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-me...
This is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [1] since these are often the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing. The new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H1B visa has made it difficult to justify hiring foreign tech workers when most of the time they are just going to be using American LLMs to do their work anyway.
The foreign tech workers that are worth the $100,000 fee are still easily getting their visa sponsored.
[1] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
fwiw the h1-b workers I encountered in bigtech were totally on-par with their US citizen equivalents in both coding and english communication. many teams were about 50/50 in my office (SF, non-HQ).
my current talent/placement company works mostly with AI startups who are usually too early to support visa requirements [0]. being able to support the lead-time and planning for international applicants is a huge advantage later stage companies have in terms of being able to scoop up talent at reasonable prices. big loss for the local ecosystems if these jobs move across the border imo.
The debate by supporters is set like: Look at these 5 top guys they are best in class in every aspect so why shouldn't they be here. And now don't look over there 500 guys which are business analyst, basic enterprise coders, testers application support engineers lest question maybe asked how come they are considered highly skilled.
The sort of work traditionally handled by cheap offshore labor is now the sort of work most ripe for replacement by AI. So it’s burning the candle from both ends. The low value stuff is getting replaced by AI and not sent there and the high value stuff struggles to get delivered by cheap labor because the play was always cost of and not the quality of the talent.
Partly that push was created by the labor unions, who pushed the cost of doing manufacturing business far above what was profitable and feasible.
When the environment becomes hostile to conducting business, then jobs will leave and local industries atrophy.
BTW - with or without unions manufacturing was profitable in the US before NAFTA and China entering WTO. So your narrative that manufacturing was dying because of labor unions does not hold much water.
My fear is that if US becomes hostile to foreign tech workers, they will simply create alternatives to US Big Tech in other countries and US economy will suffer.
Current US domination of global tech is partly because of foreign tech talent.
Manufacturing offshoring started in late 90s in small part due to NAFTA and then accelerated when China entered WTO in early 2000s (thank you President Clinton for this one).
The manufacturing employment trend shows this quite clearly I think: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp
Every single H1B I worked with was brilliant in their field - and paid extremely well often in excess of $400K. I know several that are earning well past $500K. If you claim these are generic Jira pushers, well you are showing ignorance.
The $100K fees isn’t material to them but the whole vitriolic nonsense poured around what they do and just rolling their work in mud - well that’s where they just move and take their 50 ppl organization with them.
This is pure nonsense.
It's a lottery system. Yes, by random chance, some of the visas will go to people who can otherwise get a job at FAANG. But most of the industry is "JIRA pushers," and that's where most of the visas go.
To say that the H1B are all brilliant is hyperbole.
If the issue was cost the jobs would already be in Canada. If the issue was cost the jobs would also have already been offshored.
The issue is on attracting the best talent and here, despite doomsday predictions to the contrary, the US continues to lead. The $100k fee is nothing to bring in top talent. Top talent was competing against Indian offshore companies scooping up thousands of visas for iffy-at-best talent.
The cold reality is many folks in tech on this visa were mediocre talent at best coming out of degree mills or body shops, in roles that could easily be filled domestically if there wasn’t inexpensive overseas labor willing to work for less.
Folks casually leave out the bit that all that iffy talent was crowding out far better talent looking to come to the US but couldn’t because they didn’t get picked in the lottery. This raising of the entry bar is freeing up space so the best folks have a better chance.
Agree with it or not that’s what these changes are aiming to fix, and there’s little evidence this will just send all the jobs to Canada.
This is false. Your source says it's for work permits. Though I still doubt IRCC would process an application in 10 days.
My wife and I have been US tech refugees in Vancouver after our US working permits were indefinitely held for security checks. We are targeting Canadian PR through Express Entry (EE) in case we are not able to return to the US. I have to note it's not a sure path to PR for US tech refugees.
