It does say in the law [1]: "there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, qualified (or equally qualified in the case of an alien described in clause (ii)) and available at the time of application for a visa and admission to the United States and at the place where the alien is to perform such skilled or unskilled labor".

The rules of DOL are just guidelines how they are going to determine this but they are not the law. I will argue that if you are planning to publish your job ads in a small town newspaper you do not believe yourself that there are no "able, willing, qualified and available" Americans for your job.

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182

Many companies fulfill the intent of the law. They run a real hiring process — where they advertise online and interview people with work authorization/citizens and people who would require sponsorship.

But if someone requiring sponsorship was the best candidate for the job, then they have to run an additional “fake” process that fulfills these requirements, since no one actually hires tech workers from the newspaper.

Why pay to reach many thousands of people with a widely read paper when you can pay pennies to reach dozens of people that you don't want to apply to the job anyway?

This is an entire business model.

Based on that I would expect that if you advertise in small town newspaper, the job needs to be located in that small town. Want them to work in your big office next to big city, then it must be a newspaper widely distributed in that city not a small town on the opposite side of continent.

Nearly all these ads say "Send CVs to immigration_department@tech.corp" they aren't even trying to conceal what they're doing.

Advertising in the Sunday newspaper seems a bit antiquated. I don't think I've looked in a newspaper for a job since the 90s.

> It doesn't say anywhere that it cannot be advertised in a small town.

What does 'widely distributed' mean if not "not just in a small town"?

Ah yes, the newspaper, the bastion of where all millennial and Gen Z software engineers deign to get their news from in 2026…

I think it is implies in: "The newspaper must be widely distributed in the area where the job is located."

If the rules weren’t designed from the outset to facilitate fraud, they would have required the company to advertise the position in the same places they advertise their other jobs.

Do you really think that Netflix has a preference for non-Americans?

On one hand we say they chose Americans to pay less money on the other hand we see this absurd amount of money for a remote job

Why? Because this is not them looking to fill a position but rather trying to get a PERM for an employee that they are already happy with. We don’t even know if it’s H1B or L1

Not saying that the H1B program doesn’t have its problems, but this is not the case of let’s fill this job with non-Americans for less pay

It achieved wage suppression and control over workers livelihood.

And it should be illegal, perhaps even criminal the way some companies go about it.

The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.

In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.

I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.

There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.

IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.

It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.

It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.

> they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes

If a law is on the books, but it's only applied to a specific set of people in a retaliatory fashion, then it's worse than not being applied at all.

The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.

"I saw a thing once, and I'm going to wildly guess some incriminating details, and then claim it's proof of some sort."

Even Vance does a better job of manufacturing outrage than that.

Or he's trading off of it.

If they change the ad between the local newspaper and the foreign search, they would be breaking the law. That's not what is claimed, even by Vance.

Once he got his green card via lottery, his pay went up and his mandatory overtime went down. His Japanese coworkers without green cards still had to work late.

Source? But also what difference does that make? Just pay American workers more.

I have not met a single one who was not over qualified for the job they were doing.

I have only met a couple who were (to some extent) getting screwed because of an agency in the middle. However I would not have found the wage unreasonable and the markup was well within the industry standard.

H1B is a path to import talent that mostly wants to stay here... We need to fix the portion of the process where it is onerous to go from H1B to green card and citizenship.

Besides newspapers, they have to be posted with the relevant state workforce agency and 3 other methods. It would not be hard to require that one of those needs to be the company career site or wherever the majority of recruiting comes from.

US needs a modern, merit-based immigration system. No lotteries of any kind, be it the de-facto lottery for H1B or actual Diversity lottery.

That change FAR predates the most recent election.

If you made assumptions that turned out to be wrong, that might look like a "mask".

I don't think this really holds up. They could offer the American engineers the opportunity to move divisions, but they don't because what they really want to do is what they did do: Fire Americans and hire foreigners.

> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?

Then make H1B what it is supposed to be for: elite specialists, not infinite low cost non-American laborers. Then you won't even need to have this discussion.

Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.

Yes, why not? Or more practically: keep the program but adjust the quotas annually or even quarterly based on needs. When you see tech companies laying off workers by the thousands, as happened over the past few years, that's the sign that there is plenty of local talent to be hired.

> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?

The solution to that is to separate visa renewals from new hires: allow companies to keep existing workers, while forcing them to hire new ones locally. This actually makes America _more_ attractive for immigrants because they know they cannot be replaced with a new generation of cheap workers from their home country when economic conditions worsen.

> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false.

In what sense is it false? Microsoft claims that of its 6,800 H1b filings 80% were “related to employees already working at Microsoft” (note no mention _which country_ those employees were working in) which translates to 20% to or 1720 new employees they hired.

