[billsunshine]

No doubt h1b is abused. Corporations use it to structurally underpay tech labor. Shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy - it hurts both domestic workers and underpays migrant labor. The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?

[jollyllama]

> shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy.

In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes.

Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation.

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bowman20260...

[peyton]

It’s a non-immigrant visa. I believe E* are the immigrant employment visas.

[hshdhdhj4444]

It’s a dual intent visa. The visa itself provides no immigration benefits but it’s explicitly designed to then allow for a permanent residency and then citizenship application.

[jpgvm]

> what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?

None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed.

I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing.

There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.

[Dig1t]

“Top tier programmer”

Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple.

These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.

[kjellsbells]

Not disputing this, but working thru this, lets say H-1Bs suddenly become really hard for companies to get. I dont think it follows that a ton of IT jobs suddenly open up for Americans. Isnt it more likely that all those H-1B jobs are replaced by workers in offshore locations?

Or, that those jobs disappear and are not replaced at all. Or, that the jobs go and the work is expected to happen (somehow) with AI tools operated by whoever is left.

My point is, whatever you or I might think about H-1B misuse, both the people who want to keep it, and the people who want to eliminate it are not really friends of the American worker.

[Dig1t]

Many of these roles, such as the ones where people just push buttons and send emails, could be done by Americans with just a little bit of training. But there is no incentive for Apple to train Americans or invest in their existing employees when they can just claim “labor shortage” and hire someone from India instead.

We know this works already because this is how the country worked until 1990, when they created the H1B and massively increased all other types of immigration. By 1990 the US was the undisputed powerhouse of the world, and it was built completely with native born labor.

There was plenty of offshoring that happened during the 90’s but the companies that rely on it heavily do not end up winning. In the end nothing beats Americans working in America and that’s obvious just by looking at the stock market.

The people who want to eliminate the H1B are absolutely pro-worker in my opinion. It’s a tool that’s used almost exclusively to suppress wages, the quality of the workers is almost always significantly worse than the American equivalent and serves only to boost profits for the company owners at the expense of their own workers.

[kjellsbells]

My point is that even if H-1B were eliminated and all the people that hold them today returned to their home countries, employers' response is less likely to be "we need to hire and train more Americans, asap" but more like "let's expand our overseas operations, so we can get work done without paying Americans".

In other words eliminating immigration like this is only half the solution of you don't also have a way to stop offshoring.

[mvc]

Why _should_ Apple employ only Americans (whether in America or elsewhere)?

They generate revenue all over the world. Seems only right that their costs should be distributed around the world too.

[Dig1t]

Because they are an American company which benefits from all of the advantages of this country, and indeed would not exist at all without this country's people. They rely on the tax incentives, stable society, culture, cities, infrastructure, and PEOPLE of this country. It's a company founded by Americans in the USA, they have reaped the benefits of everything that comes from this country.

Do you think that Apple could or would have been founded in India? or China? Or Brazil? Obviously not. It's obviously the product of this country.

Is your argument that since Apple makes money in other countries that they should transcend nations and become their own super-national entity? That they should not have to follow the rules or even try to benefit their home country?

At the end of the day that is what's happening. These mega corps have basically usurped the power of nations and made their own rules. They have changed the immigration system to give themselves the power to import cheap labor at the expense of the country that allowed them to exist in the first place. We as workers are saying that we should use the power of government to push back against this practice.

[jpgvm]

> These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.

H1Bs are not getting approved for these for years now.

Infosys and TechM exploited the crap out of it to do shit like this which caused the rules to be tightened massively.

These days you are only getting H1B for folks atleast earning 200k+ base.

[selridge]

I mean you could read the linked website where it points out we aren’t talking about top tier talent. It’s just shit IT jobs we used to pay Americans to do so they could be furries. Now we pay Indians to do it so they can act like they are better than Mexicans.

[weirdmantis69]

Many of the top tier companies (meta, Amazon, google, microsoft etc) have had massive layoffs in the 10's of thousands range. Those workers were top tier programmers. So you need to be quite delusional or uninformed to have your view point on the work force.

[jpgvm]

Bar was lowered massively during the COVID employment boom (with the exception of Apple really).

Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly.

All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.

[throwaway2056]

You should try to communicate to managers (that are US citizens or greencard holders) that decide on H1B/outsourcing.

[wildrhythms]

They are rewarded for cutting the budget, and undercutting domestic workers. Until that changes, this problem will continue. Or workers could unionize.

[trueismywork]

If the same work can be done abroad with less money, then it's time to place sanctions on govts that allows their workers to be underpaid.

[gymbeaux]

As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.

[ecshafer]

You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise companies its very bad.

[goobert]

The h1bs at Amazon were some of the most abysmal software developers I've seen in my life

[gymbeaux]

As time goes on I'm finding AWS on a resume less and less impressive, regardless of citizenship status. Lots of resumes where they were at AWS for 1 or 2 years, I guess they got stack-ranked out. It makes sense. Everyone knows AWS is a revolving door.

[goobert]

I heard the average tenure for an SDE at amazon is something like 9 months. The culture is so repulsive that if you're good you leave soon and convert that big name on your CV to something better. I know a few really good ex AWS engineers and the thing in common is they hate Amazon and will rant about how dumb the culture is.

[gymbeaux]

If there is a correlation to company size or company popularity (e.g., FAANG) I would have actually thought it would be large companies/FAANG are hiring the low-quality H-1Bs. I usually work at medium sized companies (50-200 engineers company-wide is my definition) where maybe 2-4% of the engineers are H-1B or green card. They've all been great. Even the one at Allstate (Allstate was also hugely reliant on India-based Infosys "developers" who I will yell from the mountaintops were straight garbage and very much net-negative).

[cucumber3732842]

>poor throw it over the wall mentality

And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.

[gymbeaux]

I've heard anecdotally that Stryker is really bad about this (throw it over the wall mentality) and I remember thinking when I heard that, how the fuck are employees of a company getting away with being assigned work and just reassigning it to someone else? But then I think about my Allstate days and I can see it. I think you're being downvoted because people reading your comment haven't witnessed that sort of dysfunction in a company, but to anyone reading this- it is how some companies operate. The execs at these companies will deadass hire garbage people (usually offshore) and then brag about how much money they saved the company vs hiring U.S. citizens. Either the bill comes due years down the road when prod goes down due to a bullshit bug from the offshore team and it ends up costing the company millions, or U.S. employees are picking up the slack.

At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.

[thatfrenchguy]

> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?

I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.

[georgeburdell]

H1B was created in the 90s. The industry had been around for nearly 50 years at that point.

[bdangubic]

how many people were in the industry/needed 50 years prior? compared to 40 years later? any growth?

[gymbeaux]

I would challenge that by saying SO MANY "software engineers" are net-negative producers, be it offshore teams in Asia or Eastern Europe or U.S. citizens. Partially a result of coding bootcamps. The recent tech layoffs in ~2022 that we are still reeling from is further evidence that maybe we don't need H-1B for software engineering roles. Medical? Absolutely.

[Dig1t]

You are being downvoted but you are totally correct. The tech industry existed before the H1B and was growing rapidly. There’s no evidence at all that the industry would have stopped growing without the H1B or that any company started by an H1B wouldn’t have been started by an American.

[hshdhdhj4444]

44% of unicorns founders between 1997 and 2019 were foreign born. 20% of those were specifically from India.

It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest.

Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders.

https://gfmag.com/capital-raising-corporate-finance/us-unico...