If the US loses its massive lead in the network effects of a large labor pool, the amount of work in the US will shrink, both by moving to other countries and less overall innovation.
This is not a beneficial move for most software engineers.
How many people on here can truly say that they were considering between two different countries. That doesn’t happen at scale.
There is a global competition for coming to Western Europe, Canada, and the US
During last century, USA has been the most benefited from that kind of immigration.
Personally I think that this is a very short sighted decision by USA administration. But overall, I think that this will benefit the rest of the world. Maybe in a few years even USA will start exporting their best minds abroad!
This is inaccurate. The U.S. had a highly restrictionist immigration system from 1921-1965. The foreign born population dropped from almost 15% to under 5% by 1970.
During that time, the U.S. had a small number of highly skilled immigrants, such as German scientists fleeing the Nazi regime. You’re talking about a very small number of truly exceptional people. A $100k/year fee is not going to shut down this kind of immigration.
Source: DHS Yearbook, https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2019/table1...
We have been around 1 million per year for decades. If we still had that policy, adjusted for population you’re talking about cutting legal immigration by one-third to one-half.
And that’s not counting a large increase in “gray market” legal immigration (TPS, asylum, etc.)
As someone who lived in all three geographies and interacted with immigrants who lived in there, here is my raw take:-
Western Europe:- Love it and people are so nice but they are also (I am sorry to say) racist. Proof:- How many immigrant CEO's do you see from companies based in Western Europe? The top 4 largest tech companies in the US have two indian CEO's for more than 10 years now.
Canada:- Super nice and immigrant friendly more than the US, but the size of the country (approx 10% of the US) doesn't have the financial/economic/social infrastructure that is needed to support a large number of immigrants. Also tech salaries are miserable compared to the US
US:- For all its faults, US is truly the only country where immigrants looking for a better future can immigrate and assimilate into. For how long this lasts remains to be seen but I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.
/me
I started in Slovenia, considered London, actually got an offer in Canada, but ultimately chose San Francisco. Figured that if I’m going to the trouble of moving abroad, I might as well go to the center of the industry.
Got lots of friends who chose various EU companies based on desired lifestyle/work/partner balance. You have lots of options as a good engineer. Especially before the last 3 years of market shenanigans.
Edit: Very cool and good for you but it doesn’t sound like those places competed for you. You out-competed others to go there.
The leaders/parties supporting immigration in those countries are ambivalent to receiving high skill immigrants or refugees.
The US, UK, and Canada all have special provisions in their immigration programs aimed at attracting and prioritizing highly-skilled workers.
Both the UK [1] and Canada [2] both use a points-based ranking system that prioritizes highly-skilled immigrants. The UK system is clear in its goals:
> introduce an Immigration Bill to bring in a firm and fair points-based system that will attract the high-skilled workers we need to contribute to our economy, our communities and our public services.
And while the US H1-B program is lottery-based, 20,000 slots are reserved for people who hold a master's degree from a U.S. institution. Proposals have also been made recently to change to a points-based system. [3]
> They built themselves into places that high skill immigrants seek, but that is more of a side effect than a competition
Wherever there is choice, there is competition. 55% of billion dollar startups in the US have immigrant founders, employing an average of 1,200 employees each [4]. If these people don't come to the US and start companies, the US will feel the effects - even if they were just "side effects".
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uks-points-ba...
[2] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act
[4] https://www.fosterglobal.com/blog/55-of-americas-billion-dol...
This choosiness is actually a sign that immigrants are competing to enter those countries. The points based system is (in theory) a way to identify the ones we want.
That said, illegals and “refugees” outnumber H1Bs, further reinforcing that Western countries don’t care about global talent.
It goes both ways. A more streamlined application process and straightforward path to permanent residency is a draw to would-be immigrants who qualify.
I won't discuss illegal immigration or asylum here as those exist for different reasons, other than to say that it's a logical fallacy to assume that just because A is bigger than B, that a country doesn't care about B.
I relocated to Amsterdam from India. When I got to know about the salaries my peers were making in the same company but in the US I felt like a fool. Being a manager I had access to compensation data so yeah it was hard to not feel being done by.
Yes.
Up and left -> You’re an immigrant
Down and right -> You’re an expat
Sometimes companies compete for you sometimes you compete for them
Hi!
I know I'm just a datum, but I gotta represent myself.
The slate of policy choices in the US is removing it from that list of countries, and will strengthen those countries' labor forces.
