The "wage Level" Mirage: H-1b Proposal Could Help Outsourcers and Hurt Us Talent
Mood
heated
Sentiment
mixed
Category
other
Key topics
The article discusses a proposed change to the H-1B visa program that could favor outsourcers and harm US talent, sparking a heated debate among commenters about the impact of immigration policies on the tech industry and US workers.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
1h
Peak period
157
Day 1
Avg / period
53.3
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 24, 2025 at 9:05 PM EDT
2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 24, 2025 at 10:09 PM EDT
1h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
157 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 27, 2025 at 11:58 PM EDT
2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Seems like a lot of people forget there was a fairly massive push for this back in the early to mid aughts (for example, google "tech outsourcing 2004", as iirc 2004 was around the peak of the mania) and it generally didn't work out so great, with most companies who tried it pulling back away from it a year or two later.
Maybe it'll work better now, but I haven't seen evidence that much has changed that would modify the outcomes.
studying here is no guarantee you'll get to stay, even if you did a phd.
That’s not to say that all US schools are good or equal, just that the credential is easier to validate.
All of this should to a little extent alleviate some of the concerns.
The weighted system should still work since the candidate pool (from within the US) is likely mostly students on OPT. They should have comparable salaries, unless they are hired by rotten companies.
Students have the fewest skills, if we are to have a work visa program it should be targeted at high skilled laborers, who have worked in industry for enough time to pick up desirable skills
Now that Trump is trying to do something about it, I start seeing a flood of negative posts. We need to decide what we want.
I was prepared to accept this as one of the handful of semi-useful things Trump did, and I might still personally benefit, but the details quickly disabused me of the idea that it was actually good.
And even then, "bad idea" is what you get after the extreme charity of assuming the Trump administration is fundamentally lawful.
It's even worse if you believe they're bunch of crooks that will use the "special exception" clause to extort/bribe companies into corrupt favors. For example, granting access to snoop without a court-order, biasing their moderation policies, silencing voices or messages the administration finds inconvenient, etc.
("They" being the Trump admin in general, since I'm not at all sure who in that morass is actually in charge.)
By the way, this is total bullshit pushed by people who are upset that the loss of H1B labor will mean that they have to pay labor more.
If the offshoring was a comparable product and cheaper, they would have already done it. But guess what - everyone already knows outsourcing leads to a lower quality product!
For half that you could staff a new hub office in one of many countries where thats desirable and tax incentives are stacked in its favor. Phillipines. Serbia.
Maybe you send an engineer to go train them there for half the year. Still cheaper.
Now the ancillary benefits, the rental income, the food, the taxation, are flowing in the other direction towards the new host country.
Maybe instead of the H1-B marrying the training engineer and deciding to stay in the US, its the reverse, and now that guy starts a serbian family instead. The flow of knowledge starts to drip away from the US rather than towards it.
Which is why I support this law so thoroughly. Its so obviously terrible for the USA, and great for the rest of the world.
It falls short of the total US blockade that I want, but its another brick in that wall. One at a time Mr President. Step by step. Ban us from sending you goods. Black van people (including beloved childrens authors) at the airports. Prevent trained engineers from working in your country.
Fine with me, if so!
You’re describing a tax on visa holders. That’s an interesting idea; I can think of some benefits and some scary drawbacks/abuses/perverse incentives to doing this as well. Has that been tried anywhere?
Charging a yearly fee to offset how H1-B is abused for cheap labor instead of high performers makes sense. Making that fee $100,000 with arbitrary waivers for friends of the administration is absurd.
The problem is that the mechanics of the switching process is extremely cumbersome. Some of the relevant documents are held by your current employer and not with you. The new employer effectively needs to apply for a new application minus the lottery system. There are significant weeks to months worth of delays for the new employers to get approvals, so most H1B employees that transfer are actually working provisionally on the basis of their new approval still being pending. They are very limited in terms of traveling etc during this period. There are significant risks to changing your job when you’re approaching the end of your current H1B visa expiry. This was particularly bad for Chinese applicants who unlike most other nations’s applicants who got 3 year approvals, usually only got 1 year approvals.
The real problem in switching jobs aren’t the policies but the extreme uncertainty and bureaucracy involved in doing so.
The H1-B visa is intended for bringing specific technical expertise that does not exist in the US for a set period of time. This is why one of the requirements is that you must have interviewed US persons first. Its the same reason it's a nonimmigration visa.
The rampant abuse of the visa has a remedy - criminal charges against the HR directors of any company who is found to have committed fraud, and capping the number of visas per company (setting up many shell companies is a strong signal that fraud is being committed).
If an H1-B worker can't negotiate on a global level for their expertise - they should not be on that visa.
