee, so they might hire less of them. But it could also mean they pay the employee less to compensate for the higher cost of bringing them in to the country.
I wouldn't be upset if we fixed both ends... make H1B an immigrant visa (they can apply for residency after ~7 years) and place reasonable minimum salaries (currently pegged at the prevailing local wage - probably should be 150% of that figure instead).
It's not just that. There are many sources coming out of the woodwork of massive H1B fraud rings. Basically from the top (CEO level) down a F500 company starts replacing its hiring loops to mostly focus on H1B and remove all American workers. And some of them just sit idle once hired.
They’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.
No. 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.
Well 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.
How 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.
Local SMEs (regulatory requirements), sales, local implementation teams, HR / legal (to support the previous employees). And engineers.
Sales and implementation could maybe be US-based, but then we're flying them around the globe. Not sure that makes sense vs hiring locals.
SMEs, similar story - not always available in the US.
The engineers are the only ones that could realistically be co-located in the US. But, a good chunk of those were acqui-hired, so now you're asking them all to relocate to the US? Not sure that's viable in the best of times, and definitely not in today's ass-backwards political climate.
Meh, 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).
1/10 sounds in the ballpark - I think my ratio is better, but not by much. About half my interviews have been with candidates in India, half US, all for software engineering roles, mostly early to mid-career. Success rates weren't significantly different between the countries. Haven't had the chance to interview in Mexico yet, but we have an office there, so that'll probably happen soon.
Given 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?
I 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.
The 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.
"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.
> 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.
What services can only be procured from offshore businesses and service providers that aren't for cutting costs? Honestly, what can be provided by someone in the UK, Europe, or LATAM that cannot be done by one of 100M people in the US labor force? I am genuinely interested, both as a scholar and as market opportunity.
You're entirely missing the point, which was to propose this as a workaround for taxes trying to make outsourcing non-competitive.
The point is not that they couldn't, but that a company moving proprietary "services" offshore as a means to cut costs aren't interested in whether the services can be provided locally, but whether they can cut costs by moving them offshore.
If you tax renting labour, then companies seeking to do this will just enter into long enough service contracts to have the outsourcing agency custom-build a SaaS just for you instead.
The market opportunity here is simply to be an outsourced body shop.
If 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
I 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.
Also 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?
