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Every year US absorbs 120k+ H1B+L1+OPT new visa holders. Considering there are 1.9M software engineers, market has to grow by 5% every year just to stand still. Add US graduates and you are talking about 10% growth required just to maintain employment. It's not realistic long term.

Congress/president should pause H1B visas or hike up fee to 200-500K so that only truly exceptional talent are allowed in. Right now it's just give away to corporations that are laying off people by tens of thousands.

[knuppar]

you're not factoring in a few specific things:

1) how many of these people leave the country in this analysis.

2) OPTs likely will get h1b/l1s/leave the country and are being counted distinctly.

3) not all h1b/l1/OPTs are for tech. majority for sure, but there's a conversation factor.

specially in the current situation that green cards are much harder to obtain and many OPTs don't find a job, I expect 1 to be much larger than in the past.

as a more general observation, this line of reasoning does fit lump of labor fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

[NikolaNovak]

Oh, there's a name for it! I've sometimes been struggling to verbalize in the past the logical issue I perceived with the "immigrants steal are jobs" absolutists, and this is a useful reference.

[bequanna]

Are new H1Bs a thing anymore?

Since the fee went up to $100k, I’m not aware of any companies still sponsoring hires who need a new H1B

[buzer]

As far as I understand the $100k fee applies only to consulate issued H1Bs. L1 -> H1B path (via AOS) is possible without fee. (Recent) US university graduates can also use similar path from what I understand.

We will see how much the $100k fee affects things during this H1B lottery round in few weeks.

[klipt]

Exactly https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/few-us-busi...

> Only about 70 employers have paid a $100,000 Trump fee on H-1B workers from outside the US since it was imposed through a September White House proclamation, a government attorney said Thursday.

[guywithahat]

I think a lot of people have just moved to L1/O1/etc visas to get around it as OP pointed out, although a lot of people are still hiring H1B's. Amazon has applied for over 2000 H1B's so far this year, which puts them on track for ~7000 for the year https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...

[Dig1t]

We have hit the cap for H1B's every year and we will always do so until we get rid of the program. Cheap labor will always be in demand.

A 100k one-time fee is nothing for big employers. That's 25k/year for 4 years, and if you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job it's obviously worth it.

Compare hiring an H1B that is stuck at their job, to an American who can leave at any time. You can pay the H1B a lower wage to compensate for the fee you paid to get them into the role. 25k/year for 4 years is worth it for not only the reduced churn that comes with training a new person, but also you don't have to pay any of the incentives that come with getting a new employee into the role like sign-on bonuses, wage bumps, benefits etc.

[guywithahat]

There's an X account which just posts universities hiring H1B's for ~half of what it would normally cost to hire people. An 80k/yr senior software developer will always be in demand, especially if the team is already predominantly non-american

[shagie]

Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.

Pulling up my alma mater... https://www.openthebooks.com/wisconsin-state-employees/?Year...

The various roles that you'll find for software developers: Sr Is Specialist, Is Tech Srv Cons/Adm, Sr Inform Proc Conslt, Sr Systems Programmer

And you can pull up the pay scale at https://hr.wisc.edu/standard-job-descriptions/?job_group=Inf...

$80k/y isn't "we're paying H1-B half of what the going rate is" but rather "the state legislature has set this pay scale and we're paying everyone that amount" ... And many times, H-1B visas aren't eligible to work in those roles.

[trimbo]

> Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.

There's absolutely no reason government couldn't pay competitive rates for software engineers. They do it for doctors and administrators of state-owned medical centers. Not to mention football coaches

https://openpayrolls.com/justin-wilcox-146812860

[shagie]

It's only a little bit lower than salaries for non-Big Tech that are in the area. Again, for Madison compare it to https://www.levels.fyi/companies/american-family-insurance/s...

Trying to make state government competitive with Big Tech salaries (especially in states that aren't California) would not go over well with voters.

While private sector deals with layoffs and uncertainty, the public sector has things like "budget not good this year? Two weeks unpaid vacation for everyone" - https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/code/executive_orders/2003_... ... 401k matching? How about a fully funded pension instead. https://reason.org/commentary/the-wisconsin-retirement-syste...

Football coaches are revenue generating for universities... software developers at universities not so much. Doctors are licensed professionals that have a decade of schooling... software developers frequently reject licensure and celebrate their lack of a formal education.

