The strongest advantage of the US has always been the ability to absorb global talent. I don’t think that is a popular view anymore, and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to the US.
I know several people on various visas that are making plans to leave after having gotten PHDs here. Still more have naturalized and are making contingencies for exiting.
Immigrants found close to half of the fortune 500 businesses, and start something like 20% of our new businesses each year. For those motivated immigrants to choose elsewhere is going to reduce our growth both from what they don't do, and because immigration is what has delayed our demographic inversion that Europe and other developed nations are going through.
I looked into the h1b for myself before, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to start my own successful business while on it.
You're aware that there will continue to be immigration without the h1b visa, right? That's just a common way big corporations use to import cheap labor, at least that's what I looked like to me - because id be fully at the mercy of the company I'd be unable to really negotiate my contracts etc
It's definitely possible to make an argument in favor of the program, but it's a lot more nuanced at the societal level - and I suspect overall net negative, because often the h1b visa recipients will transfer their money back to their home country, which makes this into a net-negative again.
I believe the parent is referring to the knock-on effects of all the other immigration enforcement actions.
I largely agree with you about h1b specifically but this move doesn't exist in isolation. It's increasingly clear that the US is determined to make life hard on immigrants in general (or at least harder) and this is just another data point.
In the case of H1B, they’re paid slightly more on average. It’s myth that they’re cheaper. Usually they’re a lot more expensive given the costs of dealing with the immigration process
> I suspect overall net negative, because often the h1b visa recipients will transfer their money back to their home country, which makes this into a net-negative again
Why is this a problem? So what if someone transfers money back home - that’s their money that they’re free to do what they want with. Most people are okay buying imported products and also don’t support exit taxes in other situations, so why single out immigrants?
That means that the society is worse of if everyone does it
And importing goods is a good example why the scale matters. People usually import items worth maybe some small fraction of their yearly income, whereas some immigrants are known to sent back more then they spent locally.
Which is fine if they're actually world class talent, because then there will be very few people doing so, and their intellectual contributions likely offset any other issues. However, as you scale up the immigration percentage, it eventually does become a societal problem.
And the governments job is explicitly to look at the well being if the society - at least ideally. How much they actually do (vs just trying to siphon as much tax payer money as they can get away with) is another question I'm unqualified to say wrt the USA
The birthrate among the most conservative Americans is still over 2.0. From the perspective of the conservative movement in power, it makes sense to halt immigration so the population becomes more and more conservative over time (as immigrants are left-leaning on average, especially Indians).
That will not be enough to offset the oncoming boom in infant mortality.
Curious what you're basing that on?
Indians and even Chinese, not to mention most of the non-European immigrants, are relatively conservative (socially reserved, self reliant, lots of self responsibility) and are only seen as left leaning in the toxic form of nationalistic conservatism that dominates the USA.
I have no idea if their claim that the "birthrate among the most conservative Americans is still over 2.0" is correct, but a demographic power struggle totally fits the rhetoric I observe from abroad.
At least, that was the messaging around 2019 when we were telling coal miners to 'learn to code.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/changing-america/en...
Now we are saying it takes a specific mindset...
It's also looking like those coal miners who pushed back had more foresight as the market is saturated and with the AI sea change.
https://futurism.com/computer-science-majors-high-unemployme...
I do agree with you in part however, it takes ambition to succeed. This is true no matter if you are an immigrant or native born.
Maybe the real question should be, why is our population losing their ambition?
Why do you think Utah is the richest red state? Mormon religion doesn’t see math/ science to conflict with faith for some reason, you will see a lot of Mormon programmers especially out here in the west. But the same isn’t true for the rest of red state America. Better yet, compare with China: China is a conservative country, but they believe in education. We simply don’t have that advantage in general.
https://www.hoover.org/research/seattle-schools-propose-teac...
> China is a conservative country but they believe in education
China is a communist country that banned private tutoring because some children were getting ahead, creating inequality (the "double reduction" policy).
When you give American conservatives actual numbers on the economy, weather, healthcare, they assert that they would much rather go with what they think is true vs what actually is true. They simply don’t believe in data and math, you aren’t going to advance much in tech that way.
You are conflating "government data" with "math" as if they're the same thing. That's a massive error and suggests you should fix your own understandings before attacking other people's. Someone saying they don't trust the government to report honest/accurate numbers doesn't mean they think math is a conspiracy, and it's a ridiculous distortion to present it like that. In fact, it's exactly that kind of behavior that causes conservatives to not trust leftists (and by extension the government departments most full of them).
Fast forward to mid 2020s, now USA feels like old style European country that is rich as f and about to go through stages of great suffering to eventually become a nation. It's not even like Dubai or something, its straight out time travel. You don't go to USA to be treated fairly and climb to the top in a meritocratic system anymore, its all about race, identity and paperwork now. It looks like a shitty European country, why would you go to a shitty European country? You can have that experience at home in most places in the world and you don't have to suffer the part of being far away from your friends and family. I'm sure a lot of people will still go to USA but their profiles will be different.
IMHO the predominant feeling towards USA is disappointment, not even anger. It wasn't supposed to end up like that.
However, your characterisation of European countries as “shitty” is unfair IMO. I’m reminded of the saying “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other ones). Europe is FAR from perfect, but the long arc of history factors large in their politics and humanistic predilections (relative to other countries that is). They have living memory to just how devastating divisions on the continent can be. So yes, the EU may be the shittiest form of government... except for all those other ones (acknowledging that this paraphrase only makes sense if your values are similar).