EE heavily favors French speakers and workers with local education/working experiences, and penalizes "old" people above 30. It also subsidizes certain fields (healthcare, transport...) that's not favored by the market. If you can max French points and have a bachelors degree, you are in. If you are not in these favored categories, learn French (which a lot of new immigrants are doing) or wait for years to accumulate Canadian experiences (and hopefully the rule doesn't change).
We have masters and PhD degrees, my wife has gained 1-year working experience here, and we have maxed English scores, but we haven't qualified only because we entered our 30s.
PNP (provincial nominee) is a more guaranteed path to PR, but it requires company sponsorship and the chance still depends on your paid level and other factors. Our US employers view our relocation to Canada as temporary so they don't do it. The alternative is switching to a local position/company. But tech positions here in Vancouver are very limited (at least compared to US tech hubs). I personally don't really want to sacrifice the career just for immigration.
Yes, pay and money matter. It's why people go to US rather than Canada.
If you can only afford rent on a Canadian salary as a tech worker without much profit, why come here?
Canada has bad weather, expensive large cities and an overworked health care sector.
At least Europe has better weather and social services.
That just isn't true. You can easily look up the cost of living for e.g. Vancouver:
> Cost of Living Including Rent in San Francisco, CA is 57.8% higher than in Vancouver
> Rent Prices in San Francisco, CA are 91.7% higher than in Vancouver
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
And your North American friends do not? Please.
The commonality is that software engineers all across the globe live pretty great, compared to their local peers. But of course, compare them to inflated NYC/SV salaries and everything looks like peanuts.
Though I don't worry too much about the pay -- it's still a decent amount. It just sometimes makes me feel unfair when I'm doing the exact same job as my US colleagues.
Now that H1B pathway is being blocked, Canada can build an alternative tech center and ecosystem. They can do it, Canada has very strong CS programs and is a birthplace of AI and deep learning
Their son is doing well, but I don’t see how it makes economic sense for Canada at that point. It boils down to a circuitous and expensive way to direct government dollars to smart people who are likely to have smart kids. You could save yourself a step and just give lower income kids in Canada IQ tests and throw money at the promising ones.
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).
Why should US employers be forced to pay $100k to Donny or compromise for substandard smaller labor pool in the US and bear increased costs?
It comes down to whether you have a globalist or nationalist mindset. Depending on which, you will come to a different conclusion about what to think. Should a government prioritize the individual success of citizens of its country, or the profitability of companies domiciled there (and therefore overall national economic performance)? Which approach, which tide lifts more boats by a meaningful amount? Which comports with a government's stated duties?
You decide!
The problem with all anti-H1B discourse is Lump Of Labor fallacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy ). The loudest people are the least educated about the consequences of blocking high skilled immigration.
Who'd imagine squeezing the middle class would backfire epically? Compensation hasn't reflected the GDP per capital increases for the majority of the workforce. I don't think even the productivity increases from personal computers in the end of the 1970's have trickled down.
The obvious problem is that you can only develop a "desirable" area so much before you have fundamentally altered it. When there is a perception that the demand is driven in large part by people moving into the country, rather than by being born, that naturally engenders bitterness. When there is a perception that there are plenty of other areas available for development, which would then become desirable over time, but the developers want money and the government is focused on short-term goals, that further engenders bitterness. This is all very natural, and doesn't necessitate people to be unreasonably NIMBY to oppose it. Again, most people would.
Then we stopped doing that, with devastating consequences for many people wishing to move to places with better opportunities: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 - as well as the economy as a whole.
You can read about it in books like Arbitrary Lines https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781642832549/ar... or Zoning Rules https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/zoning-rules/
I think if you want to be able to block your neighbors from building denser housing on their property then that should only be enforceable if it was agreed to by everybody in advance when they bought the place (e.g. via an HOA contract or some similar type of restriction on the property deed). Otherwise this is tantamount to allowing Walmart to get a vote on whether to allow Target to set up next door.
I totally agree it's both, although most first world populations have low birth rates (until you add in generational immigration from high birth rate cultures), so slow building works well.