[guywithahat]

But there's no reason they couldn't just pay them more. The way to make them pay more is to force them to hire applicants at market rate, and when that's impossible, they'll go to the state legislature. Allowing for the H1B loophole is the problem universities are too eager to abuse

[Dig1t]

Exactly. The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue. There IS no reasonable counter argument.

It's supposedly a program for importing the best and brightest talent that doesn't exist in the US but somehow those best and brightest people get paid LESS than their American counterparts? It was never about the best and brightest it was always about bringing in cheap labor that can't leave.

Sadly I don't think we'll ever fix it either, right leaning industrialists support it because they benefit from cheap labor, and the left leaning politicians get to continue importing people who overwhelmingly vote for them. As usual the loser in the equation is the middle class American worker.

[greedo]

How many H1B visa holders become citizens eligible to vote for those "left leaning politicians?"

I don't think having an H1B helps you accelerate your citizenship application in anyway, and for many countries the wait for legal citizenship is decades long.

[Dig1t]

The ones who get citizenship and their children.

Just look at the data for how people vote by demographic group (race).

Nonwhite groups overwhelmingly vote blue, H1B's are overwhelmingly nonwhite. This is not controversial.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...

https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/aoodm8/how_the_...

[SilverElfin]

> The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue.

Except this is literally false. Every single study I’ve seen that claims this has no real evidence - just speculation without knowing the details of the jobs or the people being hired, based on their own self-serving false comparisons to make dubious claims that similar jobs are paid differently.

Since you said “across the board”, do you think Google or Amazon pay a software engineer at the starting level differently based on immigration status? No, they don’t. Literally every manager at big tech could tell you this confidently.

[Dig1t]

I have worked at Apple for a decade, H1B's absolutely do get paid less. We have many H1B's that literally just sit around and push buttons and file bug reports, and barely know how to code. Some of them can't code at all. Ofc some of them are good engineers, but they are not even in the majority.

There is plenty of data to back this up.

>A total of 60% of all H-1B jobs are assigned wage levels that are well below the local median wage.

https://www.epi.org/press/a-majority-of-migrant-workers-empl...

[SilverElfin]

> Cheap labor will always be in demand.

H1Bs are not cheap labor. They’re almost always pricier than the alternative to the company. This is a myth that is ultimately rooted in racism more than facts. Most of the top H1B filers - big tech companies in particular - pay literally identically for the same job. They have fixed pay structures internally, in part because if you don’t, you could face discrimination lawsuits - but mostly to just not lose the competition for talent.

But the cost to the company isn’t the cost of the pay anyways. It’s also the cost in lost time of the H1B process, the fees you pay as part of the process, the costs of law firms you have to hire, the cost of time delays, the risk of the immigration process not working out. Those work out to a lot more value than 25K/year.

An H1B is also not stuck in their job - you can transfer H1Bs.

[oscaracso]

I do not see how the facts you present call into question the basic logic that as you increase the availability of a commodity, say labour, you anticipate its price to diminish. All of the immigrant workers could be better-compensated and more productive than all of the American workers, and still their presence could drive the price of labour for native workers in that sector down. E.g., if there is a shortage of repairmen certified to fix some medical equipment, introducing a glut of new repairmen who are even more productive will fail to reduce the compensation of the incumbents only in exceptional circumstances.

[JuniperMesos]

People applying for H1B visas are getting partially compensated in the right to legally reside in the US rather than in money. The right to legally reside in the US is something that a lot of foreigners want badly, and are willing to accept otherwise-poor compensation for; and by definition it is not something you can pay an American citizen with.

[alex43578]

Why is the company getting to pay their employee with that legal-residence-value and therefore get a discount on compensation?

The cleaner approach is the immigrant has to pay that value in visa expenses, taxes, or something else; while the company should have to pay market rate for the position.

[shagie]

That makes the assumption that every H1B, L1, and OPT is going into software development.

https://apnews.com/article/teacher-jobs-h1b-j1-visa-online-s...

    Like many school systems facing teacher shortages, South Carolina’s Allendale County has looked overseas for help. A quarter of the teachers in the rural, high-poverty district come from other countries.

    The superintendent praises the international educators — mostly from Jamaica and the Philippines — for their skill and dedication, but she is preparing to lose some of them as the Trump administration reshapes visa programs.

