[dgs_sgd]

You seem to be suggesting that the H1B pulls wages up because the median pay is higher than the median overall pay in the country? That’s not a valid comparison, you’d have to compare the H1B’s salary to the median pay in their specialty.

[guywithahat]

Not only that, but you'd have to do a study to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the US, and that an increased supply of workers didn't drag down salaries, either short or long-term. Immigration helps the countries top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country.

[sgc]

There used to be a much stronger push for education in the US. Perhaps if companies could not "just hire from overseas" or "just outsource" there would be a longer term growth strategy that would focus more on the education of the US population (not just training for this or that job).

It did seem in the past that there was much more of an all-hands-on-deck attitude towards education throughout US corporate activities, more broadly focused on the general fields the various companies valued the most. I suspect this fall off is very real, but don't actually know if that is just my impression or if there is a concrete effect from modern economic structures.

It's an important enough question it should definitely be studied and taken into account in policy.

However I can't agree with your conclusion that "Immigration helps the countries [sic] top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country". That requires meta studies that I have never seen to prove it is so. I could cautiously accept that "some types of immigration rarely help corresponding sections of the local population" much more than such a blanket judgement. Overall, it is just not true that economics is zero sum. It doesn't have to be. An entire people can in fact flourish.

[typewithrhythm]

It's so hard to study; one of the key things you loose in an environment where you bring in bulk migrants is a cultural expectation to interact with juniors that are part of your community.

It's not just a supply and demand equation; it's a fundamentally different environment that changes the social payoff for mentoring, networking, and building a reputation.

Ultimately despite all the propaganda trying to convince us that diversity is inherently beneficial, we are trading economic benefits for social costs. So we need to carefully restrict migration to make sure the economic benefits are actually there.

[infinite8s]

The economic benefits are clear - what social costs are you taking about?

[typewithrhythm]

The economic benefits are really not clear; at least not without caveats and clear conditions for the advanced skills that make a migrant beneficial.

This is if you believe that lower wages for high skill work is not an issue.

However high migration rates lower social trust, this is well studied.

If you take a smaller example, hiring internationally vs domestically. If you have to go domestic then you might have to settle for a less ideal qualification, requiring more training.

This is repeated everywhere, so companies that train better are more likely to succeed. Leading to conditions that encourage upskilling for locals overall.

Importing people short circuits that idea.

[diffrinse]

>Perhaps if companies could not "just hire from overseas" or "just outsource" there would be a longer term growth strategy that would focus more on the education of the US population (not just training for this or that job).

Except the Heritage Foundation, er, I mean, Trump Administration controls all 3 branches of government and has all the freedom in the world to power a resuscitation of public education in America, except they're not interested in that at all; quite the opposite, they want to further fragment education baselines and make secondary education less desirable.

[sgc]

Yes of course. I was trying to remain tangential to the current administration and stay on the level of the underlying problem they seem to intuit related to this one, very specific policy decision (hard to tell with them, that's for sure). Most everything they do deserves condemnation, so there would be little to talk about otherwise.

[Johnny555]

I don't think you have to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the USA (or rather, it couldn't have been trained into USA workers), but that the talent wasn't trained in the USA so bringing in an outside worker is the only way to hire for the position.

You can't really expect a company hiring PhD's in a niche field to show that they couldn't have spent 7 years training an American for the work.

[bluefirebrand]

> You can't really expect a company hiring PhD's in a niche field to show that they couldn't have spent 7 years training an American for the work

I don't believe for even an instant that there is a significant amount of immigration happening to bring in people who are that specialized

Some, maybe. But not the vast majority of it

[Johnny555]

My former employer exclusively brought in that kind of talent.

But it was so hard to get the visas (and so much uncertainty in whether or not they'd be able to secure a visa for any particular worker) that they opened up a European and Canadian offices.

[dinkumthinkum]

That's so funny. You realize there is already an O-1 visa, right? I hate to be a bearer of bad news but the vast, vast majority of H-1Bs are not PhD holders for which no suitable American PhD exists. If you go out into to the working world for awhile, you'll see that.

[kalkin]

> Immigration helps the countries top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country.

What study does one "have to do" to support _this_ claim?