I wish the crumbling of the empire will bring some humility to one of the most entitled and ignorant-about-the-world culture that ever had the chance to rule the world. Jesus, some of your comments are insufferable and it’s hard to feel pity for whatever is going on over there.
Also, the USA has stopped being the land of the free in the mid 70s for the rest of the world, but it’s clear that within your borders your post-war propaganda is still very effective to this day.
- Steve Eisman, 2008
Global talent can still come in on a different visa.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
H1-B has lower standards.
This is just derailing the discussion. Visas for privileged individuals bad = immigration bad.
"only applies to recent development" "For the entirety of the H visa program" "is a recent thing. The kickbacks are a relatively new thing."
expand the conversation scope to responding to what you state, and for me to say that in fact what you are claiming is incorrect.
But let’s assume you’re right. Even if 90% of them were unskilled, the other 10% is still incredibly valuable for the American economy and taxpayers. And it’s not even a difficult decision. That “loss” is tiny compared to the extreme benefit we receive, that literally NO other country on the planet can replicate. Unless we give it away, like you’re proposing to do.
If the h1b program was a perm residence visa, then your argument holds water. When they return home, they will take their 15 years of experience and offshore their capital.
Whereas if a perm resident had that same job, they would keep their money invested in American businesses (and real estate).
If our goal is to brain drain the world, lets replace the h1b visa program with a program with a clear attainable path to perm residency.
You have to ask yourself what other implicit objectives you have because as it stands, raising the green card employment-based cap and raising the per-country cap would get you want immediately.
As an America living in southeast with ~40 years of life to plan for, I face the similar issue of: which country can I feel can be a 'safe' home for me to live in?
If Vietnam had a f1 -> h1b system (and no country caps), I would still not feel safe to call Vietnam my home.
- The h1b is a lottery. I could work my butt off and still just be unlucky.
- H1b is tied to employment. If I lost my job due to economic situations, poor politics, or personal health issues, I have 60d to find a new job or buy airplane tickets to leave.
In my opinion this is even more general: there's a culture of focusing on punishment in the USA that creates more issues than the abuse it tries to punish.
It's one of the reasons of much of the bureaucratic mess in many systems, like healthcare and social welfare, an eternal game of whack-a-mole to stamp out abuse/fraud that creates Kafka-esque results. The focus is to find, and punish as much abuse as possible through increased requirements, increased bureaucratic burden, so on and so forth, instead of iterating the design in more clever ways to diminish the downsides.
I don't think there should be resignation to fraud and abuse, at the same time it doesn't matter how much more complicated the process gets it will always suffer from fraud/abuse, this extreme focus on trying to stamp it all out, punish, etc. instead of searching for a good balance where it's the most net-positive without creating additional issues, becomes very counter-productive after a certain level. Punishment of all waste, abuse, fraud is an impossible goal but it's always a political need given how American society needs to feel it's possible and will be done.
It's quite a cultural quagmire.
Look at their plan to 'starve the beast'. They claim they are for fiscal responsibility as their number one priority, but they would rather bankrupt the country in order to get their political way than be fiscally responsible. They have zero morals. It's hard to have a working government when half the people in charge don't want a working government.
Among the many inexplicable things the current US administration is doing, abandoning soft power in favor of returning to militaristic brute force makes the least sense to me. Soft power costs less, is easier to maintain, and creates a vast moat. Giving that up is nuts.
When three generations (late Boomer, Generation X, and Millennials) have seen it and the various alphabet soup of programs from the perspective of having to train their replacements from these programs, or hear their parents having to do same, the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry. The only valid thing to do is to have the various involved entities from the law firms that architect the citizens out under dubious if not outright fraudulent terms, the companies that implement it (from the body shops to their clients, large and small), and the various lobbying groups that have pushed the sorry excuse of a program series (along with their smears about the citizens’ dare to protect their own first), to simply start cutting painfully huge, salary replacement checks to the entire generations that dealt with that mess.
And then you might understand why this is even on the table, and hope that the 1965 Immigration Act (and its follow on provisions) doesn’t get repealed in full to get rid of the fraud and abuse that even Grigsby & Cohen advocated for in the early 2000s.
Either you can stop this now and make amends with two and a half generations (and more) while you have a voice in the matter, or that it will be resolved in far uglier terms where your words will not be heard.
> the sympathy and empathy have long since run dry
The has to be the funniest part of the whole statement. The whole point of creating an "outsider" is that you have an enemy to fight contend with and can justify your dislike by accusing them of fraud and other crimes. People who dislike "outsiders" never had sympathy or empathy for those "outsiders" so lets not pretend something has changed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:
> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,
>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.
>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.
>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.
Maybe they think they can just cherry-pick the geniuses and leave "the rest" but that's not how it works; skilled experts don't just suddenly appear out of the vacuum, you need a pipeline with a wide mouth. It wasn't perfect but the US had the world's best genius pipeline, and it has already been largely torn down.
Top talent has the world as their oyster: for the best the answer is obvious even when it is a 96% fit vs. a 96.5% fit.
I don't know the actual %, likely gap used to be much bigger, but point is you can get very sudden state changes in outcome from very small policy change when at that point: think idiom "it was the final straw that broke the camel's back".
