> The proposed weighted-selection concept echoes a 2021 DHS plan under President Donald Trump's first administration that had sought to rank and select petitions by wage tiers (OES wage levels IV down to I), an approach that the Trump administration argued would prioritize higher-paid, highly skilled hires. That earlier plan faced opposition, was withdrawn by the Biden administration and saw related regulations blocked in federal court.
This seems like a no-brainer. Why did Biden withdraw the rule?
I'm not sure I get it. So you want to have higher positions filled by h1b holders? The quota will be maxxed anyway. I don't have issues with that, personally.
Because the executive doesn't have the authority to do this. Trump also ultimately didn't do it. I don't recall if he lost the suit or withdrew it voluntarily. The new court is different and submissive, so it'll likely get through this time.
I want them auctioned by how much you pay the person hired. Want top talent, a million ensures you win and they get compensated well. Want cheap labor - train someone locally as you won't win the auction.
there is the downsides of what if they treat the emplopee baddly, of the emblopee commits fraud - I'm not sure how to handle that. However I still think the idea is right despite that issue.
H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
O-1 [1] is a for when somebody non-American has a lot of skill and is allowed to immigrate into the US to perform it.
I still think H-1B visas should require some kind of additional fee proportional to training an American to fill that role. Afaik, most of the H-1B visas are just abuse where you hire somebody at a low wage than you'd need to for an otherwise legal resident so there needs to be some kind of higher opportunity cost to the company.
> H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role
No, this is a myth. Employers can sponsor H-1B visas for any "speciality occupation" regardless of whether a citizen is available to do the job or not. Legally there are no restrictions in place re: criteria. The only thing they are required to do is pay the prevailing wage. Tests for whether a citizen can do the job only come into play later when they are sponsoring a green card.
Not to mention the EU countries already do effectively the same thing. If your wage is below a certain treshold (based on profession), you can't compete fairly with europeans (i.e. the company has to prove they couldn't find anyone), but if you're above it then you're eligible for the Blue Card program and get to compete fairly. Very similar to Trump's changes in intent
There is no requirement to demonstrate that you cannot find an American to do the job to get an H1b visa approved. If that person applies for a PERM position (needed to convert to a green card) there is. Hence the H1b is easy to game by employers to get cheap indentured servants.
With PERM (converting to a green card) they try to hide the job postings so that people will not apply so that they can get the green card approved. Some of the tricks include putting ads in the newspaper, using esoteric websites and other media such as radio instead of job boards where tech people actually look for jobs. Some Americans who have trouble finding jobs in the current market took on a side project of scraping newspaper ads and these job boards and created https://www.jobs.now/ which lists these jobs. If enough Americans that meet the minimum qualifications apply for a listed job it stops the green card process for that position, usually for 6 months before the sponsor may try again.
Also, there are a lot of stories about people getting O-1 visas via fake credential mills and research papers. Both can and are being gamed to get O-1's.
Is that really true? My impression is that companies tries as much as possible to not use the O-1 route, not sure because the requirements are by design too high or process and cost are not worth it compared to other routes.
O(1) data point: got offer from FAANG to join on the H-1B lottery, later moved to L-1 because the timing was not going to work well for the H-1B process and L-1 at least would give my partner the chance to also work, I later decided to not migrate and keep working from a different country.
> H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
The job market would disagree with you right now. I know so many US citizens who have 10+ years of work experience and work in modern stacks that have been out of a job for 6+ months yet companies are still hiring H-1B workers because its cheaper.
it is not cheaper, you can make an argument that H1B talent pool puts downward pressure on wages in general, but to claim that H1Bs are cheaper is just insulting to everyone's intelligence and is factually not true (unless it is plain abuse of h1b visa through shady schemes by unknown companies, which i dont support)
That's right. To be explicit: I am absolutely, 100% for smart people coming to the US and participating as full, equal peers in our job market. Come on in, friend! I welcome you!
However, I am wholly opposed to the H-1B program as I've seen it used in reality, where those smart peers are used as below-market-rate slave labor who can't really complain about it without facing immediate deportation. I've personally worked with iOS app devs who were making less than I was while working many more hours per week, all because our asshole boss let them know that if they didn't like it, they had 60 days to find another visa sponsor or GTFO of the country and leave their homes and friends and partners behind.