[esalman]

There's plenty to deny this claim.

Immigrants make up 14% of the population but make up over 20% of entrepreneurs. 44% of fortune 500 company founders were either born outside US or to immigrant parents in the US.

[N2yhWNXQN3k9]

Those are stats published by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Immigration_Lawyers_A...

They seem roughly correct

[rcpt]

> show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the US

The admin has been cutting billions in funding to universities which makes this argument easier.

Need an expert in arithmetic combinatorics? Well Terry Tao lost his grants so now you've got to look elsewhere.

[legitster]

You can! If you look at the report it breaks down H1b pay range by occupation and education level.

An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.

[dgs_sgd]

Interesting. I think this gets at guywithhat’s sibling comment:

> you'd have to do a study to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the US, and that an increased supply of workers didn't drag down salaries, either short or long-term.

If the median H1B for software is exactly the same as the overall median, it makes you wonder if the median would be different if the H1B was not an option available to employers.

[lucketone]

It would definitely be higher.

Lower supply tends to drive the price up.

[DaveZale]

I saw this in my specialized science field too, in California a couple of decades ago. Real wages for that work have dropped 5 fold at least, partly due to automation, but I saw labs that were 100% immigrants, many H1Bs. Not complaining, just observing. were H1Bs necessary though? No. Many US born in that field found themselves jobless upon graduation. It was all about cheap labor

[stanford_labrat]

yup, anecdotally the majority of postdocs these days are internationals who are willing to work 60+ hour weeks on $50k a year, for the infinitesimal chance to land a R1 tenure-track faculty position. americans have no interest in getting a phd and then subjecting themselves to this kind of indentured servitude.

[ajross]

Whoa whoa whoa, that's (1) not correct[1], but (2) shameless goalpost motion in any case.

The whole premise of your original contention was that we should measure like-profession salaries to see whether or not there is an effect. Then when no effect was shown, you switched it up in favor of an argument that (again, incorrectly) predicts that such an effect can't be shown at all. That's not good faith discussion.

[1] Immigrant labor is arriving, by definition, in a pre-existing market. If immigrants can't be hired more cheaply than existing labor, by definition they can't be pulling wages down.

[reliabilityguy]

> An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

> Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.

So, it seems that if we remove H1b workers and assume that the demand would have stayed the same, then domestic salaries should have been higher. Assuming, of course, that companies won’t simply offshore.

[valkmit]

The assumption that companies won't offshore is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Companies already do a lot of offshoring - you think any rational actor in this space that was hiring H1Bs isn't going to simply relocate them to more friendly jurisdictions for immigration?

On top of this, these are workers who would have otherwise paid tax in the US!

[Tadpole9181]

It feels as if you're insinuating that we shouldn't be taking measures to prevent offshoring and there's nothing to do but allow our labor markets to be subverted.

[TMWNN]

>you think any rational actor in this space that was hiring H1Bs isn't going to simply relocate them to more friendly jurisdictions for immigration?

This was true before and after today.

Put another way, if all the H-1B jobs really can be offshored quickly and easily the way so many Indians and anti-Trump people here and elsewhere confidently predict, *that would have happened already*.

[valkmit]

I'd argue that it doesn't happen more because it's (relatively) easy to bring labor onshore.

But yes, if that path doesn't exist, I don't think that global companies are going to start hiring American, they're going to continue hiring globally but take the path of least resistance towards bringing this talent onboard.

[jameshart]

Overall the US economy employs about 800,000 software engineers, with 200,000 or so of them being H1B holders.

Now you can argue you would prefer that those 200,000 jobs go to Americans, but on the scale of the overall economy, it really doesn’t matter. What’s far more important is the massive impact those 800,000 software engineers have on the rest of the economy. Four million IT jobs, the entire finance and healthcare and retail industries that are propped up on technology built by those people; whole technology companies like Uber or doordash that create entirely new labor markets.

Risk 25% of that capacity on the idea that we would rather have those industries built solely on domestically-grown engineering talent? Why would that be a good tradeoff?

[mbac32768]

It's ludicrous. US companies will not be able to dig up 200,000 qualified software engineers in the domestic population while every other skilled profession is experiencing a similar brain drain.

