With PERM (converting to a green card) they try to hide the job postings so that people will not apply so that they can get the green card approved. Some of the tricks include putting ads in the newspaper, using esoteric websites and other media such as radio instead of job boards where tech people actually look for jobs. Some Americans who have trouble finding jobs in the current market took on a side project of scraping newspaper ads and these job boards and created https://www.jobs.now/ which lists these jobs. If enough Americans that meet the minimum qualifications apply for a listed job it stops the green card process for that position, usually for 6 months before the sponsor may try again.
Also, there are a lot of stories about people getting O-1 visas via fake credential mills and research papers. Both can and are being gamed to get O-1's.
I still think that you mix up the "green card" and the "H1B visa".
The green card is a status of a permanent resident. A person legally living in the US for enough time (5 years or so) on a variety of visas can apply to get it. It costs significant money so an employer usually helps with that.
The H1B visa is a visa for a worker on a position for which a company fails to hire a worker in the US. That worker may become or not become a permanent US resident afterwards.
"The H1B visa is a visa for a worker on a position for which a company fails to hire a worker in the US."
The H1B visa application has no requirement to try to recruit US workers which makes it easier to game the system to pay the lowest wage possible.
Practically true - but that it’s not permitted to count experience gained while working on an H-1B when applying for a green card.
If an application for a green card is made for a person who’s currently in the USA on a H-1B visa, the person needs to qualify for it based on their qualifications and experience prior to whatever they’ve done in their current H-1B job.
There is no "5 year" requirement to get a green card. A company can even sponsor an employee from abroad (e.g. a satellite office) to get a green card and if approved they will be a permanent resident the moment they arrive in the USA.
Perhaps you are thinking of the five years of a green card needed to apply for citizenship?
Are they hiding jobs?
I haven't bothered to ever apply because to me it seemed obvious what is going on.
And this explains why I recently heard an ad on KNX radio for a tech job at a winery or brewery or something similar, which specified that applications would only be taken by mail.
It also had a massive list of responsibilities and a pay rate about half of what it should be.
Meta being sued by the DoL was supposed to stop ridiculous gaming of the process [0].
Still I think a points system would be better for America and the RAISE Act is looking better everyday [1].
[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/19/facebook-settles-claims-it-d...
No, this is a myth. Employers can sponsor H-1B visas for any "speciality occupation" regardless of whether a citizen is available to do the job or not. Legally there are no restrictions in place re: criteria. The only thing they are required to do is pay the prevailing wage. Tests for whether a citizen can do the job only come into play later when they are sponsoring a green card.
That said, whether software is high-skill or not is tangential to the point I'm making. Which is, H1-B is being used to depress wages and that reworking it shouldn't affect jobs that actually have few people that can do it because O-1 allows them to work that job.
Software development may seem simple for a lot of people here on HN, but trust me, I can do the electricians job easily, but an electrician won't be able to do my job. The regulatory environment which requires the "apprenticeship" is a totally different topic and doesn't inform anything on the skill required to do the job. Also, the electrician apprentice gets paid while learning on the job, the software developer in training doesn't.
1. I didn't claim that.
2. Yes, I did say it's "high consequence", but technically, comparing skill to skill, it's MUCH easier. I've done a ton of electrical work (along with plumbing) on our old home, there are a great set of safety rules to follow (and gear to use) before "touching the wrong wire".
Watch out. Soon AI can do your job easily, but it can't do an electrician's job.
do you really want an Amercian to lose a job to AI?? Also, why do you think I can't become an electrician after AI apparently "does my job" (or a plumber, I'm a better plumber than an electrician)
anyway, it's fine, you don't seem to have any idea about software development or how AI is actually going to help me more.
And the answer really is that they're both skilled. Neither is more or less unless you're getting much more specific about the roles.
I don't understand your "low wage" argument though, aren't there laws against it currently? they need to be paid at least the prevailing wage in their location/job level.