Self sorting: the best see that people like them went to the USA already, because those forerunners saw their talent, advise them to join them in the USA.
This one depends both on political stability and everyone not leaving/being kicked out.
Money: especially for startups, especially for tech. US trade deficit and reserve currency enables this as all the dollars have to make it back to the USA somehow, and investment is a somehow.
This one also depends on political stability.
Canada is going to be seen as similar to USA, but open to immigrants and not fascist. Will it develop enough opportunities?
There's a big risk that everyone says "I want to be in the country that wins the next war. Therefore, China." and this then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because all (or enough of) the talent made the same choice.
Funny thing, I considered working in the US a couple of years ago but 2 reasons made me give up. The emigration felt hard and confusing as if they didn't want people there. And second, my wife was afraid of the gun violence in the US.
The thing that really pushed me to leave though was housing costs relative to income. In Canada it has reached absurd levels. It was well into the 50% of take home pay going to housing. Here's it's less than a third.
They belatedly recognized this and introduced a "K visa" specifically to draw in talent, but the mere possibility of this bringing Indians has created a furious backlash.
https://chinaglobalsouth.com/2025/10/05/china-k-visa-indian-...
You’ll see first other Asians (mostly Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese) working in China, they are definitely less noticeable. The rest will follow, Chinese are a lot less xenophobic snd more pragmatic than they appear.
Even if that pay was so much lower that you'd have to split your rent with flatmates? (yes, European comp is typically that bad, not oveblowing this)
Then I admire your principled position, but you're one in a million.
> In 2020, 70% of the population in the EU lived in a household owning their home, while the remaining 30% lived in rented housing.
So it does not seem like the price situation is as dire as you suggest, though Germany is on the lower end of the ownership scale.
Personally, I had a flatmate (rented a room) for one year during my studies, but I don't know anyone currently living with flatmates. Plus, it's not like you have to live in the middle of the capital, thanks to extensive public transport
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/w...
Oh, and all these news reports saying how young Europeans have to live with their parents until their thirties?
Second, I did in fact split my rent with flatmates during my 6 years of college, we lived 5 people in about 200sqft, then my first job I split and apartment with 3 other people. That was luxurious already! Sure, it would tricky to live like that if you have a family, but as a young person? It's fine, actually, it was a great learning experience.
Anyways, what I want to tell you is that life is not that bad in the EU and things can be much much worse than the current status quo. Personally, I have no concern for myself or my comfort, but for my family. I could live in a box in a ditch.
Sharing an apartment while in college is OK, even fun in my book.
We're talking about immigrants though, right? (If you don't want more of us in your country, I don't think you're a monster, btw. But entertain me anyway?)
Go check out, say, Berlin salaries on levels.fyi or glassdoor or wherever you prefer and filter out US companies.
Given these conditions, 80000 euro is an amazing salary. Your take home is going to be around 46400 or 3860 euro monthly.
Then head to immoscout24 and check rent prices in Berlin. Let me spoil it a little, a two-bedroom, two-bathroom 65-80 square meters apartment is starting from 1500 euro or so plus 200-300 euro for heating plus the rest of utilities. Or 2000 euro monthly in total.
So after rent you're left with what, 1860 euro? Good luck getting through the month with that money in Berlin.
I was more talking about the choice to remain in my home country vs move to the US. And I assure you, I personally don't care where you come from as long as you do your job, we can understand each other and you're not a raging asshole.
My only pet peeves with immigrants is the people who never bother to engage with the host culture at all. I find it a bit disrespectful, but that's a personal take.
Fair point.
I just realized I was replying from the perspective of attracting talent which obviously different from keeping it.
Glad things worked out for you. Staying close to loved ones and friends sure wins over pursuing money, as long as the situation is not outright dire.
I live in a higher cost-of-living city than Berlin, and could easily make it through the month on 1860 EUR, once rent and utilities have been paid
I’m confused. Is Berlin more expensive than I think it is or you never cook yourself?
~~~Add: how do manage to pay more than 50% in effective taxes?~~~
Like the median income here is extremely low, that salary puts you in the top 10%.
Help me understand because this doesn't make sense at all to me--context: living in Berlin the last 13 years
Well, maybe things are better than I imagine. Would you be comfortable sharing a few things? Thanks!
What're your monthly expenses? After rent, that is. Just groceries, a mobile plan, some clothes averaged over the year, etc.
Do you have an emergency fund? If so, what's the ballpark sum?
Are you going to be able to still pay rent when you retire?
Are you saving for a downpayment?
Do you feel financial secure enough to star a family?
Can you afford to visit some far-away place with beautiful nature once a year?
Can you afford to go... idk, skiing? Can you afford all the gear needed to do that and a few lessons?
Can you buy a gaming PC with something like rtx 5070 or so? Not into gaming? Can you afford a homelab made up of a few used PCs and a few Raspberry Pies to play around with Kubernetes or whatnot?
I'm not American, the question was why Europe can't keep talent ("talent" doesn't really include me).
Well, the compensation is just depressing. And as that person from Ireland pointed out, all the talk about worker protections is barely more than fairy tales (maybe not in the Netherlands, idk).
Were we looking at 120 instead of 80, deciding between Europe's quality of life and pursuing career and money in the US would a real tough dilemma. With 80 just enough to pay rent and for groceries... Saving a thousand a month (a wild sum!) gets you to a 20% downpayment on a 500K home in just 8 years...