And for pay, they only state that “international workers that Microsoft does hire through the H1b visa program are paid the same level of compensation that a worker from the US would receive”, but of course the point is that the average level of compensation for new hires today is significantly lower than it was 10 years ago, when there was a tech worker shortage.

So it can be simultaneously true that the current-year H1b hires are hired at the same rate Americans are, but that those rates are substantially lower than the negotiated compensation of the people Microsoft laid off. The fact that Microsoft declines to comment on this,

So the following are almost certainly all true:

  - Microsoft fired (or laid off) over 1000 American citizens last year
  - Microsoft applied for H1b visa for at least 1000 _new_ employees
  - Those new employees will almost certainly receive lower compensation than the citizens that were laid off

The later is specifically called out for an EEOC discrimination. https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination

> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.

> ...

> National origin-related disparate treatment in hiring related to job advertisement also can include an employer making it more difficult for applicants from one national origin to apply for positions (for example, subjecting U.S. workers to more laborious application methods than H-1B visa holders during the PERM labor certification process).

Part of the challenge here is that the EEOC tends to not be funded well and is limited to acting on tips rather than being able to investigate or audit.

And they do act... https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/eeoc-sues-sibitalent-h-1b-visa... for example...

Though note:

> The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to investigate and litigate against businesses and other private sector employers for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.

And if this is important...

https://cwc.org/CWC/CWC/Updates/2026/Partial-Spending-Deal-W...

> Congressional negotiators have reached a bipartisan deal to fund the EEOC at $435.4 million for fiscal year 2026. The funding level is the same as that requested by the White House, but nearly $20 million (4.3%) less than last year’s budget.

And the funding and staffing by year: https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc-budget-and-staffing-history-1980-p...

Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.

The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.

Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.

I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.

Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.

This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.

Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.

Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.

it's been true 100% of the places I've worked. I can't name names on the internet.

Laughs in ESG. Companies stopped reporting this in 2024, but go look at prior year results compared to US demographics.

My $0.02 here is that AAPI and African applicants have crowded out ADOS and Hispanics when you look at corporate demographics.

You're so close to getting it... keep going...

At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).

Idk if people don't realize you can look this up? Pay doesn't look suppressed to me....

Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?

Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.

The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).

I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.

One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.

Enforcing existing regulations and supplying the resources for the agency to effectively audit the already existing category of H-1B-dependent employers (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer ) could be an approach taken.

But a nation couldn't ask more than a working age adult where you invested zero in education and health for 20 years and suddenly pay taxes with none of almost no benefits.

In the UK, which I raised numbers due to the discussion going on in there, visa workers generated yearly 12 to 20 Billions in direct taxes and fees and they use 4B in health (which technically they paid in fees a combined value of 6B upfront If my numbers are right)

But the real numbers lies on what other revenue they generate. It is estimated in my calculations that +50B-70B pounds are from immigrants on UK with a working visa.

That's no amount to shy considering about it is 8M people in that specific situation. And remember that none of them had to have their education covered by the government.

Someone in the other comment said that 8M British people would generate more taxes than that, but I did not find evidence of that. According to the public consultation documents UK gov released about immigration a couple of years ago, about 10% of the immigrants are responsible for more than 35% of the taxes collected. Hence the suggestion on curb immigration considering the salary range which might make sense or not depending on where you stand on the topic. I have no horses on this race and my impression as an outsider who just likes analysing data is that it seems as much of a claim as saying that EU took more money from UK than what it put in which turned out to be mostly incorrect.

I think the logic behind being anti-immigrant are "These people don't follow our culture" and "These people don't contribute to American society", then we should have objective criteria that addresses that. Time in U.S. is a proxy for acculturation; so measure that. And taxes paid is a direct financial measure of how much they have contributed to the American government. Both of these are extremely easy to ascertain from official records, so take the corruption and the human guesswork out of it and make clear and consistent rules that address the objectives you're trying to attain.

Yup real chud. I'd play world's smallest violin in solidarity with these most productive people.

I think the "chud" immigration logic is rather, take whatever win you can get in the general direction of restriction, because you've been losing every single battle for 5+ decades.

Not really.

Your only generic option is EB-5, with $750k in direct investments. However, right now it takes 3 _years_ to process the initial application (https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times - look at the I-526 form). And after the initial form is approved, you need to apply for the actual green card, adding another 1-3 years.

And this is hardly new. Ross Perot was opposing H1B when he was running for President in the 1990s.

November can't come fast enough!!

For non-native English speakers it also has the advantage of providing a free total immersion language course as well. People pay for opportunities like that.

