Is it? $100k per hire isn't much of a cost to pay for large companies. Smaller companies may -- may -- end up having some trouble with this, but consider that $100k often amounts to less than a yearly base salary (and will pretty much always be less than a year of total comp/total employee cost), not to mention the costs of legal staff that they're already paying to deal with this stuff.
What this may do is cause some of the "body shop" consultancies to drop some of their "low end" business, so they'll focus more on targeting positions with higher salaries. That's... probably a good thing.
And yeah, we may see some higher rates of offshoring, but I don't think that will be significant. And I'm not even really convinced: offshoring is already possible, and in strict dollar terms is already cheaper than going through the H-1B process to bring someone to the US. If companies preferred offshoring, they'd be doing it; clearly the already-higher-cost H-1B program is still their preference.
I agree that this isn't going to fix the H-1B visa system, and is not a reform or even a particularly positive step toward a reform, but I think you're overestimating the negative impact. I really don't think this will change things much at all.
That's almost as much as the media H1B salary. It's a huge cost overhead. I don't understand how you can be dismissive of a number almost as high as hiring another engineer.
Did you drop out of school before they taught multiplication?
It is $100k per hire per year.
https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d3969...
Really? 100k on top of a salary per year? Why would anyone do that?
I’m honestly tired of hearing the argument “if we do X then business will move to another state or out of US”.
Good riddance to the companies that flee from jurisdictions enforcing workers rights, don’t allow exploitation, etc.
The most important thing is protecting people, not fearing the cries of money-making machines.
California could introduce a million dollar minimum wage for software engineers, ban electricity on Thursdays, raise corporate taxes to 60% and still probably have more new unicorns founded in the subsequent year than Europe.
L1 has no PWD, no min wage requirements (beyond min wage law in US) and is completely uncapped.
Is it?
Some AI recruitments have seen 9-figure contracts. $100K is actually a surprisingly well-considered number and would still see the intake of legitimate talents, obviously contingent on the specific details. Indeed, those people wouldn't have to compete with masses of consultant trash and the whole lottery system could be done away with.
$100K actually seems perfectly coherent with forcing the program to winnow down to actual talents. People truly good enough to get the employer to pony up $100K to pull them in -- presuming there isn't some kickback fraud happening -- will truly be the best of the best.
> The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in
Paradoxically the #1 reason H1B employers bring in H1Bs is to bridge offshoring work. Pull in a dozen Indians and they're your bridge to the big Indian office, which is precisely why Infosys, Tata et al are such H1B users.
These are crazy outliers who would go through a different visa path anyway. US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures. Weirdly O1 visa holder spouses will get an O3 which doesn't allow them to work, making it worse than the H1B/H4 visa for some set of people. (H4s allow spouses to work)
They are. And in the truly talented spaces there are many at all of the ranges in between.
> US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures
$100k for three to six years seems entirely reasonable if it's really such a critical need.
So the one year seems to be the trial policy of the $100K, but it sounds like it's a single payment per visa, then normal visa policy comes into play.
Yes, and there are plenty of US citizens to fill these roles.
Does this utopia come with four-day weekends?
Countries become wealthy because people in them work and make stuff. It's incredible to see people actively advocating for making their country poorer. "No, no, we have too many people working..."
If you just need a normal worker, there are plenty of CS grads and unemployed SWEs you can hire in the US right now. If you need a specialized foreign worker because he or she is not available in the US, then chances are you are going to pay a premium anyway; that's the point.
And what stops those people, best of the best, working somewhere else, with much better living standard(EU) ?
In the past, it's because of salary, but now, the 100k/year will either make company to lower their package, or try to extract much more from the employee.
There's literally millions of talented Americans out of work in the tech industry right now while companies continue to hire H1B.
The companies post impossible requirement job ads in obscure locations..to get around the requirements to hire Americans first.
That is, at most, less than half a million people in the field and the majority of those jobs aren't the ones looking for overseas hires anyway. If we take CompTIA's number of roughly 5M tech workers it's 140,000 people, not "literally millions."
If you have better numbers, please, let us know.
Says you. I work in Lake Wobegon.
I think there are certainly abuses of the system, but we should be focusing on stamping out that abuse, not just generally "slowing it down". A $100k price tag is not going to affect abuse all that much; yes, it will make it less profitable, but probably not to the point where it will fix anything.
As a US-born citizen working in the US, I would rather work with a smart, motivated person from another country than a mediocre person from the US. The problem is that there are a lot of non-exceptional people being brought in on these visas, so let's focus on stopping that as much as we can. And while there are plenty of exceptional people who are US citizens, there are also many more who are mediocre or worse; we should be importing talent in order to raise that average.