Well, my feelings are hurt by seeing so many talented engineers getting compensated so badly.
How come that for all the signing and dancing about worker rights protections when push comes to shove it's US companies EU offices that are ready to pay their employees fairly? What kind of hypocrisy from EU companies is that?
If you think EU companies just cannot afford to pay that much, just compare what Siemens pays to the same level SWE in EU and US. (Have no relation to Siemens whatsoever, just an example).
That said, I was considering relocating to Germany and researching the country as best I could. I do prefer European lifestyle, but the salaries are just a non-starter.
You can easily check the numbers I give though. Any specific mistakes there?
Btw, why are you so defensive about the fact comp is so low in Europe?
> your math is not mathing really (what 20% downpayment?).
> what 20% downpayment?
20% downpayment is generally expected by German banks if you want to take out a mortgage. Don't take my word for it, check yourself.
500K Eur x 0.2 / (12 * 1K Eur) = 8.3 years.
You implied that saving 1K a month is some absurd goal. I'm trying to show that's tablestakes if you hope to ever own a home.
It's lower compared to the US and to US companies offices in EU in absolute numbers, it's the fact. Why it's lower in general -- because the cost of living is lower. Why US companies in EU have to pay premium -- because they try to behave like in US and pay premium to their delusions of grandeur.
>You implied that saving 1K a month is some absurd goal. I'm trying to show that's tablestakes if you hope to ever own a home.
I do in fact own a house and lived through this situation. It's not that the goal is absurd in itself, it simply doesn't match the story as a whole.
>You can easily check the numbers I give though. Any specific mistakes there?
From the start, two bedroom at 80k salary for living alone is already an interesting choice for 2026. You either get a better salary, a partner who works, a smaller place or live in a village. The same with the rest -- you can't have both the grind-based compensation and chill-based lifestyle. It's not that individual things in your calculation don't hold the water, it's more like they different numbers don't correspond to the same real person when taken together. If you have marketable skills that warrant the lifestyle fancier than the normal IT person slapping some forms together in a bank, you will not get 80k.
I would also not go for Europe in general (especially for 80k) if you don't have 50-100k of saving already and have the expectations like this. Grind some in US (if you are of acceptable skin color for them), then go and chill here once you are done with the grind.
Fair point. That example comes from my research, but trying to anonymize it somewhat I ended up messing it up completely. I ack it doesn't make sense as is. And saying that a job in tech won't be enough to rent a place on your own was stupid too.
> Why US companies in EU have to pay premium -- because they try to behave like in US and pay premium to their delusions of grandeur.
From my perspective they pay more because they actually value skilled employees. (Shocking, isn't it? US companies valuing their people more than European companies do). And hiring the best, in turn, lets them outcompete European business, make more money and compensate their people better -- on and on it goes.
> they try to behave like in US
In reality, save for a rare exception, they treat their employees nicely in both US and EU.
Or at least they used to before we entered the current layoffs era -- but people say big Berlin tech companies have become just as toxic (DeliveryHero, Zalando...). So it doesn't look like European companies are stopped from being toxic by labor law or better ethics.
> Why it's lower in general -- because the cost of living is lower
That's not the whole story though. Obviously comparing absolute numbers is a fool's errand. But the purchasing power is significantly lower too. And, like, OK, maybe matching US salaries purchasing power isn't realistic -- but my feeling is current EU comps are below a fair level. Companies pay that simply because they can get away with it.
> Grind some in US (if you are of acceptable skin color for them), then go and chill here once you are done with the grind.
That's not a bad idea at all. I'm good though. Found my way and am doing fine for now and, hopefully, long-term too.
It just pains me to watch so much wasted potential. Yeah, it's none of my business and it's dumb that a non-EU citizen even has strong opinions about this stuff. But EU could do so much better if only it got its shit together instead of this pathetic "but we got public transport" style coping.
Which is usually called "market price". The latest thing I heard is "threemodal market", where there tier 1, is US subsidiaries, tier 2 is local it companies and banks, and tier 3 is a normal not fancy place. Upper tiers are more competitive and tier 1 can have 200k and up compensation packages (that including shares, and stuff), lower end of tier 3 and something like 50-60k. Then there are hourly contracts too.
>But EU could do so much better if only it got its shit together instead of this pathetic "but we got public transport" style coping.
It's a pretty shallow dismissal. Not having to deal with cars and heal insurance bullshit for my whole life saves me how much money exactly? Not even monetary amount, the peace of mind alone. How much would you pay to let you child cycle to school and generally not be afraid of environment?
There is even deeper level of belief to this sometimes, that you being able to afford food delivery or eating out every day isn't a good indication of the state of the society, but I don't want to go there.
I lived in a place with 5% flat tax rates too and I'm here by choice, paying for all that really.
Tons of tax calculators available online, see for yourself.
> you never cook yourself?
I do cook but it's not like groceries are free. And what about saving for an emergency fund, a downpayment, a vacation, a new PC, laptop, phone. Or, god forbid, a car?
Do you feel safe and stress-free paying 51% of your take home comp just for rent? And keep in mind, 80K eur is top 1-5% salary.
The overwhelming majority doesn't make that much.
You have a point. I would not get two bedroom two bathroom apartment for myself alone however. Or live in Berlin for that matter.