So yes, an Italian 19 year old is willing to work for less money for the chance to work in a water park for a summer, improving their English and boosting their resume, and if it gives them enough money to be able to fund a couple of weekend trips to New York or DC so much the better. It’s a life experience and a working vacation.

That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.

Ep. 388

And I didn't mean to give the impression that I have some grievance that these jobs aren't filled by Americans.

My curiosity was why aren't there more American kids having a working vacation in beach towns, not shame on these towns for importing labor.

the idea is that foreigners will do the temp/seasonal low value work, while Americans were supposed to educate and upskill using federal student loans and get a high value jobs.

unfortunately American education system made it impossible, ue to stupidity.

Only China is able to do that: massively educate population and upskill and go up the value chain of manufacturing and industrialization.

I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.

If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).

Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.

What are some of the other "many negative externalities" you mention?

I feel like we could have the best of everything if you we just built more housing to keep up with demand.

So, I am not sure if that housing argument alone makes that a better outcome for America (and workers).

And they are good at it.

My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.

But but but I was told that unions will force employers to retrain folks instead of laying them off.

You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.

As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.

It is risky to invest in offshoring when the outcome isn't guaranteed to save you money.

For the first time in my life I'm seeing high-income earners as a big drag on society.

That 40% is a win for Americans. It means more new grads will be hired instead of losing out to “experts” from TATA to copy and paste from ChatGPT. Our vibe coders will be home grown, corn fed.

The argument works no matter what you think the breakdown is, 70/30, 80/20 etc.

I mean, we don't really need that west coast comp either? If I was pulling my old FAANG comp here in Spain, I'd be in the top 0.1% of earners...

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/05/12/g-s1-12...

Is it really just a matter of empire-building, at the end of the day? That can't last. Management realizes that, right?

> President Donald Trump’s administration is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using H-1B visas

Everything described in the article, is about H1-B. So yes, the action is preventing greencard applications for those H1-B visas, but that is functionally the same as restricting Microsoft's access to H1-Bs since a future green card sponsorship is the reason many are there working for them on that visa.

I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.

Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?

I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.

Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.

Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".

Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.

The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.

Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.

Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.

the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.

That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.

Department budget doesn't allow for a new Desktop PC ? Call it a "data collection terminal."

Just change the words to the ones you like, and cash those checks, easy as flying a kite ! :D

My own PERM would have had no chance of passing certification.

By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!

I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.

On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.

On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.

Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:

1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.

2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.

I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.

The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.

Why couldn't it mean someone young, with a reasonable education, who's willing to work at half the price and be trained over the course of years?

Ok you said it. Where's your empirical evidence?

This is absurd. It's because you're absolutely unwilling to invest in domestic candidates and train them. You and every other employer. You are shooting yourself and your peers in the foot through this stinginess.

If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.

Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.

And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.

For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.

The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.

Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLUEM1524ZSUSA

Ironic phrasing, as in my experience the steelman argument in favor of these companies is "The customer is really bad at thinking through their own requirements."

I guess it’s the least worst option we’ve found. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t need any guardrails at all though.

That is an ideological creed, not a fact. It might be true, but you're just smuggling in your priors with no evidence.

But if you’ve ever worked with the public, you know there is almost no cultural onus on nontechnical people to properly hire or contract technical people for technical tasks.

So…no: The market isn’t very good at this - yet.

Good luck trying to get a 6 person shop with a full calendar of other-customer work to suddenly prioritize a show-stopping bug that's only affecting you.

It's really palpable, developers in these orgs just stopped caring about the quality of their work.

I was specifically responding to the list I quoted, which did not list Microsoft and was mostly Indian consulting firms.

> There's a similar evaluation done for H1B.

If so, they should tighten that up then (if they haven't already) so it can't be gamed, then drop it from the PERM evaluation if it's already been done.

If that's the case, that's ass-backwards. The H1-B check should be more stringent, and the green card check should be more relaxed (or not be done at all).

I do not condone abuse of any system, including visa/gc system, it should only go to those that truly are builders and contribute to growth of the overall system and not act as parasites, but that's a trait not exclusive to just the people (some targeting is probably legit) you're targeting.

When I was in the US on one myself, my company kept pushing me to go for a green card, but I never intended to stay permanently, which made things a little awkward... I remember basically ghosting the immigration firm they assigned to me.

It was quota was set at 2% of each nationality's population as recorded in the 1890 census. That date is revealing.

The mass migration of Southern and Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc happened after 1890. The act anchored the quota to 1890, Congress deliberately set the baseline before those groups arrived in large numbers.

The result: nations with large post-1890 diasporas, and of course all of Asia and Africa, got tiny quotas, while Northern and Western European nations got huge ones.

I don't call this stopping immigration. Rather codified national selection. It may have helped with "assimilation". But no one can deny the maneuver was for national discrimination.