They weren't coming here to invent quantum computers. They were writing phone apps. The sole reason said asshole boss hired them was because he knew he'd own them.
I firmly, adamantly believe there should be an extra 50% employer-borne tax on H-1B roles, making it so that it's possible but expensive to bring in new employees. It wouldn't stop people like those quantum computer scientists. The companies making those things would still hire them in a heartbeat if they couldn't find "local" talent. But it would stop the asshole boss from exploiting my friends to work them like rented mules while artificially suppressing salaries for everyone else.
Every controversial and disruptive problem occurring in this administration is solely because an activity was allowed to continue in a controversial and disruptive way for many administrations
On the topic of H1B’s specifically, I wish the minimum salary kept pace with inflation, and that overall our immigration system didn’t kick out mentally capable and educated people after finishing school or between employers. Intellectual fitness and those with the support system to flourish improve our society.
H1B is also for fashion models, which AFAIK, do not need their employer to prove they can not hire an American person for the role before being granted permission to hire a temporary foreign employee.
I think a tax of at least $100,000 per year per H-1B visa going forward would help eliminate abuse of the system. All current visa holders should get an expedited path to citizenship to keep them from being exploited as well
Any change that hurts WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL) is a good change. If they just plain banned those five, there probably wouldn't even be a lottery.
Hearing from multiple sources that there is big uptick in "offshore / global development centers" in India to support US companies who are currently using H1B in sizable numbers.
With the increasing standardization of application stacks, automation, AI (seems mostly just hype), companies are thinking even if they need developers in larger numbers they can most definitely do with cheaper offshore developers.
So US government, offshoring nation's government and American companies and their vendors are ironically on same page that H1B is going out. Even if they have different benefit or loss with current system.
Oh man when I worked tech support for some computing equipment (going to try to keep it vague here) Wipro would call up for support, ask me to lie when they bought their client on and try to coach me what to say.
They did not like it when I refused... they tried to get me in trouble with my bosses many times. Thankfully my employer backed me every time.
Then when they couldn't get what they wanted that way, they'd just demand I fix the problem with the equipment and they'd try to lie to me about how "this has been working for months" but I'd check and it NEVER worked. Like never ever configured to work in any way ever... Some of their clients were under the impression their disaster recovery solutions were functional when they hadn't been for years.
The few times I talked to their clients it was clear Wipro was the only technical person on the call except myself, and the clients weren't knowledgeable enough to know they were being taken for a ride.
Ranking by Salary probably makes the most sense if you're going to cap the numbers you want the most productive people who contribute the most to the tax base.
Welcome change. I studied engineering at a U.S. university, came here 10 years ago, and still did not make it through the lottery (while the ones gaming the system did).
> [Microsoft] applied for 9,491 H-1B visas during the last fiscal year, all of which were approved. The company has laid off nearly 16,000 people in total this year, out of a 228,000-strong global employee base.
It shouldn't be able to get new H-1B's if it's laying people off. Hard to believe that the new H-1B hires are more qualified than the people that were laid off.
At the same time we see articles about how after being told to get a STEM degree, new CS grads can't find jobs.[0]
I sympathize with those in India wanting to get a higher pay job in the US, but it does perpetuate abusive behavior by companies (who have that employee under their thumb because their visa is tied to their employment), and it makes things much harder for new grads in the US (especially given college tuition costs) to get jobs.
Off-topic, the article looks like AI slop: "Why it matters?" "What happens next?" Either AI is now running Newsweek, which is something we could even come to expect from a decaying magazine, or journalists are writing like that to compete with AI and/or sound natural to what readers come to expect lately.
I do think it's good to curb abuse by the Indian bodyshop companies like Infosys. They spam the system with applicants to the point that they get more than their fair share of visas for what turn out to be relatively low-paid jobs with fairly horrible working conditions.
At the same time, that couldn't happen if we didn't have the artificial per-country limit on employment-based green cards.