And by the way, what reality do we live in that your local megacorp can decide to radically alter your population demographic and people support the megacorps ability to do that? There was no vote for the existing inhabitants about whether they wanted to take the trade off, the decision was made for them by businessmen. It’s pretty weird when you think about it.
What at the end matters if if the immigrants are law abiding and contribute to the local economy. Indians hardly show up in any crime statistics and make up generally as part of high earning group of immigrants.
Suddenly every immigrant has to be this pristine model minority which has never been the case. That's why I gave those examples. People will find ways to target immigrants no matter what. This kind of narrative I see popping up everywhere where people don't like immigrants. This isn't even US specific.
The goalpost keeps shifting from legal, law-abiding immigrants to they better assimilate, say nothing bad or we are going to create policies which actively target some group based on how a particular government feels about them.
I do separately think there is a risk that what worked reasonably well when combining all Europeans may not work when combining all humans. There is no historical example to look at to go “oh yeah that does work fine in the long run”. At a completely abstract level, what we have been doing since the ‘60s is an experiment (combine all humans) that is different from the one we started with on this continent (combine all Europeans). Just because the first one worked doesn’t mean the second one will, right? Even if we ran the first one again from scratch, maybe we got lucky the first time, for all we know maybe that scenario only succeeds 10% of the time. Should we be at all cautious here, or is this just terrible evil heresy talk?
I'm white as heck and have worked with plenty of first-generation Indians, and if you can't manage to make friends with at least one of them, it's a skill issue. The problem is you.
I have personally witnessed it myself. I have countless Indian friend who are candid with me. They are biased against whole communities. Blacks, Muslims, etc.
Indians hire Indians.
So are Americans. People are going to bring their biases. If you are serious about this, start vetting all immigrants about thier biases or racism. Are you saying Cubans or Latinos don't bring their own racism? Or other Europeans didn't do it? Why is this cherry-picking going on?
However I do see a ton, and I mean a ton of Indians and their hiring practices. Hence why I started my sentence with "I have personally witnessed it"
Such offshoring was possible before and after today.
Put another way, if all the H-1B jobs really can be offshored quickly and easily the way so many Indians and anti-Trump people here and elsewhere confidently predict, *that would have happened already*.
I suspect it didn't happen before because these companies were more focused on growth than efficiency.
That being said, thanks to AI parts of the big companies are again focused on growth at all cost.
No, this is just another tariff. If it costs $200k/yr to employee an H1B Software Engineer, and you expect them to work for you for 3 years, it raises the cost of employment from $200k/yr to $233k/yr. It'll discourage people from applying on the margins, which will bring the application rate down and acceptance rate up.
https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-trump-immigration-8d3969...
From defunding science, fining the biggest universities, defunding green energy, making hiring ambitious foreign workers economically unfeasible, replacing technocratic administrators with incompetent lackies with quite literally zero experience, imposing inordinate tariffs ... It's just win after win for the CCP.
Couldn't possibly be more generous
Even with tariffs, the initial effect was to increase purchases before the tariffs hit. Later the companies started eating from their margins instead of increasing prices right away. So it all resulted in increased economic activity and then increased tax payments into the federal government. However, because this is tax on consumption, it will eventually reduce business profits and personal wealth of the consumers. Meanwhile, Trump can claim that the economy is booming and he is collecting huge tax revenues without any negative effects.
Offshoring can, and ought to be, heavily tariffed.
If you are an American company (or a subsidiary thereof), and you have an employee resident in another country who does IT work, then you pay a tax to the US Treasury on that employee's salary. This tax can be varied depending on the country of the employee's residence.
Alternatively, if you pay OutsourceCo or whomever to provide you with IT services, then, depending on OutsourceCo's incorporated location, either you pay a tax on the services you buy from OutsourceCo, or OutsourceCo pays the tax on salaries just described.
All this can be avoided by hiring American workers, of whom there are many currently looking for work (mainly because of offshoring and immigration).
The US makes up about 4.5% of the global population and it seems silly to think that the FAANG companies and the new AI startups chasing behind them are going to restrict their hiring to this tiny slice of the global talent pool.
The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India, Europe and Canada, which is a net loss for the US.
I myself became a US citizen two years ago after being on a H1B. I was paid the same as all my peers and for all its shortcomings the program worked for me. It stunning to think this has been closed off, killing the main path for skilled immigration into the US.