Actual immigration from outside the US is a vanishingly small part of our housing problems, just as immigrants do not actually "eat the cats and dogs".
Where I live in Oregon the conflict is almost entirely about other Americans moving here vs those pulling up the ladder - which doesn't, of course,stop anyone from moving here, it just means only the wealthy can, rather than teachers, nurses, firefighters and so on.
This is a pretty stark straw man. It's very normal to be critical of immigration policy without believing that immigrants will eat your pets, and it's petty to try to cast the person you're talking to into that camp.
Why would investments by employers result in higher compensation for employees?
That said, median real individual income has increased substantially since the 1970s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n
https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...
lower wages and higher rents are 99.99% of the reason for the West's immigration policies.
OTOH, you have free universal healthcare - and, the best part is that everyone in Canada gets it. You also have gun-free schools, abortions are considered healthcare, and, on top of all that, a sane government and a population that's considered pathologically nice to each other.
Honestly, I'd take the pay cut (in fact, I did - but I live in Ireland instead).
And this "sane government and a population that's considered pathologically nice to each other" is literally just the definition of chauvinism. Sure _you_ like it, and that's great. Let's not be assuming everyone in the world shares our values though.
The thing about potential is that it needs to right environment to be realized. Canada still has two hurdles to create that environment:
- Access to capital, either in the form of risk-tolerant VC funding or established companies willing to invest significantly in R&D. Those are not quick to move over the border.
- A critical mass of _experienced_ talent. Entrepreneurs and high-agency ICs who've seen what it looks like to build a successful startup and capable of replicating it. Those don't have much incentive to move over the border either.
The U.S. has hundreds of startups that later became unicorns. The employees of those startups are typically the key members that drive the success of new ones. For Canada, the only name that easily comes to mind is Shopify.
This stuff doesn't actually help Canada at all, it's in a bit of a development trap.
In any case I wish well to people in Canada and Europe and people who are looking to move there. More spreaded opportunities lead to better outcome for everyone including US even if it does not look like one.
You can easily look up the cost of living for e.g. Vancouver:
> Cost of Living Including Rent in San Francisco, CA is 57.8% higher than in Vancouver
> Rent Prices in San Francisco, CA are 91.7% higher than in Vancouver
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
1. Vancouver is well regarded as one of the least affordable cities. 2. I stay in the same role but got a 40%+ pay cut so that offsets the "Cost of Living Including Rent". 3. If you compare other bay area cities (Sunnyvale, San Mateo, Fremont...) where tech workers live to Vancouver, it's not as dramatic. 4. While I support universal health care, which is good for average people in society, it's not necessarily a pro for tech workers. US tech companies buy good health insurance plans for their employees. I used to walk in my company's on-site health centers to get same-day health care in the US. In Canada, I have to wait for days to see the primary care provider and drive one hour to another provider to get exams.
Side note: if you're willing for me to ask you some questions about your move I would be really grateful.
I'm not denying that the cost of living to salary ratio is better in the US. But it is simply false to say that the cost of living in cities like Vancouver (widely considered the most expensive in Canada) is the same as SF or NYC. Rent in SF is roughly double that of Vancouver, which itself has the most expensive rent in Canada.
Once they figure out the ecosystem Canada can arbitrage away the broken US immigration policies and anti-immigrant bigotry.
Just as manufacturing jobs in heartland have left US for Asia, so do tech jobs can leave US for Canada, India and elsewhere
1. It is not easy to immigrate to Canada.
2. There is also a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment in Canada even from people on the left if you’re not white. Canadians just do not like Asians anymore.
3. Canada has so much red tape for business that it forces many entrepreneurial Canadians to either gravitate towards real estate, online streaming as entertainers, or simply just move down south.
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.
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.
