Nothing stops those companies from moving offshore anyway. If being in the U.S. didn’t offer advantages they wouldn’t be here to begin with. At some point americans are going to have to start having faith that their own country and people are a competitive edge against other countries.
> If being in the U.S. didn’t offer advantages they wouldn’t be here to begin with.
For companies hiring H1Bs it's about being closer to clients and colleagues and just being managerially far easier than opening an offshore office, but the benefit isn't infinite and once companies have the chops for opening new offices they'll turn down the H1B hiring.
The issue for the US is that, are you're saying, "having faith in your own country" only works if you have the process for developing unnaturally skillfull talent, which is just not going to happen once the smart people stop moving to the US as countries have uniformly distributed talent potential.
You seem to have interpreted "have faith in your own country" as "have faith in the people who grew up here" whereas I tend to interpret it is as "have faith in the country's institutions and culture".
Having seen American institutions up close I’m sorry to say that if you subtract the people who have bought into the American dream you’ll find that it’s educational institutions are unremarkable.
If "unskilled work and a gigantic natural resource bas was the basis for wealth [in] the 19th century" then China and India would have been the U.S. 200 years ago.
This is a nice trick. Since SCOTUS barred universal injunctions, the government can implement whatever batshit ideology they want until the case makes its way through the judicial system. Often that is a year or two. And even if it is eventually vacated, like the tariffs or the previous iteration of this fee, the damage is already done, as you cannot go back in time.
Good. What’s happening now in the corporate world (and other
places) is very distasteful. Americans shouldn’t have to compete against the whole world to get a job in the USA
I forgot where I heard this, but the thought is that if a country takes the world's best and brightest, it means those other countries that they are coming from lose their best and brightest, making it harder for those other countries to succeed.
Well arguably H-1B is being abused specifically to lower wages. I think we're aware especially given the contrived ways of circumventing how H-1B is supposed to be used like deliberately advertising jobs in an obscure print newspaper that doesn't even get circulated or modifying the job description to suit an international candidate alone.
This is one of the problems with this issue. People talking about are pretty clueless and have no idea about what they're talking about. They get whipped up into an ignorant frenzy about something they don't understand. H-1B has no requirement for advertising in newspapers.
>But for me, a larger concern is elite overproduction.
Props for finding incredibly niche and out-there theories to support your worldview. This is kind of nice about HN. Normally, people would just cite the great replacement theory or other leftist slop to support protectionism, but you found something even more bizarre.
> They get whipped up into an ignorant frenzy they don't understand. H-1B has no requirement for advertising in newspapers.
Oh yes, yeesh, my bad, this is for green cards only, there's some hilariously low bar for H-1B yet it still exists. But let's just go back to my point that H-1B is used to lower wages. You can just search for it unless you think it's just a conspiracy theory. For all your frothing hostility, I noticed you didn't try to defend lowered wages. What are you defending here? Corporate profits? Do you have evidence H-1B was vitally necessary?
> incredibly niche and out-there theories
I don't think it's either of those things. Maybe not well known but not my problem.
> support protectionism
I think that misses the point if you mean trade protectionism. I am saying H-1B (also EB-2 and other degree to green card pipelines) presents a danger of destabilizing society. I already think that's obviously the case.
Everything is used to lower wages. Uber, waymo, doordash, LLMs, etc. all reduce wages. There is no requirement in the statute that it should not lower wages. Congress considered the tradeoff and decided that it was worth having the program. It is a minuscule number, btw. 85k per year, which given the size of the US economy should not even register anywhere in any discussions. In any case, these econ 101 discussions are beyond the scope here.
Congress did that for when skilled jobs couldn't be filled. It wasn't primarily meant to just onboard people and fill jobs. I don't think ~85k per year is minuscule. I think that is substantial and the cap has regularly been exceeded and this is annually for decades.
That brings us to
Americans are too dumb to get these jobs so we still need it:
If that's true, which I doubt, I am not sure why this isn't a higher priority problem of ours to solve.
Americans are not too dumb but we need H-1B anyway for reasons:
Those are exactly the two conclusions it brings us to. If a skilled job can't be filled the question becomes why the skill gap exists or if it even exists at all and I have never seen someone suggest every single job given to a H-1B holder provably could not be filled by a citizen. There's almost no bar at all besides putting a notice in the lunch room or something equally frivolous.
>the vehicle for change you seek is the legislature
I never argued the fee was legal for reference. And oop must've forgotten that Congress cared about my concerns, thanks for the tip!