Quote
The statute creating the H-1B visa—which allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated workers as well as fashion models from abroad—contains language establishing a “prevailing wage.”4 This prevailing wage requirement is intended to protect the wages of U.S. workers in occupations requiring a college degree from adverse impacts and to prevent college-educated migrant workers from being underpaid and exploited. Corporate lobbyists and other H-1B proponents often cite this prevailing wage requirement in the H-1B law as evidence that H-1B workers cannot be paid less than U.S. workers. However, the reality is that the H-1B statute, regulations, and administrative guidance allow employers wide latitude in setting wage levels....
Although salary information that corresponds to requested positions on LCAs has been made available by DOL for a number of years through the Office of Foreign Labor Certification’s LCA disclosure data, until recently the prevailing wage levels selected by employers were not readily available. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for the first time reported what some had suspected and speculated about but to that point were not able to officially confirm: The vast majority of H-1B jobs were being certified by DOL at the two lowest wage levels.I mean if you follow the law sure.
It's easy to either just pay them below market or hire them at a lower title than the role actually requires.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/09/h1b_visa_fraud/
https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
So, it's more like saying "people speed and break traffic laws, therefore we're going to improve enforcement". Reasonable statement to me.
How many of these consulting companies just have the most awful, toxic company culture imaginable? I don't think that's a coincidence - that's a purposefully engineered cost saving strategy.
That said, consulting companies out of India are horrible, I don't think they'd be more productive even if they worked twice as hard.
O(1) data point: got offer from FAANG to join on the H-1B lottery, later moved to L-1 because the timing was not going to work well for the H-1B process and L-1 at least would give my partner the chance to also work, I later decided to not migrate and keep working from a different country.
Interesting. Citation?
You’re competing for this talent against every other company. If they’re good, you (and others) want to hire them.
Again: data set of one, at a high-paying company who generally has a strong ethical bent. There seem to be a lot of other experiences with the system.
https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025
You can technically be forced to hire only citizens by paying them really high salaries but you wouldn’t be able to have that many businesses.
If you don't account for the kickback schemes and terrible results.
The job market would disagree with you right now. I know so many US citizens who have 10+ years of work experience and work in modern stacks that have been out of a job for 6+ months yet companies are still hiring H-1B workers because its cheaper.
The tech industry like tech stack is broad.
For example, it's nigh impossible to hire an American citizen with professional CUDA or eBPF experience because almost anyone with those skills already has a job. If you have those skills YOU WILL land a job (not remote first though - that era's over).
And it's not like you can retrain a fullstack engineer to understand systems programming overnight - it takes years of experience and knowledge of computer and OS architecture.
And it's not like companies aren't paying top dollar for these skills - they are, but people with those skills simply don't exist in significant numbers in the US.
There's a reason a large portion of the cybersecurity industry shifted to Israel and India - the kinds of table stakes skills in systems development aren't heavily taught in the US anymore compared to 15 years ago, and the only universities where you might have a shot hiring someone with those skills are T10 programs where students can field multiple job offers.
That said, the proposed changes in the H1B program are good - it's easier for a startup or a professional company to sponsor an H1B now instead of dealing with unethical consultancies gumming up the works.
The H1B market is bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups. You want to optimize for the right hand but don't want to make it so hard that you don't end up incentivizing talented people from leaving and returning to India or China or Europe.
That said, I don't envision this having much impact on easing hiring - AI/ML in the hands of experienced devs is fairly powerful AND the economic conditions currently are incentivizing us to limit hiring to only those who are truly critical.
However, I am wholly opposed to the H-1B program as I've seen it used in reality, where those smart peers are used as below-market-rate slave labor who can't really complain about it without facing immediate deportation. I've personally worked with iOS app devs who were making less than I was while working many more hours per week, all because our asshole boss let them know that if they didn't like it, they had 60 days to find another visa sponsor or GTFO out the country and leave their homes and friends and partners behind.