This is generally not a requirement for an H-1B. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit...
At the same time, if a US person applies and is similarly qualified, they must be offered the job.
Which is trivially abuseable by offering substantially less for the H-1B position. I'm not sure if there's an easy policy solution for that.
You don't have to look at every single one lying on government forms is fraud start putting at the company who signed off and the person brought over (before they are deported) in jail for a couple of years and people will clean up their act real quick.
- Jailing a foreigner before sending him back to his country for an administrative offense is somehow a big waste of public money.
- A very hard punishment still requires to consistently catch offenders, otherwise it will slowly become hypothetic.
I think that it is very clear what was meant here.
trust me, there would be 99% compliance in very short order
In my view, the real problem with the H1-B program stems from the sponsorship system which ties each employee to a particular company and role. Unable to leave their position without threatening their residency, they are more willing to demand abuse (e.g., long working hours, poor leadership, subpar compensation) than the labor market requires.
An improvement to the program would make it easier for people to change job. Perhaps the government could permit highly skilled individuals to qualify personally for the visa so long as they sustain employment in their field.
That is kind of how it works: when I was on a H1B I did look at switching jobs and had an offer from a company who would sponsor me. They need to file a Labor Condition Application to show that the position qualified for a H1B worker, but you can start working as soon as the LCA is approved if you already have the visa, while the I129 is processed.
I actually don’t think it should be like the poster you replied to suggested where the immigrant employee in question needs to maintain employment.
I would advocate that we structure employment visas like we do marriage visas which would mean we calculate whatever the total cost of the drain on our system would be if the new immigrant wasn’t working, charge the company that much to have them enter, and then the employee is free to quit immediately if they feel it’s in their interests
Yeah of course people are not happy about such bait and switch behavior.
My impression is that Americans are having a hard time coping with the fact that Europe and Japan aren't bombed out husks anymore, China has developed, and India is slowly getting there too. That's why over the decades, Americans have slowly gone through hating every one of them.
Thus, the socialism hating capitalists seek strong isolationist market controls, as anything that doesn't have them winning must actually be unfair.
But that's exactly the idea. I don't know what "solving" a cheap labor problem even means.
H1-B is being used for cheap labor, let's use a reasonable yearly fee to put some pressure on that usage to make it less lucrative.
This may have an effect at the margins where the company is contractually or due to some rare product specific reason required to have the person be within the U.S. But the vast majority of H1Bs are working for major tech companies that have massive campuses all over the world.
As a body shop you can charge a higher rate and get bigger margins on an on-shore body.
I see your point about faangs and direct hires though. I suppose they must believe that something about being in the U.S. makes those people more productive or their output more valuable.
But people loathe common sense, so that wouldn't do. And it's not dramatic and aggressive enough for Trump.
Its supply and demand. If you think any of these changes will cause fewer than 85,000 H1-B applications, then that is a good reason to believe that these changes might negatively impact the United States as a migration destination. However, with that added context and framing, I hope you'll agree that it won't; there's still going to be a smaller, but growing, number of people applying for the H1-B every year.
Increasing the number of H1-B visas has very little support from both sides of the isle. The 65,000+20,000 number was set, if you can believe it, 35 years ago. There were one or two temporary increases, but since 2005 its stayed at that 85,000 number.
That isn't on the table right now. Its possible that it could be, as sometimes you need to have a problem before people will feel incentivized to solve it. On the other hand: We've had a serious medical care provider shortage since, like, the early 2000s; over 20 years of Bush (R), Obama (D), Trump (R), and Biden (D) to have solved this obvious problem; and no one has. Chesterton's Fence sometimes exists for a reason.
If we create an exception for doctors, what about ‘medical lab technicians’, ‘wastewater treatment professionals’ or ‘air traffic controller’? All these jobs faces shortage in US right now. If we leave it up to the executive branch at the time to determine exceptions, we will just end up in a situation in exceptions going to the industry with the ‘best’ lobbyist.
I am not in a position to decide a policy like this, but I have a wild idea. Why not lower the application fee for H1B (or make it free) or even make it super easy to apply. Right now, the companies that are willing to abuse the H1B system will do so because they know the higher the application fee, the less competition they have to get those 85,000 slots. If every doctor, speech therapist, medical lab technologist is applying for H1B, it would totally crowd out the H1B abusers and it might no longer be worth it for them to try to game the system. Just musing on ideas, not that I can implement any of these.
Before raising the fee to $100,000 this week, the "official" fees one would pay to apply for an H1-B were, effectively, $0. Employers would pay a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on their size. There might be some "unofficial" fees like lawyer and advisor fees to help with the process, but in essence: your "wild idea" was the status quo for 35 years.