The prospect of a $100k/year/employee visa tax makes opening an office in Europe so much more compelling.

I guess the people who can't be offshored will see their salaries go up so that's cool?

[mlrtime]

"Computer science ranked seventh amongst undergraduate majors with the highest unemployment at 6.1 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."

https://www.newsweek.com/computer-science-popular-college-ma...

Obviously there is not going to be a drop of 200k overnight, but I think the graduates of CS will be thankful there are more opportunities for them. These opportunities will drive more students to take CS classes in the US.

[jameshart]

This reflects that there are just less openings overall. In a shrinking job market layoffs have already disproportionately gone to H1B holders; future layoffs, if this policy is implemented, will further erode H1B numbers, but it won’t magic up more domestic engineering job openings.

You know what would provide job growth in high tech? Economic growth and expanding prosperity in the economy overall.

[jiscariot]

I wonder what effect the US's heavy reliance on HB1 visas (and off-shoring more broadly) has had on the size of the cohorts graduating with CS degrees.

All I have is anecdotal conversations of people avoiding tech under the assumption that writing code would be off-shored.

[myrmidon]

You also get the baumol effect increasing wages even for unrelated sectors (sounds helpful at first).

The flipside is that every american industry becomes less competitive globally without the H1b guys.

[geodel]

Yeah, right India has 10-100 times more H1B level talent that they send to US.

And it is the 10 times more competitive economy compared to non H1B importing nations.

[evan_]

you'd really need to look at the median pay for specifically companies that hire a lot of H1b SWEs. I'd suspect that would be higher.

[skydhash]

Maybe? But what about training and talent pool? Imagine how many companies would not take off because there’s no one to implement the founder’s idea. Imagine you’re a startup and you have hiring difficulties because all the good ones are over at Oracle or Microsoft (doubting the existence of FAANG).

[randomname93857]

>> Imagine how many companies would not take off because there’s no one to implement the founder’s idea... Why should we do imaginary stats with narrated conditions? America striven on startups well before H1B became expanded so much it's barely doesn't include janitor positions... with smaller H1B pool, startups may need pay more. But also more compensation and demand in IT in US would make more people go to IT - smth-smth middle class, not poor class. BTW, what's the stats on how many doctors and lawyers come to US on H1B?

[reliabilityguy]

Maybe, maybe not. Too many factors to consider, and it’s extremely hard to get a definitive answer.

[sciencesama]

We can arrest all of them and send them back like in hyundai !

[nxm]

If they don’t have valid visas for the kind of work they were doing, like was the case for Hyundai, then the indeed were breaking the law

[_DeadFred_]

The problem you will have selling this to this crowd is we have been in the meetings. We know that 'we're going to use a consulting team on this' means lower wages. We know that 'we going to outsource this' to a company full of H1Bs is being done... to lower costs.

Maybe at FAANGs what you say is true. But at every place I've been when H1Bs ended up added (normally via consultancy or outsourcing) it was always to cut costs. And the only costs we were cutting was staff.

[AtlasBarfed]

If h1bs are statistically a lot more centered in higher income urban areas, while overall populations of a given profession are more evenly distributed across the country...

Then that $120,000 salary median can still represent a 50% undercut of similar Urban salaries for a profession.

I'm going to contend that that is the case. But I don't have time to chase down the statistics

[jopsen]

Underpaid or overpaid doesn't really matter.

Sure it's sound to argue that wages would be higher with more constraint supply.

BUT: The network effect of all SWE talent from across the globe moving to the US is also huge.

Probably, you'd have a smaller overall tax base without H1B. Make no mistake most countries would like to keep their H1B expats :)

If you really wanted to grow US supply of engineers, you'd have to start by fixing the education system, making it cheaper, and then wait 5 years.

[giantg2]

Median salary for a software engineer according to BLS is over that - around $133k.

[jpleger]

K, but if these are experts that literally do not exist in the US, why are the salaries not higher than median? It wasn't meant to fill junior level positions.

This program was meant to allow talent that is not available in the US, so that gaps could be filled with experts from overseas.

[thatfrenchguy]

> An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

Base salary, not total comp, the first year

[alephnerd]

The math of bringing an employee onsite on an H1B just to depress wages does not work unless it is below the 25th percentile of wages (which is $90k).