You are building up hypotheses and theories in your head that have no basis in reality. There is no requirement that a job is opened up to H-1B if a citizen cannot do it. That does not exist. You are starting with this flawed assumption and then reaching some absurd conclusions. H-1B exists because it is nice to have and provides positive value. The fact that it may displace other citizens' jobs is fine too and permitted by the statute. Uber doesn't exist because no capable taxi drivers could ride a cab. We don't do that type of if (can't be done by someone) do (endeavour) test for anything in this country. Your grievance stems from a flawed premise. You wish there were protectionism, but there is no protectionism in the law. So again, talk to Congress.
You know what? You might be right. The wording doesn't seem to specifically state anything about reasons indeed implying that "H-1B exists because it is nice to have and provides positive value". The lore about requirements doesn't appear. This means the law was never intended to fill shortages and the law isn't really being gamed because there's nothing dishonest about the intentions. This saddens me greatly. Truly the only fix is through Congress.
Arguably it leaves room for people that DO NOT profit from nepotism and generational wealth when the "best and brightest" leave. A lot of important people don't even filter into "best and brightest", while people acclaimed with this title are sometimes completely useless.
Perhaps the most personally impactful positive change that a president has ever enacted in my lifetime. Bravo. Trump is fucking up a lot, but this is a win for all American tech workers.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 49.4 ms ] threadWhatever tax and living + lifestyle expenses that USA economy was making from H1B's will be gone.
Good for the rest of the world.
Assume grift first when any American regulation is proposed.
For companies hiring H1Bs it's about being closer to clients and colleagues and just being managerially far easier than opening an offshore office, but the benefit isn't infinite and once companies have the chops for opening new offices they'll turn down the H1B hiring.
The issue for the US is that, are you're saying, "having faith in your own country" only works if you have the process for developing unnaturally skillfull talent, which is just not going to happen once the smart people stop moving to the US as countries have uniformly distributed talent potential.
Or has the Trump Administration found a workaround for this?
===
The proposed ~$8.78B/year in H-1B fee revenue would be allocated roughly as follows:
USCIS: $3.00B (34.2%)
EOIR / immigration courts: $2.96B (33.7%)
DOL: $1.21B (13.8%)
ICE: $1.05B (11.9%)
State Department: $484M (5.5%)
CBP: $76.2M (0.9%)
Total: ~$8.78B/year
> Notably, only $79.2M of the $8.78B is specifically allocated to DOL's H-1B program.
This is not due to bribery. Everyone using H1B have already done the bribing.
The Republican base is demanding this. They want jobs for themselves and their kids.
Milton Friedman would have a couple of things to say about that
But for me, a larger concern is elite overproduction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin#Elite_overproduc...). We've basically massively expanded the number of highly credentialed people in the country and this might not be a good idea.
>But for me, a larger concern is elite overproduction.
Props for finding incredibly niche and out-there theories to support your worldview. This is kind of nice about HN. Normally, people would just cite the great replacement theory or other leftist slop to support protectionism, but you found something even more bizarre.
Oh yes, yeesh, my bad, this is for green cards only, there's some hilariously low bar for H-1B yet it still exists. But let's just go back to my point that H-1B is used to lower wages. You can just search for it unless you think it's just a conspiracy theory. For all your frothing hostility, I noticed you didn't try to defend lowered wages. What are you defending here? Corporate profits? Do you have evidence H-1B was vitally necessary?
> incredibly niche and out-there theories
I don't think it's either of those things. Maybe not well known but not my problem.
> support protectionism
I think that misses the point if you mean trade protectionism. I am saying H-1B (also EB-2 and other degree to green card pipelines) presents a danger of destabilizing society. I already think that's obviously the case.
Everything is used to lower wages. Uber, waymo, doordash, LLMs, etc. all reduce wages. There is no requirement in the statute that it should not lower wages. Congress considered the tradeoff and decided that it was worth having the program. It is a minuscule number, btw. 85k per year, which given the size of the US economy should not even register anywhere in any discussions. In any case, these econ 101 discussions are beyond the scope here.
That brings us to
If that's true, which I doubt, I am not sure why this isn't a higher priority problem of ours to solve. :|The cap is 85k, which is never exceeded, as that is a statutory limit. There are other cap exempt categories for non-profits and universities.
>That brings us to
It doesn't bring us to any of these conclusions. The vehicle for the change you seek is the legislature. Lobby Congress to change the law.
>the vehicle for change you seek is the legislature
I never argued the fee was legal for reference. And oop must've forgotten that Congress cared about my concerns, thanks for the tip!
I don't know if protectionism is the right word.