They weren't coming here to invent quantum computers. They were writing phone apps. The sole reason said asshole boss hired them was because he knew he'd own them.
I firmly, adamantly believe there should be an extra 50% employer-borne tax on H-1B roles, making it so that it's possible but expensive to bring in new employees. It wouldn't stop people like those quantum computer scientists. The companies making those things would still hire them in a heartbeat if they couldn't find "local" talent. But it would stop the asshole boss from exploiting my friends to work them like rented mules while artificially suppressing salaries for everyone else.
The simplest solution is just to take salary into account. If someone is making $180k a year then they aren't "owned".
For me, I can hop ship, decide I don't like it, boomerang back or take some time off no worse for the wear. That level of autonomy doesn't exist when you've got 60 days to land a job or uproot the life you've been building. Salary is a minor part of the picture. If changing jobs is a gamble that might end in "leave the country," the employer gets a certain kind of "loyalty" that salary cannot buy.
I agree, but on the flip side: the point of applying for an H1-B visa is to come and work for a company in a specialised field. If you're trying to use it to get yourself permanently into a country, then that's the wrong visa type to apply for. I've worked overseas on a visa, and it was stressful for this reason, but I was under no illusions about that when I applied for it.
What other mechanisms are there to move to a country that has a quality of life you seek, and work for a company that you feel excited about? Because that's most of the motivation from the people (like me) that lived in an under-developed country, are qualified, and wanted to work on the top of the industry.
You work a bit out of college, some day you get an invite to an interview from a FAANG, you take the interview, and next thing you know you're moving to another country, working for a great salary, and in a huge company. You do life. You meet people, maybe a partner, maybe get married, maybe have a kid (after all, life doesn't stop). All this while on a temporary status with no easy way to progress out of it other than via time.
I have felt this pressure of not wanting to switch jobs and/or having to be extra careful in order to not put myself at risk of losing it. Specially with the current state of the industry. It has put me (and still does) at a disadvantage with my local peers. I am not saying this is necessarily good or bad, but it is a reality. The 'visa choice' is fictional, and not the most relevant part of the process.
I know these abuses happen, no system is perfect. But I feel the bias in the US against H-1Bs from random citizens not from employers. And the government today has quite strong bias against immigrants.
About 20% of H1B visas go to indian outsourcing firms. You know the culprits here. Are you really going to argue that these firms are not abusing the system and underpaying employees?
That's abusing the system, but I dunno, better than abusing the employees that I hear about... Or the straight up fraud where immigrants were paying to get hired on h-1b for fake jobs, or the abuse where job shops would submit 3x the applications for the number of positions they actually had, etc.
Since H1B has a 6 year hard time limit.
Everyone has their own perspective. Your friend who referred to as “rented mules” probably will question you as a friend because you actually want them to be out of this country lol. Just be real, we don’t want H1B slaves who set the bar so high for work ethics. Just stop fake being nice as if you care about their well being. They chose to stay in the US after college knowing the expectation. You are shutting down the door for those who really could of developed into great tech talents.
H1B is not so bad. Many IT people I know came to the US by L1 visa. That is a true modern slavery! Don't like the work? Laid off? Go home, no other options.
On the topic of H1B’s specifically, I wish the minimum salary kept pace with inflation, and that overall our immigration system didn’t kick out mentally capable and educated people after finishing school or between employers. Intellectual fitness and those with the support system to flourish improve our society.
H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role so somebody comes into the US on a visa to fill that slot.
O-1 [1] is a for when somebody non-American has a lot of skill and is allowed to immigrate into the US to perform it.
I still think H-1B visas should require some kind of additional fee proportional to training an American to fill that role. Afaik, most of the H-1B visas are just abuse where you hire somebody at a low wage than you'd need to for an otherwise legal resident so there needs to be some kind of higher opportunity cost to the company.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...