At the end of the day, relying on temporary immigration programs to backstop critical job shortages isn't sustainable on the long-term. Its not fair to citizens, and its oftentimes not fair to the temporary immigrant either. The more efficient and feasible solution to these shortages is to incentivize citizens to enter these roles.
If one would purely go by the rules of the free market, the solution would indeed not be immigration, but either automating these jobs away, rationalizing them so you need fewer employees to handle the same workload or raise the compensations and non-payroll benefits to attract more (prospective) talent.
The problem is, it's one thing if you do that for air traffic controllers. Flights are too cheap anyway, making them a bit more expensive to pay for more ATC will also reduce demand which in turn would also have positive benefits on the environment (CO2) and airport residents (noise).
But for stuff like garbage disposal handlers, wastewater facility staff and other jobs on the high-ick, low-pay side of things? These are actually and literally vital for society to survive, but if prices were raised to reflect the fact that you need to pay people pretty huge sums of money to do these jobs? Barely anyone would remain to pay for these services.
In the end, immigration has been used by Western societies as a stopgap to avoid the inevitable conclusion that the wide masses by far do not earn enough money, and now that immigration is drying up - in the case of the US, from the political climate, in the case of Europe including the UK, many people from Eastern Europe going back to their home country during Covid and discovering life there has actually vastly improved over the last decades - the cracks are growing so large they can neither be hidden nor overlooked any more.
The perfect is the enemy of the good enough
So it isn't in fact good enough, it is pure evil
by giving H1B visas to doctors ?
A lot of us simply want the H1-B to green card conversion time to be 12 months to 24 months MAX and all the expense should be borne by the company.
That unblocks the pipeline and prevents the whole indentured servant depressing salaries problem. Any company that genuinely needs an H1-B will obviously hold onto the H1-B when it converts to a green card. Companies that are abusing the pipeline will be obvious as the green card holders will leave and the company will have to reapply for more H1-Bs.
I don't buy it. This is spectacularly easy enforcement. A company applying for H1-Bs over and over and over is going to stick out and should get its H1-Bs denied--regardless of whether it is selling them to wealthy foreign nationals or is running an IT sweatshop that people flee as soon as they can.
Any company that isn't abusing the H1-B process will be able to demonstrate all the green card holders that are still working for them.
In addition, if foreign nationals want to come to the US and pay taxes here, we should let them. The US was built on immigration from working-class people--wealthy foreign nationals are kind of a no-brainer.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”You understand that 10 US companies hired 50k H1-Bs in 2025, out of 85k visas? The second largest hirer is Tata Consulting Services, who then "resells" the H1-Bs to clients while taking a cut. It's already happening.
And even then, you can still create subsidiaries or stand-alone companies to avoid being seen as a "repeat customer".
> In addition, if foreign nationals want to come to the US and pay taxes here, we should let them. The US was built on immigration from working-class people--wealthy foreign nationals are kind of a no-brainer.
This is a democratic issue, the USA is not earthlings' free for all, but the land of the citizens of the USA.
Just as a country is not a sum of taxpayers, immigration is not always mutually beneficial. If young CS graduates can't find a job because entry-level offers are reserved for foreigners, they'll end up working in underqualified jobs and paying less taxes, on top of the human cost caused by this situation. Supply and demand laws exist, and the job market is not magically immune because Amazon decided that the skills of the 14k H1-Bs they hired this year couldn't be found on the local market.
Those "couple unlucky countries" make up ~80 percent of all H1B applications (India + China). Your comment makes it sound like this affects only a small set of H1B applicants.
But I think the reality about the H1-B program no one wants to state plainly is that its effectively a system of voluntary indentured servitude, and its important to all of the masters of the program that the visa holders accumulate as little power as possible.
The money generated should go towards grants for US citizens imo though, as it would shore up the "need" for foreign labor. As long as the economy is growing and there is demand it isn't a problem. If there's a legitimate need, then it should be worth the cost.
To those mentioning outsourcing will skyrocket, I doubt that as it's already widely used and there's a lot of additional friction without embedded staff/managers where the work is getting done, and even then.
With many companies having set up foreign R&D offices L1 is in many cases preferable alternative. There are about 75K of those visas issued per year. Increase of H1B fee without similar increase of L1 fee would probably create a pressure on L1.
Who is we?
An educated, young person doing useful work that comes to your country is a massive gift, and a debit to the country they have left.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/jobs-unemployment-rise-youn...
Would the country benefit if skilled young people started fleeing it? People that you've invested decades of labour and education into?
Surely, this would be great news for the ones who remained. Why shouldn't we pursue policies that result in just that?
---
If net emigration of that demographic wouldn't be a net benefit, why do you think the reverse is a net harm?