Few years ago in Holland it was something like 100k salary == mortgage for 500k house. No downpayment, 2k monthly.
Having a sweet 30% reduction of taxable salary was very nice, otherwive learn sone cooking and get an income-generating partner to top it up. Now after layoffs and AI-bullshit depressing wages it doesn't sound nice at all and node of us is in IT is Mr. Fancy anymore.
And of course, mandatory -- don't go to western europe, everything is expensive, locals are racist, taxes are high and the weather is bad.
Would it be wrong to think that the borrower would repay a potential downpayment a few times over to the bank?
How much smaller that 2k mortgage payment would be with a 20% downpayment? And how much larger the share going towards the mortgage body would be?
If only the borrower's comp was just big enough to let them save for that downpayment.
Don't know about you, but to me it sounds almost as if the system was rigged against the worker, to redistribute wealth away from them and into the hands of employers and bankers.
I could live 200m from the beach without having to share rent with flatmates and now own my place, have easy access to the sea, mountains, great bicycle riding roads and trails with few and respectful drivers, nice places to hangout and good climate to spend time outside.
And I wouldn't trade that to the terrible (to me) quality of life in the USA: road rage, gun violence, car dependency, stupid urbanism, litigation culture, next level puritanism and hypocrisy aren't for me.
Here're some rough current salaries/cost of living numbers though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524452
In tech? Not really. Village kids having studies in the city -- sure, when they are too fancy to live in a dormitory. Tech is more like having a mortgage without your partner contributing kind of salary.
I let my frustration with European comp levels take the best of me. My bad.
If you did happen to end up with computer-related skills or education, not only was the pay vastly higher in the US, that's where the culture was a lot more enthusiastic about technology (hence why most of the world's major tech companies were founded there). And if your interest in tech extended beyond making money, you probably felt like you would meet more like-minded people in the US.
One of the things that makes starting a startup in US so favorable is that you can fire anyone at any time for any or no reason, which means you can easily retool or cut costs.
And if you're not looking to start a startup, the huge different in salaries and concentration of talent in the US, especially in certain cities, is a huge draw.
Do you have anything specific in mind? Maybe European law if friendlier to employees on avarege. But in tech US companies seem to offer similar if not better conditions. E.g., Amazon is widely considered an employer straight from hell, and yet they offer 3 monthly salaries when letting an engineer go -- that's more than a European employees typically gets.
On the other hand, both layoffs and long-hours aren't unheard of in, say, Getmany.
Add: It's not that layoffs are not a thing, they are a bit more complicated and expensive for a company than getting a list of people and sending mass-email, then blocking all access.
Employment law differs wildly from country to country, there is no general European labour law (with the exception of the working time directive). For instance, I live in Ireland where you can fire anyone for any reason for the first six months, and are not required to pay redundancy until after they've been employed two years.
The statutory redundancy limits on wages are super low for tech, so it's almost free to do layoffs. Additionally, firing people is not really very hard, you just need to have a reason, and follow a process. You need to give a verbal warning, then a written warning, and then fire.
You can't fire people because they don't suck up to you, but you can basically find a reason if you want to.
I recognise that Germany/Austria/France are different, but that's exactly my point, there is very little common European labour law.
So, I don't live in Germany but I tried to look into how things work there a little deeper.
It seems to have a lot in common with what you describe about Ireland actually.
In Ireland, companies are not obliged to recognize a union and can do other forms of employer representation instead. This is quite different from other EU countries.
For all of the USA's myriad flaws, if you say the same thing people will cheer you on.
It infuriates the fuck out of me that practically all the success of the Internet era has come out of one single country that can't even come up with a way to provide healthcare or vacations for their population.
Then there is outsourcing, where the contract with their company can be dropped. They are more expensive and have 1 year contracts too. People on permanent contracts have to be persuaded to sign separation agreement and have leverage over you. I have seen some funny examples of management trying to fuck over people for no good reason and then having to continue paying them for 2 years without seeing any output, but that was not a 10 people shop that would go under for it and was self-inflicted too.
They mood in Europe is you as a company owner have to take the risks, not the employees. Which is reflected into salaries of course.
For the startups it's not the problem I saw so far, as they benefit from having to pay lower then otherwise salary, without actually taking the risk. If the company goes under, everyone goes back to job market anyway.
Once you have the stronger pool of talent you get the better companies, you get more income, higher salaries and talented people wants to work with talented people. As a young geek I was very attracted to the tech environments in the US, MIT and silicon valley, and other places were not really on my mind. Even though there are competent places in Europe as well.
Don't really have anything to back up what I'm about to say except a gut feeling. But Europe actually has got plenty of talent. European business just doesn't seem to value that or have ideas what to do with it.
Now as someone raising kids in Europe the general sentiment is "The system is rigged, don't even try, anyone with nice things got it through avarice or corruption, nothing ever changes" (to be fair, I've lived in only two European countries, but this seems to be a common sentiment that varies primarily in scale - it was utterly atrocious in Ireland)
As smarmy and unrealistic as the first one is, I'll take it over the latter.
Speaking as an Irish citizen, this does not match to my experiences at all. But countries are large, and individual experiences are rarely a good sampling of population level traits.
Though I did appreciate that the culchies were pretty practical about getting things done.