This will hurt new grads and non-engineering STEM applicants though.
But part of all thyis should be that if you did layoffs in the last 12 months (maybe even 2 years), you don't get to apply for H1Bs.
Oh and any system that uses artificial performance metrics to force people out should also count as layoffs. By this I mean that some companies will require a quota of 5-15% of the workforce to get subpar ratings and, in the current environment, that means more likely being put on a PIP and fired within months. If the goal is 5-10% of the workforce every year to be ushered out on PIPs, that's a layoff.
Time to smash offshoring too. Any American company that offshores jobs should be delisted from all American stock exchanges and banned from doing business in the United States.
The H1B visa doesn’t compete with American workers as much as it does with the same people working in their home countries.
Especially in today’s extremely remote friendly environment (and H1B visas outside of maybe biomed research tend to be concentrated in remote friendly fields), if a company cannot hire a candidate on an H1B visa, and the candidate has to return to their home nation, why wouldn’t the company not be thrilled to hire the exact same person abroad for a fraction of the cost?
And with RTO failing miserably, and with nearly everyone on HN assuring us that WFH is as good, if not better, than RTO, it’s not like them working abroad is gonna be materially different from them working in a U.S. city.
Four Indian companies take a large portion of the visas. These companies are using very sketchy practices and should be investigated. If just left to American companies, the entire quota would not even be hit.
I’m no fan of most of what this administration does, but in the abstract I don’t think optimizing giving visas to the highest paying workers is the worst idea.
Keeps the as many dollars in the American economy as possible while incentivizing the upskilling of American citizens to meet demand for low wage roles.
Would be better to do it based on pay relative to the line of work, but that would be very easy to game. IT people working in fast food would be classified as fry cooks making $150k.
This solves the exploitation of H1B visas. However this tilts the scale towards the bigger companies. The small upstart cannot compete with Facebook or Tesla. I guess there is always someone disadvantaged with these proposals. Let’s see how this works and hopefully we have enough will to tweak it later
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 78.5 ms ] threadThis seems like a no-brainer. Why did Biden withdraw the rule?
there is the downsides of what if they treat the emplopee baddly, of the emblopee commits fraud - I'm not sure how to handle that. However I still think the idea is right despite that issue.
H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
O-1 [1] is a for when somebody non-American has a lot of skill and is allowed to immigrate into the US to perform it.
I still think H-1B visas should require some kind of additional fee proportional to training an American to fill that role. Afaik, most of the H-1B visas are just abuse where you hire somebody at a low wage than you'd need to for an otherwise legal resident so there needs to be some kind of higher opportunity cost to the company.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
No, this is a myth. Employers can sponsor H-1B visas for any "speciality occupation" regardless of whether a citizen is available to do the job or not. Legally there are no restrictions in place re: criteria. The only thing they are required to do is pay the prevailing wage. Tests for whether a citizen can do the job only come into play later when they are sponsoring a green card.
With PERM (converting to a green card) they try to hide the job postings so that people will not apply so that they can get the green card approved. Some of the tricks include putting ads in the newspaper, using esoteric websites and other media such as radio instead of job boards where tech people actually look for jobs. Some Americans who have trouble finding jobs in the current market took on a side project of scraping newspaper ads and these job boards and created https://www.jobs.now/ which lists these jobs. If enough Americans that meet the minimum qualifications apply for a listed job it stops the green card process for that position, usually for 6 months before the sponsor may try again.
Also, there are a lot of stories about people getting O-1 visas via fake credential mills and research papers. Both can and are being gamed to get O-1's.
O(1) data point: got offer from FAANG to join on the H-1B lottery, later moved to L-1 because the timing was not going to work well for the H-1B process and L-1 at least would give my partner the chance to also work, I later decided to not migrate and keep working from a different country.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025
The job market would disagree with you right now. I know so many US citizens who have 10+ years of work experience and work in modern stacks that have been out of a job for 6+ months yet companies are still hiring H-1B workers because its cheaper.