I have been working in big tech for a decade, and have a few friends working in the more technical financial firms (think more TwoSigma/HRT/Citadel, not JPM/GS), and my experience matches yours. Every H1B I knew at the companies I worked at was absolutely not hired as a cost-cutting measure. It was just simply difficult to find people who could qualify. And god knows we tried, I remember my team interviewing roughly 50 people just to fill a position of just a baseline decent dev (not a rockstar math olympics winner with multiple groundbreaking publications; though that would've been nice). And absolutely none of them were underpaid either, they were on the exact same comp range for the level, with plenty of them topping out the range. In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
Meanwhile, I have a lot of acquaintances from undergrad working as devs at tech consultancy firms and more "general/traditional finance" companies. The stories I hear from them about H1B at their workplaces are pretty much exactly what the grandparent comment describes, and even worse.
I mean, you were actually underpaying the local workers if this was the case? If you offered the fully loaded salary to the local workers they might have accepted.
Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
So you talk a good game about work life balance and then after you hire an H1B worker and bring them to the country you can spring 60 hour weeks doing tedius things and many won't be in a position to say no.
The salary might also seem higher to somebody who doesn't understand the cost of living in the US (and how many things are not paid for via taxes like healthcare).
Yeah, by definition this is pretty much always true, no? No matter how scarce local workers are, if you were willing to offer double the market rate you could probably find someone. Scarcity and price are two sides of the same coin, that's how markets work. Bringing in labor from another country when local talent is scarce both reduces costs/wages and reduces scarcity.
Whenever someone says "But then the locals making $400k would make $500k" I have to ask: where are all these qualified locals for whom $400k isn't enough money already? Shouldn't all the laid-off people be champing at the bit for these jobs?
At some price point you genuinely do run out of local talent. At that point it's just a question of whether the work goes abroad or foreign workers come in.
It’s hard to get people to even interview, or find them in the first place.
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.)
It’s more common then people think
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".
Current version of H1B had become a big basket to hold both, and abused too for just finding cheaper labor. It may be time to segment these out.
Also, given that US has ~400 million local citizens, there should be less need for either.
Now the question is whether the US wants another visa category for finding cheap labor. I am not sure that is either needed or desired (by voters). Maybe with the exception of agriculture
Our friendly neighborhood Ski resort oligarchies leverage the J-1 Visa program to bring in international students to work at the resorts over paying more to hire local workers for example. They also leverage the company store model by putting them in dorms and charging them accordingly for housing.
O-1 is for exceptional talent ("extraordinary ability"). Bring exceptional talent, eliminate the H-1B visa. It's that simple.
These people gravitate towards big cities where they can earn more, access more amenities and work with other top talent.
Remote could have changed that, but it seems to have fizzled for now.
Modern AI turns skilled individuals into teams.
We put people on the moon. I find it hard to believe the people here lack the raw ability. I find it much more likely businesses don’t want to give back to the country that they’re residing in.
Having a disproportionate share of the best people world wide to work with is a great privilege and advantage.
Finding the top 1% gets better results if you have a wider net.
Finding the cheapest 20% does too...
H1B were no less skilled (and no less paid) than their US-based counterparts.
Regional wealth inequality in America has not gotten better as Silicon Valley has gotten richer and brought in more foreign labor. At some point, the people making money hand over fist need to show how they're improving the situation for Americans instead of just saying "trust us, bro."
The AI discussion hasn't helped Silicon Valley seem more in touch with "flyover" states either. It's pretty clear there's a lot of disdain and hostility from Silicon Valley towards the "average" American.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+language+immer...
A stack rank by salary would mean "H1B is big tech employees" rather than "these are professionals who have skills."
We've had about 35 years to build a domestic pipeline of Novell NetWare, SunOS 4, Windows 3.0, and dBASE IV developers and experts.
Putting additional restrictions and requirements for reporting would likely be a good thing. I am hesitant to say "H-1B needs to go" when it does serve other non-technical positions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende...
In the past there have been specific carve outs for specific fields. The H-1A was the section for nurses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#The_Immigration_Act_...