Right now SV salaries command a huge premium, because all of SV is predicated on increasing productivity, increasing the economic pie, and rewarding those who do so with a fraction of that gain in GDP.
Treating SV labor like plumbing or construction labor fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics and the creation of wealth.
SV labor is largely not different than a skilled trade, except at the higher levels.
That's where the massive salaries come from, that massive wealth creation. It's not just taking larger chunks of a fixed size pie.
Sure some electrical capacity goes to non-productive uses, but much of it is also spent doing things like enabling widespread computer usage.
SV labor is downstream of skilled trades.
Mmmh...How about four countries?US,UK,Canada &South Africa.
As a student,though
By US you mean corporate America? What if they maintain that massive lead on the backs of the US citizens?
The exploitation of the US worker needs to end, if the company does not have 100K to bring in global talent then that company cannot "massively lead" in any domain and the "talent" is neither global nor talented.
I think you underestimate the capabilities of the American worker, after all, they have created the circumstances in which your company surrounds itself and succeeds.
If your job cannot exist without an endless stream of underpaid, overworked Third word country immigrants then you don't have a job, you have a mill.
"the exploitation of American worker" ? American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.
2) Tell that to the 100K+ unemployed Americans in the IT space.
> American workers have one of the richest standards of living in the world.
What are you even talking about? Being able to hold more tokens that can buyback the products of the asset class does not make for a "rich standard of living".
Having to run gofundme's for medical care is not "rich standard of living". Them trembling on every unscheduled meeting with their boss is not "rich standard of living"
The American workers' existence is sad.
Why would they intervene with outsourcing the jobs instead of H1Bs? And more importantly, how?
Of course the visa is a privilege and there are tons of abuses associated with it. There are methodical ways of going about it and actually fixing the problem. Slapping a $100k fee with unclear language and no heads-up uproots while uprooting lives of so many people have lived in the country for years if not decades, maintained legal status, and paid taxes including Social Security and Medicare is "a smart move" according to the top comment.
But we all know what the real problem is. If majority of the H-1B visa holders had the right skin color, they would be welcome with open arms regardless of any abuse of the system. Just like how South African refugees are welcome while other those from the "wrong" kind of country are not.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." ― Lyndon B. Johnson
“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family. The opinion advanced in the Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived, or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.” — Alexander Hamilton
maybe it was true before the US became the global propagandist, but almost everyone on earth is a native born american now.
Even the groups who superficially assimilate into the progressive culture embraced by Yankees do so as subordinates, not peers. The Yankee will condemn his own ancestors and discriminate against people who look like him. Most immigrants are happy to be the objects of that pity, but do not behave in the identical manner. They respect their own ancestors and retain their own ethnic attachments.
Virtually everything Hamilton worried about applies to contemporary immigrants to a T.
You wanna say that about the Irish and the Polish of a century ago, too? lol
“The rainbow theorists argue that the machine was a functional body (Merton 1968) that pursued political incorporation of many ethnic groups in the political party. In return for loyalty to the political party, machines delivered a variety of social services to ethnic immigrants, in addition to jobs, friendship, and opportunities for social and economic advancement. The rainbow coalition of mostly white-ethnic groups was sustained through a virtually endless supply of ‘municipal gold’ (Erie 1988) that the machines controlled. This exchange system seemingly guaranteed ethnic loyalty to the machine.”
The remainder of the article shows how Irish domination left the Polish with the short end of the stick: “Through this study we try to show that Polish Americans in Chicago were on the short end of the exchange arrangements in the machine, receiving few rewards, especially as their independence from the Democratic party expanded during the Daley era.” The Poles were punished
This is basically Pakistan, except instead of clans it’s immigrant groups voting for their own co-ethnics and jockeying for advantage. It’s a far cry from the political debates of the founding era, which were based on principles and political theory, not ethnic tribalism.
In terms of what we could do now, we should stop illegal immigration and asylum entirely. We should also end family reunification. And skilled immigration should be spread out around the country (there are top universities everywhere). All that would prevent the development of ethnic enclaves, and over time lead to the weakening of disparate ethnic identities. That’s what happened during the immigration restriction from 1924-1965, when the foreign born population share dropped by 2/3, and the salience of ethnic identity among European Americans was greatly reduced.
Also, the founders were not British. Most of them were second and third generation immigrants.