However, I am wholly opposed to the H-1B program as I've seen it used in reality, where those smart peers are used as below-market-rate slave labor who can't really complain about it without facing immediate deportation. I've personally worked with iOS app devs who were making less than I was while working many more hours per week, all because our asshole boss let them know that if they didn't like it, they had 60 days to find another visa sponsor or GTFO of the country and leave their homes and friends and partners behind.
They weren't coming here to invent quantum computers. They were writing phone apps. The sole reason said asshole boss hired them was because he knew he'd own them.
I firmly, adamantly believe there should be an extra 50% employer-borne tax on H-1B roles, making it so that it's possible but expensive to bring in new employees. It wouldn't stop people like those quantum computer scientists. The companies making those things would still hire them in a heartbeat if they couldn't find "local" talent. But it would stop the asshole boss from exploiting my friends to work them like rented mules while artificially suppressing salaries for everyone else.
On the topic of H1B’s specifically, I wish the minimum salary kept pace with inflation, and that overall our immigration system didn’t kick out mentally capable and educated people after finishing school or between employers. Intellectual fitness and those with the support system to flourish improve our society.
With the increasing standardization of application stacks, automation, AI (seems mostly just hype), companies are thinking even if they need developers in larger numbers they can most definitely do with cheaper offshore developers.
So US government, offshoring nation's government and American companies and their vendors are ironically on same page that H1B is going out. Even if they have different benefit or loss with current system.
Oh man when I worked tech support for some computing equipment (going to try to keep it vague here) Wipro would call up for support, ask me to lie when they bought their client on and try to coach me what to say.
They did not like it when I refused... they tried to get me in trouble with my bosses many times. Thankfully my employer backed me every time.
Then when they couldn't get what they wanted that way, they'd just demand I fix the problem with the equipment and they'd try to lie to me about how "this has been working for months" but I'd check and it NEVER worked. Like never ever configured to work in any way ever... Some of their clients were under the impression their disaster recovery solutions were functional when they hadn't been for years.
The few times I talked to their clients it was clear Wipro was the only technical person on the call except myself, and the clients weren't knowledgeable enough to know they were being taken for a ride.
It shouldn't be able to get new H-1B's if it's laying people off. Hard to believe that the new H-1B hires are more qualified than the people that were laid off.
At the same time we see articles about how after being told to get a STEM degree, new CS grads can't find jobs.[0]
I sympathize with those in India wanting to get a higher pay job in the US, but it does perpetuate abusive behavior by companies (who have that employee under their thumb because their visa is tied to their employment), and it makes things much harder for new grads in the US (especially given college tuition costs) to get jobs.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs...
Really concerning.
I do think it's good to curb abuse by the Indian bodyshop companies like Infosys. They spam the system with applicants to the point that they get more than their fair share of visas for what turn out to be relatively low-paid jobs with fairly horrible working conditions.
At the same time, that couldn't happen if we didn't have the artificial per-country limit on employment-based green cards.
This will hurt new grads and non-engineering STEM applicants though.
But part of all thyis should be that if you did layoffs in the last 12 months (maybe even 2 years), you don't get to apply for H1Bs.
Oh and any system that uses artificial performance metrics to force people out should also count as layoffs. By this I mean that some companies will require a quota of 5-15% of the workforce to get subpar ratings and, in the current environment, that means more likely being put on a PIP and fired within months. If the goal is 5-10% of the workforce every year to be ushered out on PIPs, that's a layoff.
>"There aren't any tech jobs in this city..."
[0] http://www.h1bdata.info
Especially in today’s extremely remote friendly environment (and H1B visas outside of maybe biomed research tend to be concentrated in remote friendly fields), if a company cannot hire a candidate on an H1B visa, and the candidate has to return to their home nation, why wouldn’t the company not be thrilled to hire the exact same person abroad for a fraction of the cost?
And with RTO failing miserably, and with nearly everyone on HN assuring us that WFH is as good, if not better, than RTO, it’s not like them working abroad is gonna be materially different from them working in a U.S. city.
Keeps the as many dollars in the American economy as possible while incentivizing the upskilling of American citizens to meet demand for low wage roles.
Would be better to do it based on pay relative to the line of work, but that would be very easy to game. IT people working in fast food would be classified as fry cooks making $150k.