End the H-1B Program

Posted by sergiotapia 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by QuiEgo 22 hours ago

I wish the stated goal of H-1B was "brain drain -> let's attract all the best talent in the world to the US, and keep the US (and US companies) the epicenter of the tech industry, medical industry, research universities, etc.".

The stated end-game should be getting the best people in the world to stay in the US and become citizens.

I feel like this could be a bulwark against offshoring, and in the big picture, protect US jobs overall.

I think the system as-is is fundamentally broken. First and foremost, it needs to include equity when comparing the salary to US persons - H-1Bs are supposed to require "equal pay" to US persons, but they only look at base salary.

I also think consultant firms need to be fixed. They need some cap such as "no more than 1 in 10 engineers in your teams may be H-1B. This should include consultants you use - e.x. if a company employs 20 engineers, and they have 10 active consultants, no more than 3 H1-bs across both in-company employees and consultants used.

The consulting farms are the biggest abusers by far, and the low hanging fruit to target and fix. If we can't figure some workable way to fix it, just ban consulting companies from having H-1Bs outright.

The system is also needlessly cruel to applicants. They should have some long buffer, say on the order of a tourist visa (6 months?) if they lose their job so they have time to try and find a new one before losing status. Can you imagine putting your kids in school and buying a house in an at-will state, on an H-1B? Yeesh.

Comment by mushi_shi 1 day ago

"let's just have hundreds of thousands of people move into the US every year, surely they are only here temporarily to work and won't effect US citizens housing or jobs prospects". The H-1B program is a disgrace, should be considered treason.

Comment by ares623 1 day ago

if that's treason then what is dismantling US global hegemony?

Comment by mushi_shi 1 day ago

> then what is dismantling US global hegemony?

Partly it is importing H-1B workers to displace US citizens?

Comment by 1 day ago

Comment by verdverm 1 day ago

Who's going to pick the fruits and harvest the vegetables? Those are not jobs Americans want, among many more.

Trump is using the system at levels like no one has seen before, perhaps he could set an example

"Trump Organization requested record number of foreign workers in 2025"

https://thehill.com/business/5603478-trump-organization-fore...

Comment by ckrapu 1 day ago

Conversely, the question should be "Who is preventing American agriculture from mechanizing?"

Or, if you are such a pessimist in America's can-do attitude, instead take it from the point of view of market efficiency. If a good cannot be produced cheaply enough for the market to sustain it, the solution is not to modify the social contract and undermine the value of labor for the sake of the good.

We have always solved problems by innovation. The surest way to prevent innovation is to continually provide cheaper and cheaper labor. The Roman empire is an excellent example of this.

Undoubtedly, these issues are more complex. However, this is such a tired old canard. Wages make labor, scarcity makes innovation.

Comment by verdverm 1 day ago

> Undoubtedly, these issues are more complex.

agreed, two points toward this are

1. American agriculture is largely mechanic already, which removes the labor completely

2. food is non-discretionary, caveats about choices of what king of "food" eg. fast vs healthy

Comment by ckrapu 1 day ago

The part of American agriculture which employs illegal immigrants is clearly not mechanized; they are not driving combines and are tending vegetables by hand.

Types of food really are discretionary. Beans are an excellent vegetable and can be raised completely without manual labor. Trading salad greens for them would not be an overall nutritional loss. Perhaps the true market price for a head of lettuce should be 1.6x in a properly labor regime.

To draw the distinction more clearly, suppose we had zero illegal immigrants working in the field and someone said “let’s reduce the price of some vegetables by a third and create a permanent underclass”. Does that sound reasonable?

Comment by verdverm 20 hours ago

in assuming illegal immigrants, bias may be perceived by others, we have visas for temporary farm workers

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

Comment by variadix 20 hours ago

Sounds a lot like “who is going to pick the cotton?” to me.

Comment by bigyabai 1 day ago

Not so much that, but doctors, ATC, and other skilled labor the US needs and can't replace with AI.

Is it better to scale back hospitals and airports instead of filling those jobs?

Comment by mushi_shi 1 day ago

The US would have more doctors tomorrow if they invested in US citizens and not foreign workers..

Comment by verdverm 1 day ago

training up doctors takes ~10 years

the current administration and republican party regularly put down the very institutions needed to do what you want

there's a saying about cake that is appropriate here

Comment by mushi_shi 1 day ago

Better start tomorrow, and no one but you mentioned the current admin or the republican party. Projecting much?

Yes, and the people saying let them eat cake are the same ones promoting H-1Bs, they will end the same.