All the same, “maybe I like the misery” didn’t come out of a vacuum…
That being said, I come from a pretty long line of culchies so maybe that's it ;)
Karpathy, with a Stanford PhD, would not have received or needed an H-1B.
This, like the new $100K fee, is about shutting down the Indian body shops that consume the vast majority of "tech" H-1Bs.
The actual law, dictated by the F-1 visa program allowing foreign studies, is that a foreign Stanford PhD must permanently depart the United States within 60 days after graduation. There's a one-time extension available under the OPT program, where they can stay up to one additional year so long as they maintain employment complementary to their education for at least 20 hours a week. But after that year they must either obtain an H-1B or leave.
Via popular media, there's a narrative that "it's easy to come here legally". Having done that myself, I know that it's not straightforward -- even if all of your paperwork + travel history is in order.
I respect the rest of your comment and have no reason to disbelieve you factually. But this comes off as propaganda. It's a hateful assumption about a person and a conversation you have no idea of. You shouldn't say this to strangers if you're trying to convince them of something.
Strange how you accuse me of intentionally lying, yet write the above. I will be more kind than you, and assume that you are unaware of (for example) the EB-2 visa which someone like Karpathy would certainly qualify for immediately. All a H-1B allows, from the "dual intent" perspective, is to temporarily extend the time one can stay in the US while looking for a job that will sponsor for another visa type (typically EB-2); it by itself *does not automatically lead to a green card or US citizenship*.
EDIT: I somehow overlooked another, ahem, inaccuracy in your riposte. Someone like Karpathy would easily have qualified for the 24-month STEM OPT extension to the base OPT year.
Bottom line: A Stanford PhD (not necessarily in a STEM field) who wants to stay in the US has very good odds of being able to do so.
That will continue to play out until it doesn't make financial or competitive sense to do so.
The withdrawal of the H1B means companies can't compete on offering them to attract talent, but that talent still wants to work somewhere and companies can instead complete on the perks they offer at those offshore places.
Things will get interesting if Europe can become the place that US tech companies offer visa support for people to move to though.
My employer sent out a company-wide email late last year outlining an aggressive growth strategy in two new tech hubs in Ireland and India, and encouraging employees to apply for open roles in those locations.
It might be me being emotional about this and about seeing a country I looked up to becoming what it's becoming, but I just can't comprehend how some of the people in this otherwise great community can look at this and think it's the direction they want for their country.
In the specific case of those around me, they are seeing huge numbers of Indian tech workers, local and offshore, displacing them. That would just be normal competition, except that they are all of the same foreign culture, which makes them an easily identifiable "out group". Multiplying the indignity and perceived "un-American-ness", they exhibit attributes like nepotism, sycophancy, ineffective communication, and a willingness to work longer hours for less pay while producing horrible work. And these attributes are perceived by as desirable to unscrupulous short-term-thinking leadership.
Of course this may exacerbate the problem (more offshoring).
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:
> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,
>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.
>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.
>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.
This is 100% the result of capitalist class overreach. They're fine with fucking over other people, but oh my how they whine when their interests are threatened. If they don't want to drive the country into the ground, they need to stop being so greedy. At the very minimum, the have-nots will eventually make sure they can no longer stay aloof from the pain, even if that means everyone is a little more worse off.
Is it? It's just free market deciding you are not needed. What's the problem with that? Are you against the free marker or something?
Any libertarian that's not extremely wealthy is stupid and was duped by propaganda.
Also there's an important difference between "institutional capital buying houses" and immigration: the former is all invisible lawyers in the background (you'd have no idea without investigative journalism), and the latter can be much more palpable to your average guy on the street. IMHO, an extremely important parts of how present-day elites maintain power in our current capitalist system is how they use diffuse responsibility and misdirection to deal with threats to their interest.
But yes, I also do wonder with these political topics on all online sites using text, votes, and comment trees what kind of things would become red flags about users if sites chose or were forced to make more metrics appear in them. "Lurker" votes, Estimated Geolocation or VPN use of commenters, anythings that could be shown in "suspect" topics even if not "bannable or confirmed" manipulation was happening.
Or maybe just a politics filter. I know I have a bad habit of getting into reading these topics and their comments when my sanity would prefer I filter them out entirely.
They're already doing that, because if the workers stay there, the businesses can pay them much, much less than if they bring them here on an H1-B. And it seems like that's much more common now, since the pandemic further normalized remote work.
Stupid me, I thought the US was about competition and boldness, a place where a man can work, be good at what he does and be appreciated for it. But it turns out that for many of you it's about the place you happened to be born.
The purpose of the United States government is to benefit the people already here. It is not reasonable to assume that Americans should have to compete with the labor pool of the entire planet.
>But it turns out that for many of you it's about the place you happened to be born.
This meme needs to die. It was not some sort of accident that I was born in this country, it was the consequence of generations of conscious decisions and actions. I had a 0% probability of being born literally anywhere else. And as such, it is perfectly reasonable to want my government to prioritize the needs of me and my compatriots over those of others who are not from here.
You almost always do, with houw our world is set up. No matter what you believe.
> it was the consequence of generations of conscious decisions and actions.
Oh, yeah, you are worthy, the others aren't. Got it.
> it is perfectly reasonable to want my government to prioritize the needs of me and my compatriots over those of others who are not from here.
They are not, in fact, prioritizing the needs of your compatriots. They would if they cared about making your country more competitive.