Once you are breaking the $100k mark and want to only save costs, you are better off opening a GCC in Eastern Europe, Israel, or India, which is what most companies started doing once remote work became normalized in the early 2020s.

All this did is make a free "Thousand Talents" program for India, especially in chemical, petroleum, biopharma, and biochemical engineering - industries where the delta between US and India salaries aren't significant but the talent gap in the US is real.

There are much smarter ways to crack down on H1B abuse by consultancies - this ain't it.

Edit: can't reply, but here's why this is dumb

Assuming I am in Dallas (a fairly prominent domestic IT services hub) and hiring an H1B employee.

In Dallas, a wage around $95k base is fairly standard based on JPMC, DXC, and C1's salaries in the area.

That $95k an employee is has an additional 18% in employer required taxes and withholdings. Add to that an additional 5-10% for retirement account and insurance plans. That $95k employee became around $115k-125k.

Once salaries start breaking into the 6 figure mark, that 23-35% in overhead starts adding up very fast. On top of that visa processing before this rule costed around $15-20k in additional legal fees on the employer's side.

If I'm at the point where I'm paying a low six figure salary, I'm better off opening an office in Warsaw or Praha or Hyderabad where I can safely pay $50k-60k in base to get top 10% talent while getting a $10k-20k per head tax credit over a 3-5 year period depending on the amount I invest building a GCC because my after tax cost at that point becomes $50-60k per employee. These credits tend to require a $1M investment, and with the proposed H1B fee, this made that kind of FDI much easier to justify than it was before.

At least with the current status quo, if I was hiring an ML Engineer at MS or an SRE at Google (a large number of whom are H1Bs as well), I could justify hiring within the US, but adding an additional $100K filing fee just gives me no incentive at all to expand headcount domestically.

You don't use the stick if you also don't have the carrot.

> You are not taking into account section 174, It takes you 15 years to depreciate foreign salary vs first year

That's a rounding error now that it costs $100K to renew or apply for an H1B visa. And for larger organizations breaking the mid-8 figures in revenue mark, section 174 changes never had an impact one way or the other - it was mostly local dev shops and MSPs that faced the brunt of the section 174 onslaught.

> Honestly, even Germany is probably better bang-for-the-buck than Hyderabad

Germany needs to severely reduce employer contributions and taxes to become cost competitive against Warsaw, Praha, or Hyd for software and chip design jobs.

That said, this is a net positive for Germany's biotech, mechanical, biopharma, and other engineering industries that aren't software or chip design related.

[myrmidon]

> Praha

This is a pet peeve of mine, but there is an english name for that city and it's Prague.

There is no point in using the local spelling because it adds no clarity, is less obvious to pronounce for any reader and the locals are not really gonna thank you for doing this either. Just seems like a form of light cultural white-knighting to me.

You are not even consistent because Warsaw is not how locals spell that.

[mc32]

It's a peeve of mine as well moreso when they don't carry it out for English placenames that get transliterated into a local language but some of these folks will carry the localized version -like they won't insist on "New York" instead of Nova Iorque in PR or BR. But even above, they are inconsistent with Warsaw carrying the English spelling.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Exonyms are colonialism.

[otabdeveloper4]

Eh, no?

The most prominent exonyms are of cities like Paris, London, Moscow or Beijing.

I.e., places culturally and historically significant enough that older historical pronunciations have become ossified in foreign languages.

English having a "Prague" spelling means the name of the city was important enough to have entered the English language back in the day when English was still borrowing heavily from French.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Um. Beijing's not the exonym. Like, maybe this reveals that I'm ancient at this point, but I remember it being Peking at least the first few years of school.

[Vvector]

If the local market for American DBAs is $180k, then hiring H1B DBAs at $110k does depress wages.

[jopsen]

Sure, but if the local market is that high you probably have sever supply constraints.

If you don't fix the supply constraints, you'll depress growth.

You could fix the education system - good luck - and then wait 5 years before you cut H1B.

But yes, obviously it depressed wages, which at a certain point is probably a good thing.