The strategy that you mention is however used, with success by countries that are either dictatorships (e.g Algeria) or that have too many men, due to archaic sexist traditions of aborting females (e.g India). Maybe you'd prefer that the USA become more like those two examples?
So, the point stands. If talented youth left the USA in significant numbers, would that be detrimental or beneficial to the USA? And you can feel either way about the answer there; however, you then can't have it different for talented youth leaving their own current home to bring their talent to the USA. Not in good faith anyway.
Is it the people living in the USA? The citizens? The State? The companies? The US stock market? A benefit for companies can be a big problem for citizens - environment, or privacy come easily to mind.
It is also context-dependent: is there a real unsatisfied need for skilled professionals in the sector that affects everyone in society (e.g in healthcare)?
Otherwise the added workers will just push down the wages for the other workers - but companies and investors may benefit, true. However, should a State policy be decided for the interest of companies against the citizens? Why is there even a need to vote then?
So yeah, oversimplifying a situation and then implying that if A is bad B should be true is sophistic, sorry. I could do the same, and ask if skilled immigration is good, why not remove quotas and let 3 million Indian ninja/x100 software engineers in per year.
If not, how much is the right quota? How do you define it? And you're back at the start.
Which seems weird to me as an American. All of our ancestors were immigrants, immigration is what made the US what it is. It feels like they want to turn the US into something completely unamerican.
The "country" is an amorphous - having the money to move out of your parents basement is not.
You could just as soon zoom out to the earth rather than fetishizing "the country", then it's zero sum.
Not really, no. That’s mostly propaganda that got pushed hard in the 60s - right around the time the wealth gap really started growing and hasn’t stopped ever since.
The only reasonable argument for any immigration is if it equally enriches all us citizens. Given the ever increasing wealth gap this is obviously not the case.
The alternative is: no immigration, focus on increasing native births by ensuring it’s easy to have a large family. Ensure our elites have a sense of “noblesse oblige” and are self sacrificing instead of chasing profit. Some minor level of immigration is fine (for the Werner von Braun types), but staffing companies that build iPhones and gambling websites is not a good use of our resources.
All of my immigrant friends mention they’ll return to their home country if things get bad here. This is my home country, and I want my country filled with people who are here because they see it as their home, not a business transaction. I have nowhere else to go.
Name any economic policy that will equally enrich all citizens. That seems like a ridiculous bar to meet.
Immigration obviously dates back far, far before the 1960s. What in the world leads you to believe that it’s responsible for the current (admittedly massive) inequalities we face?
It’s a symptom of the problem not the primary cause. Our real issue is elites that view us as cattle. Rulers that care about their people take a much more measured approach to immigration.
And yes, obviously pedantic equality is not achievable. I want more roads, trains, healthcare etc and less IPOs.
Maybe the "native births" bit is a trigger - but how was that actually ever wrong? Perhaps from consumer culture I guess - why go through the hassle of raising babies for 20 years until they become ripe consumer-taxpayers when you can just import them ready-made for free, or some such thinking.
Really illustrates how leftist the tech class is.
You can't both have a system that can kick people out on a whim with zero recourse AND expect those people to be fully devoted to being American before they actually become citizens. They have to avoid committing fully before them, and especially nowadays with the unnecessary cruelties of the current administration (the entire "fly back within 24 hours or pay a fee that we don't yet have a process for" thing)
Rich people started playing this on repeat while they crushed the standard of living via immigration and low interest rates
People want to live in the US, and earn US wages. H1B is just one vehicle for that.
Yes, H1-B is a dual intent visa that can be converted to a green card
The visa holder enters as a temporary worker but is not penalized for having an intent to immigrate permanently- (as opposed to a travel visa where you must prove permanent ties to another country)
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.
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.
What do you mean exactly by that. I do not follow...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some are legitimately highly skilled, but you also see jobs like:
https://www.jobs.now/jobs/164577823-lead-software-engineer
>>Develop and implement next generation Human Capital Management (HCM) software.
>>Requirements:
>>Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Informatics, Computer Engineering or related field
>>2 years experience in software development
>>Develop and implement HCM software solutions for global enterprise
>>Create applications on cloud platforms
>>Work with Golang and NodeJS
>>Participate in full product cycle from wireframes and database models to UI/UX development
>>Home telecommute available
>>Application Instructions: Send CV to: LS, EPI-USE America, Inc. 303 Perimeter Ctr N., Ste 300 Atlanta, GA 30346
When was the last time you had to post a CV to apply for a job? This blatantly designed to ensure no US person applies (and if anyone in the US is qualified and wants to apply to stop the visa abuse, please do).
33 more comments available on Hacker News
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.