Comment by verdverm 1 day ago

> no one but you mentioned the current admin or the republican party

does not make it irrelevant, the stance you have is the same they have, while they also have another stance that works directly against it, I don't know your stance on universities

the saying about cake I meant to imply was about getting to have it and eat it too, as applied to the party in power holding views that work against each other

I personally think that nurse practitioners is something to emphasize, maybe more so than doctors, for the non-emergency medical care that underdeliver for in this country while paying twice as much as the next closest country

I'd start with the basics here, reading and math competency levels are largely headed the wrong direction. Mississippi has done wonders for their reading, re: phonics, and I hope other states follow suite

Comment by Danox 1 day ago

So what? If you don’t bother the train anyone within your own country, then what is the point? How do you improve if you don’t build from within? See China if you want to know what happens when you build from within. Infrastructure-wise they are killing the Western world.

America is not alone in failing to build infrastructure from within their country most just make excuses. All along the way (the last sixty years) many Western countries have deindustrialize themselves which mainly helps the upper income groups, but doesn’t help the average wage earners in any of those countries.

Importing H1B’s does not help the target country in the long term. All it does is postpone building infrastructure, industry within and raising the incomes of people within the destination country, the overall collapse of the target country still happens.

Comment by bigyabai 1 day ago

Out of taxpayer's pocketbooks? The Fed isn't running a charity, there's 40 trillion dollars of debt that we all share.

Comment by mushi_shi 1 day ago

The country works for the citizens or it isn't a functioning country. They can take the 40 trillion from the people leveraging H-1Bs over domestic labor.

Comment by sergiotapia 1 day ago

They can be skilled doctors back in their own countries. I want prospects for my children.

Comment by ryan_n 1 day ago

This is absolutely hilarious and so incredibly misguided... I promise you that Mohamed the neurosurgeon is not the reason your children are not able to become doctors.

Comment by Danox 1 day ago

See China, Korea or Japan, Mohammed, who?

Comment by verdverm 15 hours ago

It's worth noting that we already have a shortage of doctors and many that are choosing not to practice. Radiology is a well known example

Comment by bigyabai 1 day ago

Here's a prospect for them; war. Do you like that? It's where they're headed, living here.

Fact is, your kid could start working 40 hours a week at age 18 for the next 50 years, and still not receive a proper pension. The government won't have any money left for them, and even if they did the economy probably wouldn't be ready to pay it back. Their brilliant future is enlistment in a war half a world a way, to bleed on foreign soil and see their government ignore them. Hope they're planning accordingly.

Comment by mushi_shi 1 day ago

Famously H-1B jobs /s

Comment by OsrsNeedsf2P 1 day ago

There's fundamentally two schools of thought - those who are Pro and Anti immigration. People's opinions of programs like H1B tend to align more closely to their school of thought than they do any economic or social impact.

Comment by mushi_shi 1 day ago

This is incoherent, the pro and anti-immigration stances are downstream from economic and social impacts.

Comment by UncleMeat 20 hours ago

Nah. My aunt supports mass deportation because she hates nonwhites. No outcomes matter to her other than ensuring a white society.

Comment by Synthetic7346 1 day ago

As a hiring manager, I would love to hire only citizens, but only the underqualified apply. I guess the qualified citizens all just go the Frontier labs. We don't have the time to train folks, we need them to hit the ground running. Real conundrum tbh

Comment by bdangubic 1 day ago

several companies I work(ed) with ended the H1-B sponsorships. now they just outsource the work abroad, much better :)

H1-B is smokescreen put in front us to “argue” about and pale in comparison to outsourcing which no one talks about (cause companies pay politicians a lot of money to make sure no one talks about it, like ever…)

Comment by Danox 1 day ago

Within the United States, the upper division sales the need for H1B’s to the public within the country and then at the same time do all it can to still sub out everything to cheaper labor countries.

The big three countries in competition with the United States, China, Korea, Japan. Do sub out some things, but they do not sub out the core critical part of their industries or allow their companies, to do just about anything they want when it comes comes to pursuing cheaper labor overseas to the detriment of their citizens it is largely a western phenomenon, two of those countries even have strong unions similar to Germany. Who are actually taken seriously. (see what the unions were able to do in Korea for their workers in Korea at two of the memory cartel companies).

Comment by password54321 1 day ago

Sounds like jobs that are the first in line to get automated by AI.

Comment by bdangubic 22 hours ago

may sound that way but they are not, there are many companies that off-shore just about all of their development and QA. so your comment is roughly equivalent to “we’ll all be out of a job soon” (which may very well be the case :) )

Comment by clipsy 1 day ago

HN posters when the topic is DEI or Affirmative Action: I support pure meritocracy!

HN posters when the topic is H1b visas or outsourcing: Meritocracy is horrible and I reject it!

Comment by muzaffarpur 20 hours ago

and they would say they voted Donald Trump to bring down inflation. There is no point of engaging with this crowd.

Comment by _DeadFred_ 1 day ago

What is it when HN posters label winning an actually lottery (the H1b lottery) as meritocracy?

Comment by bigyabai 19 hours ago

Hypocrisy