It might be appropriate to separate H-1T (I'm sure its not up to section T yet, using that as a placeholder) for tech workers and have some sort of proctored test to ensure that the skills represented aren't "I know how to use Claude" along with filing fees sufficient to cover the administration of the test.
This would move tech workers out of the H-1B category allowing it to return to its original intent of skilled workers (teachers, medical technicians, private sector researchers...).
Elsewhere in DOL, there's a definition of computer professional.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...
The employee's primary duty must consist of:
The application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software or system functional specifications;
The design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications;
The design, documentation, testing, creation or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems; or
A combination of the aforementioned duties, the performance of which requires the same level of skills.
Or if the job is classified by the BLS as 15-0000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2025/may/oes_stru.htm#15-0000 )
All this still requires proper funding of the Department of Labor and its ability to investigate H-1B-dependent employers.
Stack rank would just give all the visas to big tech and starve US hospitals and every other industry
Nursing does pay a lot and conditions havent changed much over the years. Certified anesthesiology nurses get paid like $132/hr, and still there is shortage.
Considering salary based on country of origin, adjusted for position, would probably be the best way to ensure little abuse (apart from the indentured servitude-like features). If you want to hire the best, they'll be overpaid in their origin markets.
First, how do we ensure it doesn't become a slave program: that is you get hired for X, and they are paying you that, but you want to find a new job because you don't like your boss. Or perhaps they hire you for X, and you are doing Y (again, nothing illegal)
Second, you hire someone to do a job, and they realize you have to pay them and so they decide to do nothing (or get a second job that they are working instead).
I can find answers to all of the above, but they all fail to: somebody is aware of your solution - how are they going to abuse it. I haven't solved this secondary abuse issue.
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.
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.
If you decide on a single pay cutoff software engineers will starve everyone else out. And there are of course great, well paid people in other hard to hire industries.
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.
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.
> Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We should find way to improve the system.
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.
Not to bring in jobs or money (tariffs don't do that); just to push us away from your companies.
The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing - 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 - September 2025
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/297...
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
“China” “National Security”
And with that, you’re argument is dead in the water.
I have no problem with someone getting a green card, citizenship, TPS, etc in the US. I think there should be a lot faster routes for that. Let the software devs come in and become citizens or permanent residents, I don't care about that.
What I do care about is the fact that H1-B locks immigrants to a company and tie their residence in the us to their employment. That means they'll accept lower wages and worse working conditions as they can't simply quit and switch jobs. The entire thing is designed to suppress wages in general.
There's a bunch of levers you could pull to stop it from being such a huge negative, faster paths to citizenship, looser requirements for switching jobs, higher minimum salaries. All these things would improve conditions for the H1-B applicant.
That's why I call it a bad program.
They're free to change companies if the new company sponsors them. It may reset the timeline for applying for a green card, depending on the location and job type of the new job. Generally, if it's the same type of job in the same city, it doesn't reset.
People (including Indians) do it all the time.
Going to a country for employment and having your legal status tied to a company is pretty standard across the world. Do you know counterexamples?
I used to work as a contractor in the earlier stages of my career, that meant that sometimes jobs only lasted 3 months.
That's a much smaller pool of companies. The company already has to be participating in the H1-B program in order to sponsor someone.
> Do you know counterexamples?
Most of them happen under the likes of the EU where citizens of member nations have the freedom to migrate.
But even in the US, we have the green card (as you note) which you can get without doing H1-B. Getting a green card means your legal status isn't tied to employment.
Yes, but this isn't the same. As a US citizen, I don't have that freedom in the EU, correct?
> But even in the US, we have the green card (as you note) which you can get without doing H1-B. Getting a green card means your legal status isn't tied to employment.
True, but we're talking about employment visas. What the US has is likely standard in most countries when you don't have permanent residence.
Not to mention that many (most?) countries have a much more difficult path obtaining permanent residency compared to the US. You want to live there? Get an employment visa and stay on that visa forever.