But in fact, they are hard at work to alienate your allies, erase your competitive advantages and turn you into a dictatorship.
Good luck, you're going to need it. Don't worry, I know us across the pond are fucked too, but at least we are not throwing away our status as a superpower for the dumbest of reasons.
If you would choose to believe, all of this is a strategic play to get off the resource curse (aka the Dutch disease), with resources in question being trust and US dollar being the world currency.
Throwing that away may be a good thing for US long term.
There is nothing you can post that will change this. The people openly abusing the intent of the program are growing too wealthy for them to even pretend to understand the negative effects. Don't expect them to accept there ever being any consequences for themselves for what they have done. Cutting them off cold turkey and enforcing the laws they've been breaking is the type of ice water shock they need to come back down to reality.
If you disagree, share your evidence. Oh and also, high tech unemployment is not a reason to stop the H1B or other programs. If you’re unemployed in one industry, go find another one - don’t steal from me for your protectionism.
"Oh and also, high tech unemployment is not a reason to stop the H1B or other programs. If you’re unemployed in one industry, go find another one - don’t steal from me for your protectionism."
directly contradicts the written purpose of the H-1B program.
H-1B is explicitly conditioned on labor-market protection: prevailing wage requirements, attestations that U.S. workers are not being displaced, and the idea that the visa exists only when qualified domestic labor is unavailable. “If you’re unemployed, go find another industry” does not fit with H1B and shows you are OK with and personally normalize it's abuse.
The fact that you’re such a strong defender of H-1B while rejecting its core statutory premise shows you’re arguing for something other than H-1B as it exists in law. That mismatch is itself evidence that the concerns you dismiss aren’t coming from nowhere.
The first issue which stands out to me is that the world at-large doesn’t create enough jobs in industries where highly-skilled Western educated workers can work. In fact, low-skilled Western educated workers don’t have many prospects at a global stage either. So Western-educated workers (either immigrants or citizens) are stuck in Western nations due to several factors, including pay ranges, work conditions, and quality of life reasons, like access to a clean and safe environment, or a working justice system.
The quality of life reasons and pay ranges are the main attractors for immigrants as well, which is why some nation-state economies have remittances as a key component of their GDP. On top of that, some nations have sacrificed building an education and employment infrastructure in favor of building what are essentially factories for producing workers for Western nations. This also has the side effect of keeping the quality of life of these countries suppressed because people who would voice the most discontent simply leave. So, I’d say the second reason immigration visas need a more nuanced approach is because they hurt the development of other countries, unless those countries set up remittances or job contract pipelines. But even so, there’s no guarantee that the baseline quality of life will improve even as GDP sky rockets.
If you look at where people work, and how they’re the happiest working, it’s when they can find something modest which affords them a reasonable quality of life in their local environment. Great examples of this include many East Asian and Northern European countries. The key difference here is that these countries prioritize building benefits for their populations via education and workforce training and development. Unlucky people in any country will hope to immigrate to change that aspect of their life, which is a failure on the part of their home nation, not the individual.
Some nations have prioritized infiltration of large cap Western companies primarily for strategic geopolitical reasons, and that’s the third reason why I think immigration visas need a more nuanced approach.
Lastly (because I am secretly an idealist), I’d like large cap companies to be responsible with the great power they wield. Large cap companies have a global reach, and so can upset the local economies of any country by interfering with the work of small to medium sized businesses. Imagine if Google decides that it will set up shop in South Africa because the U.S. curtails all H1B hiring. Some people in South Africa will benefit, but the overall effect will be that the majority of the population will desire to shift its behavior so the individual can work at the best possible economic opportunity. While that sounds like an ideal scenario to a Western-educated liberal, consider that many businesses in local communities will lose out on potential high-skilled workers. The ecosystem of workforce development and employment needs to balanced against community development. Large cap companies subvert the function of local communities by shifting the calculus to economic optimization, whereas healthy and thriving communities have other goals as well.
Populations as a whole have lost sense of purpose because the main reason most people work is so that they can stop working. But globalization perverted that mindset by prioritizing the needs of large corporations over the needs of local communities. People still want to stop working, but they don’t know how to reach that goal. This problem exists because more than half the countries in the world have sacrificed their own development in favor of developing workers for large cap companies in Western countries.
Bit of a hastily typed ramble, but I hope the gist of it is clear enough.
the US has very many visa programs, including half a dozen to a dozen work visa programs
this one particular visa program is politically radioactive, as if it is the only work visa program, and it doesn't accomplish its stated goals in hardly any way
until that can be settled I think and the program ironed out, it should be hampered to closed off, a moratorium
I would like to see the H1B program used to its original (and still codified) standards - highly in demand professionals that couldn't be sourced in the US so easily and are exceptional. The minimum wage for what such a professional would be paid was set in the 1980s, to $60,000 for someone with a master's degree, when it was exception. This minimum would be around $156,000/yr today. Okay, let's do that, that makes sense
if its politically radioactive to even just suggest that, all the more reason for a moratorium on that program, to me
13 years ago you should have been ineligible by both base salary and scarcity, until you were a senior architect in some specific niche and commanded a greater base salary
Or on a different work visa
Exhibit a b and c
I’m not saying you aren’t supposed to be here, I’m saying fix that program. The US shouldn’t be training talent and kicking them out. We should be training and keeping talent.
H1B doesn’t do that well either.