    Facing higher visa sponsorship costs and uncertain immigration policies, Superintendent Vallerie Cave said it feels too risky to extend some international teachers whose contracts are up or bring on others.

[aantix]

South Carolina's beginning teacher salary is $42,500.

That's at 125% above the poverty level.

[xjlin0]

Education sector should have exceptions

[sgerenser]

The current $100K fee doesn’t apply to people changing from a student visa. This was long the path of people in software dev or other high tech careers: get a masters or PhD in the U.S., then get an H1B to start working. For those already on H1B after starting on that path, again the fee does not apply if they want to change jobs and have the new employer sponsor their H1B. So hiking that fee to $200K or more wouldn’t really change things much, at least in tech.

[SamuelAdams]

200-500k would make a large negative impact in healthcare. Specialty doctors cannot be trained in a snap, and there are limits on how many MDs and DOs are churned out of schools.

So healthcare industries turn to H1Bs to hire specialty positions in underserved / rural areas. The alternative is to shut these facilities down, which has other negative aspects to communities.

[oscaracso]

I was surprised to hear in this thread that there is a physician shortage in the US, because my understanding was that most Americans go to university and that doctors are paid well. Why aren't more graduates pursuing careers in medicine?

It turns out that they are, but (if I do not misread the situation) there is a regulatory bottleneck:

>The United States is grappling with a physician shortage, but the solution does not lie in simply opening more medical schools. As a physician-scientist and former founding dean of a medical school, I argue that the true bottleneck is not the number of medical school graduates but the insufficient number of residency training positions. Since the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which froze the number of Medicare-funded residency slots, the United States has seen a steady increase in medical graduates, yet the availability of residency spots has stagnated. This mismatch between undergraduate medical education (UME) expansion and the lack of corresponding growth in graduate medical education (GME) is the key issue.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12256077/

As this has been the arrangement since 1997, by now a graduated American child of an immigrant H1B specialist trained in a foreign country may be unable to secure a 'residency training position' and therefore unable to practice medicine in his or her own country? It sounds absurd.

[SilverElfin]

Half the Fortune 500 is founded by an immigrant or child of an immigrant. Most of the others rely on immigrants in key positions. Pausing visas or hiking fees up doesn’t protect jobs - it just causes a future decline in the American economy. I think it’s literally cheaper in terms of the country’s future to just pay those who can’t get jobs to take a one-way flight elsewhere, if they’re not able to compete, than to make it harder to get talented people to move here.

[ea550ff70a]

this comment has so many bad assumptions is not even worth debating

[mulakosag]

So immigrants are in fact taking away the jobs? Do you have the same opinion of illegal immigrants jumping the border and taking jobs from average Americans?

I find this argument extremely funny because when immigrations are taking the white collar jobs, you guys get anti immigrants, tighten the visa stuff, but when blue collar and low level jobs are taken by illegal folks you turn and blind eye and noone is illegal in stolen land login.

I 100% agree that H1B has been extremely abused by folks from specific country running body shop tech consultancies but the solution is not to hike up the fees to 200k-500k.

The 100k fee by Trump admin is already showing effects in the job market. Most companies are not readily sponsoring H1B visa anymore, getting a big tech job as a intl student is already tough and only exceptional ones are getting such jobs.

[JuniperMesos]

I honestly don't see that much hypocrisy on this point. People in tech who are supportive of expansive rights for foreigners to immigrate to the US generally ground their argumentation in either claims that it's immoral for the US to limit immigration (the view characterized by the slogan "no one is illegal on stolen land"), or claims that they benefit from immigration even if they are competing for jobs with immigrants. And often the people making these claims are socially adjacent to immigrants in their workplace or other social circles.

Meanwhile, the people in tech who oppose immigration often do bring up the same argument you do - that it's bad to allow immigrants to compete with blue collar American citizen labor even if this competition would make some things that these white-collar tech workers buy cheaper - or ground their opposition to immigration in negative effects of immigrants on American society that aren't directly related to competition for blue-collar jobs (generally, that the presence of large numbers of immigrants has bad cultural or political consequences for the US as a whole).

The political fight over immigration among white-collar tech workers I think has more to do with battling moral claims, or different visions of what the US should look like culturally and politically, than it does over purely-materialist job competition concerns that they are hypocrites about when the job competition is happening to blue-collar workers.