[snicky]

I don't know much about the other cities you mentioned, but there's no way you could get top developers from Warsaw for $50-60k in 2025. You may be hard pressed to find them even if you 2x that. As a point of reference, a nice family apartment costs around $1M here now. Times they are a-changin.

[alephnerd]

> you could get top developers from Warsaw for $50-60k in 2025

We'd be paying that for Early career base (think L3). Mid-career you'd see people breaking the $80-110k base range.

I don't like giving "TC" simply because RSUs are very dependent on a number of outside variables.

And my example was for why a JPMC opens an offshore office abroad, or why a company hires an EPAM type.

For product companies who actually care about work quality, you won't too see much difference between salary abroad and a US salary from 10 years ago. I'd recommend using a fork of the old GitLab comp calculator - it's fairly accurate.

[dzonga]

I don't know why people like arguing with facts.

you're pointing out facts - yet people deny. most software jobs listings are either in eastern europe or india these days. that's the "A.I" eating software jobs.

yeah some companies might list U.S jobs - but they're only seriously hiring for Staff roles. the rest offshored.

[alephnerd]

It's been a bad market. A lot of people on HN are ICs who are rightfully stressed and anxious.

The nativism and rejection makes sense with that regards - it's an almost religious hope that stuff will get better.

I just believe in being brutally honest - especially on HN, where I can vent or shine a light on decisions.

[N2yhWNXQN3k9]

Then what would the salary be? If I am hard-pressed to hire at 120k?

[prasoonds]

Offering a perspective from Berlin - a decent-to-good senior engineer goes for $120k-$130k so I'm guessing for Warsaw, you could get someone similar for $90k-100k

[LunaSea]

$130k is something I very rarely see on job postings anywhere in Europe besides maybe London.

[snicky]

Of course it all depends on who are we actually talking about. I think talented seniors with 5-10yoe and proper communication skills expect North of $150k.

[N2yhWNXQN3k9]

Interesting, there are plenty of localities in the US that hire 5-10yoe developers at south of $100k.

You can see this in BLS data.

Is there a good resource for data on wages in Poland? I mean, I am going to look, but I thought I'd ask.

[snicky]

> Interesting, there are plenty of localities in the US that hire 5-10yoe developers at south of $100k.

I don't doubt there may be people who would be fine with that, but I guess no one who values their own skills would go for it if there are plenty of East/West Coast companies hiring remotely.

> Is there a good resource for data on wages in Poland? I mean, I am going to look, but I thought I'd ask.

I think you can start from looking at the local job offers, e.g. https://justjoin.it. Just remember there are a couple of nuances:

- most developers in Poland don't want to be FTEs, because the tax burden on that type of employment is at least 2 times higher than on B2B contracts; effectively, we ended up having a market where everyone is hired B2B, but with all the usual FT benefits (paid vacations and sick days, equipment, private insurance, gym memberships, free food and whatnot) - it's sort of a gray area, but the related law is not really enforced; thus as a foreign company you compete with the local B2B rates + benefits

- people are aware that US is a different market generating more revenue

- the work-life balance may be quite different, so they expect to be paid accordingly

- Warsaw is generally more expensive than other cities in Poland, so you don't need to limit yourself to one city in your search, the same way as you wouldn't hire remote developers from the Bay Area only

- there's a reason these offers are hanging in there :)

Edit: formatting.

[prpl]

Hyderabad is not that cheap for the top 10%, probably closer 90-100k base.

Honestly, even Germany is probably better bang-for-the-buck than Hyderabad, but Hyderabad has the volume and the offices.

[streetcat1]

You are not taking into account section 174, It takes you 15 years to depreciate foreign salary vs first year (post the BBB).

[_DeadFred_]

I guess all those management meetings where we brought on teams staffed by H1Bs in order to cut costs, when our only costs were wages, didn't make sense.

Funny things is the agencies/consultancies/outsource companies all solds us on it would cut costs when the only thing changed was labor. But apparently they could cut costs without cutting labor costs? How does that work?

[nobodyandproud]

Care to provide a google sheets outlining why it doesn’t work?

[dgs_sgd]

I’m sorry but I don’t follow. What bearing does the 25th percentile H1B wage have on suppressing wages in a particular role or specialty?