I was once brought in to a Fortune500 company to teach basic ENTRY LEVEL web development to a room full of supposedly "highly educated" H-1B Software Engineers.
Much of my presentation included things that most of my unemployed American colleagues, all of whom were actively looking for work, already knew how to do implicitly. Because it literally was just basic, "This is how flexbox works"-type of stuff.
Maybe the H-1B program is a great program for hospitals. For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.
H1B workers are supposed to be people with qualifications that are in short supply in the United States. The unspoken part is that the "qualification" employers are so desperately searching for is usually the willingness to work for peanuts.
After graduating college I joined a company that paid generally below-market for everyone and had a significant number of H-1B employees and contractors.
The benefits were legendary but the pay was 20-30% lower than what was around.
I don’t have evidence of wrongdoing but I’ve occasionally wondered if it was some kind of scheme.
“Legendary” benefits (especially healthcare) are extremely expensive. It’s plausible that the average total compensation was the same, or even more, than other companies. The trick is that not everyone gets the same value from those benefits.
The compensation is only measured in terms of salary (and maybe bonus).
Stock compensation is completely ignored. Since stock compensation can be a large fraction if not the majority of the compensation, this means that many H1-Bs may be underpaid compared to their coworkers, while appearing to the government to be the highest paid in that company and job role.
The other ignored aspect is effective hourly pay. Software engineers are nearly always exempt employees, so they don't receive hourly pay. But a manager can demand more from H1Bs, even if it would mean work during nights or weekends, and there's little the H1B can do. Local employees can more easily change jobs if that happens, and moreover, the threat that they can change jobs disincentivizes such abuse.
It's a bit of a catch-22 because if you add enough lower compensated employees you shift the local median lower. If "everyone" in the local area is hiring more cheaper H-1Bs that gives you a chance to hire even more H-1Bs for even cheaper. Averages can be a fun game that way.
Even if you try to pin it to the median that does not include H-1Bs, you still are letting the market compete on labor cost and that competition can still affect the local median. Companies decide all the time that they could hire, for example, 2 H-1Bs for the cost of one "senior" local developer, encouraging that local developer to maybe only ask for 1.5x "an H-1B" to remain competitive in that market. Iterate that enough in hiring decisions and companies still have more control of that local median than labor does.
I don't know if there is a "fair" way to set the cost of labor for an H-1B, but "local median" or any other average-based math is probably not it.
Or if the job is an outsourceable one that can be provided as a service then they will outsource it to a company overseas and still pay peanuts. The only reason they'll raise wages is if they have to, aka the service cannot be done elsewhere or automated.
If your company doesn't need domain experts/doesn't change to the point these people can be remote... you are a zombie company and will be replaced by someone that does utilize domain experts/dynamically changes all the time with conditions. Even with just a factory, when I moved from dev to IT, getting my people to understand our users by going out to the floor and sitting with people we were able to greatly improve efficiency in a way no remote IT could.
They already are... Generally insourcing is to reduce the friction of doing so, because application managers and product owners don't want to relocate to the countries they're doing the outsourcing with.
A lot of jobs require or are better done on-premises, which is why they hire H1-Bs. Outsourcing is already cheaper, by far, especially if you want to go to the third-world.
This. The problem for H1B advocates is most of us here reached our conclusions AFTER exposure to outsourcing/consulting and what H1-Bs got us/the new people we had to manage. Lots of us were also privy to managements' reasoning (cutting costs/your team is the most expensive and we don't want to pay that) which don't align with 'H1Bs are paid the same'.
> For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.
I'd argue with the 100% - we all know the companies that do it. They get about half of H1B visas. So 50% :)
The blanket $100K (instead of say tiering it like raising fee $50K for each next 20K tier of visas with the $250K fee visas no subject to the cap - if only Tramp knew anything about business and specifically price differentiation :) would definitely revive interest for outsourcing to offshore.
Managing AI agents have some similarity to managing offshore teams. This time the offshore teams will be using AI agents. May probably lead to much higher performance/output.
Being rate limited, i'll answer to the commenter below here: The offshore teams are naturally assigned a well defined chunks of work, at least in a well managed situations. AI agents are also very suitable for that.
> Maybe the H-1B program is a great program for hospitals. For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically
And yet, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta and Amazon would never be where they are without folks who are or who started on H-1B. A ton of their senior staff were once 20-something hired on H1B
Crackdown on the abuse of outsourcing companies, let actual tech workers who are (or will be) good at their jobs come here, it’s obvious policy. The US has benefited immensely from that brain drain.
Much of my presentation included things that most of my unemployed American colleagues, all of whom were actively looking for work, already knew how to do implicitly. Because it literally was just basic, "This is how flexbox works"-type of stuff.
Maybe the H-1B program is a great program for hospitals. For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.