If I recall correctly, just my base was 20-30% higher than the prevailing wage that the government publishes (big tech bubble people forget how wages look like outside of big tech). In exchange, my employer hired someone with a graduate degree that knew C/C++ well enough to contribute immediately (I also did an internship with them a year prior).
> 13 years ago you should have been ineligible by both base salary and scarcity
I disagree. I don't believe my wage was lower than what a US candidate would get (from what I've seen at big tech, HR dictates wage brackets so same position translates to roughly same wage) and it is more expensive for a company to hire internationally. To me this means that they were unable to fill the position domestically. Later in my career I was involved in interviewing and the candidates were barely able to code (small sample size though) so either I was unlucky (after all, a lot of people apply even when they maybe shouldn't; some may have had a bad day), or the talent pool is indeed pretty small. I guess systems programming is a specific enough niche?
> I’m not saying you aren’t supposed to be here, I’m saying fix that program. The US shouldn’t be training talent and kicking them out. We should be training and keeping talent.
H1B was the only option available to me that allowed me to kick off the naturalization process so no issues there for me as well.
Highly in demand professionals are eligible for O1.
H1B is the base work visa for those that aren't covered by a trade deal or haven't completed a US university program, or have and completed OPT.
The temporary program from three decades ago to bring in some extra help until the industry could ramp up training programs to develop domestic talent isn't temporary after three decades and the industry has made clear as long as it exists, there will be no honest attempts at developing talent instead of going for the lowest cost global source. All of the above will of course fall on deaf ears, with all the usual intellectually dishonest deflections and outright lies being brandied about. This once again guarantees that reform will be impossible and elimination the only solution.
Eliminating H-1B isn't going to make Americans' lives any better than imposing tariffs on foreign countries or deporting immigrants. But the propaganda must continue for the sake of fascism.
No.
So it solves nothing and just makes things worse.
https://fortune.com/2025/07/30/latinos-immigration-economy-j...
And H1B workers are paid slightly more on average, not less, than citizen workers. Not to mention that if you account for the cost companies pay to deal with the immigration process (lawyers, fees, etc) they end up being a lot pricier.
The new hatred towards H1B is part of a broader shifting of the Overton window. First hate illegal immigrants. Then ones on visas. Then naturalized citizens. And soon they come to a place where they can deport 100 million, their actual racist goal that the DHS tweeted recently:
https://xcancel.com/DHSgov/status/2006472108222853298
Meanwhile China just launched their new K visa to soak up all the amazing talent the new far right America is pushing away.
The US has no shortage of labor. However, it is terribly allocated. Like "baggers" for groceries, old people (that should have retired long ago) working as "greeters", and thousands of Uber drivers working 12+ hours/day cause cities are so badly designed that you need taxis to get around. People whose only job is to put out cones on the street to force cars to slow down when the light is green... So much wasted labor. Why not try and "upgrade" these people through education (which tech companies should pay for in taxes) so that they can work more qualified jobs? Then the US wouldn't need to import qualified labor.
Retraining has been tried and has failed every time when taken at scale.
Just have the tech firms and the like cut huge, straight, salary replacement checks to the citizens who they harm.
I've worked with a lot of retrained and second-career people and I can't sing their praises enough.
Please don't fulminate or post ragey flamebait and offensive epithets on HN. HN is for people who have higher standards than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: We've warned you several times about this kind of commenting and you've posted similarly inflammatory comments in the past week or two, so we've banned the account.
Congratulations to you and those folks.
The other choices find work rather easily already and don't need this kind of protectionsim.
But what Congress really needs to do is introduce an onerous tax on offshore labor, that's a much worse problem.
Look at the shutdown vote and other consequential votes where they need to reach across party lines.
It does get conversations going though and could be re-introduced again soon.
She or others can get some good deals from their party to push bills, votes, or speeches in exchange for donations or speaking venues.
Most offshoring companies don't pay directly to individuals - either they are employees of their own subsidiaries or those of offshoring entities. So, this is not going to change anything.
This is called a tariff and is the same as raising taxes on every American.
Come on, what are you going to do next? Mic drop "I, Pencil"? Libertarian rhetoric is tired and old, and doesn't adequately address present-day concerns. It's not the 90s anymore, get with the times.
FYI, free market economics has taught me to love the idea of tariffs, other similar taxes, and trade barriers. I'm glad those ideas are back on the table, and I hope they can be more competently executed after the current administration ends.
The label wasn't an argument. You're repeating the same tired old shit, like it's new and no one's ever heard of it. We've all heard it, it's old. It sounded good in the 90s, but it ain't the 90s anymore. It sounded plausible when the competitor was the Soviet economy, but that's not true anymore, either. Been there, done that.
> But a tariff is a tax.
Taxes aren't bad. You're talking about taxes like I'm expected to recoil from them in horror.
> Which means you are proposing to take money from others to subsidize people who aren’t able to compete on their merit. Why should they be subsidized?
What do you mean merit? Do you mean giving the best deal to the wealthy who'd just as well sell their countrymen up the river for an extra buck in their pocket? Being totes ok with a lower standard of living to make that deal happen?
If you think "the market" is the only judge that matters, or a fair judge, you've got problems.
> But vilifying Indians and Chinese and other immigrants, who have made our companies and economy strong, all over a small 60k visas a year, is irrational.
If you think that's mainly what's going on, you're either blind or playing the misdirection game.