If you are from Cuba, you don't have access to the H1-B program. All nations have restrictions one which nations can and can't participate in their immigration and to what extent.
So yes, it is the same, the US just isn't a part of the EU. The relationship between EU nations is much closer to the relationship (pre-trump) between the US and Canada.
> True, but we're talking about employment visas.
No, actually what you specifically asked for was
> Going to a country for employment and having your legal status tied to a company is pretty standard across the world. Do you know counterexamples?
A green card is not a visa, but it is a mechanism to go to a country for employment without having you legal status tied to a specific company.
Yes, but the restrictions on which countries' citizens can be part of the H-1B program is tiny compared to the list of countries that cannot participate in the EU program you're mentioning. With the US, it's practically a rounding error (or was, at least pre-Trump).
> No, actually what you specifically asked for was
>> Going to a country for employment and having your legal status tied to a company is pretty standard across the world. Do you know counterexamples?
Yes, I said "Going to a country for employment". If you have a green card, you are not going to the US for employment. You are in the US, or going to the US to receive the green card. Getting employment is incidental.
TN visa
TN visa is much more restrictive than H1B. Only for citizens of two countries, and only for certain professions. I know Canadians who have no hope of getting a TN visa (wrong profession), but have come on H1B.
> What I do care about is the fact that H-1B locks immigrants to a company and tie their residence in the us to their employment.
I am merely pointing out that most countries lock employment visas to the employer. It's fine not to like it, but I'm highlighting that this is pretty normal - the US is not an outlier.
Do you think Elon Musk (and every other foreigner who founded US company) diluted supply of labor, or expanded supply of jobs ???
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.
I'm sure this is at least partly a case of the loud minority, but it's hard to tell sometimes
Their strange notions of what democracy looks like might feel dangerous to the current government.
You can be pro-immigrant while also being pro-not-fucking-people-over, for example by forcing companies to have a baseline "minimum wage" for H1Bs that match what a local would be paid (or higher!) for the role. It doesn't have to be a "let in a gazillion people or 0", you can choose a middle value.
One need not (always) invoke racism or xenophobia to explain why folks might take issue with high levels of immigration.
It’s so politically charged now that people’s brains just turn off and everyone calls each other Nazis. But it is a discussion that does require nuance, especially as things like aging populations are really changing things immensely.
You’re still allowed to have opinions, even if the situation does directly affect you. In fact, that sounds like exactly the situation you ought to weigh in on. Immigration or otherwise.
Absolute peak "lost in the political sauce". Most people aren't aware that Bernie Sanders has historically been very anti-immigration, before just becoming an old guy who echos whatever the current young people vibe is.
I know this sounds like a cop out, but Bernie isn't Ghandi just because he thinks socialism is cool. The immigrants who got shot were "fascist riot inciters" and it all just vanishes into the news media abyss.
Same thing how the left media does full lifetime bios on deported immigrants while the right media only reports on the gangsters and rapists who get deported.
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 (citations)
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.
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.
[1]: Sorry for the blog post: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html
Every citizen should have the right to one vote. Large scale campaign financing distorts that.
How many of the talent from frontier labs is immigrant?
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-ad...
I do believe it’s going to push a lot of jobs offshore though. I have already seen it at my job.
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
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?
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.
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.
Except this is doing the opposite. Pushing jobs offshore does not help American citizens.
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.
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?
There’s not much you can do about jobs just moving abroad unless you start some kind of tariffs or import bans on software, which is a self-defeating choice for a massive net exporter of tech services and software.
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.
Testing abilities is a gamable proxy. How much a company is willing to spend on the person is the best barometer, if we stay true to the intent of the visa (scarce talent)
Does it though? It seems like it would drive away the $60k worker, and the companies hiring the million dollar worker would pay it without second thought.
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
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-investigating-tata...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
title is false. There are no jobs "pushed" offshore for the fee
dang really sleeping on his job these days :D