In addition, I don't think you realize how funny this statement is:
> Ethnic politics had little opportunity to arise in these communities, which were individually mono cultural
I wonder if you can spot the massive gaping hole in this logic. I doubt it.
Indeed, most of the founding fathers were British.
150 years after their inception, assimilation of ethnic whites has largely ended those political machines. But the effects are cumulative. Chicago still lives with the consequences of the machine politics of the Cermak to Daley era. And ethnic politics still plays a large role in Chicago between whites, hispanics, and black people: https://www.hispanicfederation.org/news/new-poll-shows-dead-... (“One interesting finding is that one-third of Latinos think Vallas may be Latino.”).
It comes off a little bit like it would if you claimed that immigration brings with it organized crime, because La Cosa Nostra was dominated by Italians. But LCN is not in fact the story of Italians in America, and wasn't replicated by other ethnic blocs.
People share affinities and affinities structure interactions, and naturally some of those structural affinities are going to be ethnic. But if they weren't ethnic, they'd be religious, or political, or economic, which is what US history actually demonstrates.
If you're going to make the case that any of this matters in Chicago politics, though: cite the immigrant bloc that controls and distorts Chicago politics. Which ones are the illegitimate aldermen? I don't like most Chicago alderpeople, so you're not going to hurt my feelings.
Whether or not tribalism exists among white ethnics today is besides the point. Corruption is self-perpetuating. The real question is what Chicago would look like today if it had never experienced mass immigration, starting with the Irish. I strongly suspect it would be a better governed city today, like Toronto before the recent mass immigration.
There is a single well-governed city in the world that has experienced mass immigration from multiple ethnic groups, and that’s Singapore. And that’s got an authoritarian, top-down government, and seems to be engaged in selective immigration to maintain a stable ethnic composition and Chinese supermajority.
> But LCN is not in fact the story of Italians in America, and wasn't replicated by other ethnic blocs.
There’s two different things. Mass immigration alone gives rise to ethnic, religious, and cultural conflict, which undermines democracy. Then sometimes you import specific problems from specific places. Organized crime is a bigger problem in Italy even today than in England or Scandinavia. And it was a definitive part of the story of Italians in America. It took decades to eradicate that problem.
Now we're talking about Singapore for some reason. Is that a concession that you can't identify the aldermen who are illegitimated by their immigrant support?
The obvious solution of "stop being a racist douchebag so minorities can actually feel secure enough to be able to act on other priorities" being of course completely off the table as the speaker views such behavior as a birthright and sacrament. It does happen. Now voters of Irish descent take 'is an Irish Catholic' as a nice to have at most instead of an essential.
But the same counterproductive behavior is doubled down upon as their sacred sacrament of racist douchebaggery shall not be denied. Look at how a very religiously conservative bloc, Muslims ended up shifting to the left by necessity from the racism they encountered post war on terror.
Urban-environments in the hyper-individualist age have no culture (no, drinking and watching "football" is not culture). Even Church-attendance is so low that these people you hate are buying up these abandoned buildings to create communities.
What you're complaining is that "they" have a culture, while you don't. I guess it's semi-understandable if it results in mob-violence and ganging-up, but I haven't seen this happen outside some Islamic-communities (even there, I think it's typ. only the S. Asian ones).
I have a culture! I grew up in Virginia, but my parents are Bangladeshi, and this describes me quite accurately: https://commisceo-global.com/articles/cultural-differences-w....
You racists really want all the "benefits" of racism without actually accepting the label. Why is that?
You admitted that there were tons of abuse. This gets back to the law’s original intent. This is the best fix that corporations “pay up” for.
It’s just politics. You have CS grads facing employment headwinds against AI, H1B, and high interest rates. They aren’t going to vote for the incumbents if they’re unemployed. Now they’re going to have a $100k discount to hire them instead of from a WITCH company. FAANG will still hire H-1Bs.
It's not a "card", it's reality. And you make it sound like there is something wrong with being emotional.
It's neither politics nor getting back to the law's original intent. It is red meat for wolves like you and others in this thread.
20K H1Bs with $30K fee
20K H1Bs with $60K fee
20K H1Bs with $100K fee
unlimited H1Bs with $200K
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer
... and is done for these employers already (though not to the level that is being proposed)
Public Law 114-113 (December 2015 to September 2025) : additional fee of $4000
Public Law 114–113, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, imposed a fee of $4,000 on H-1B petitions and $4,500 on L-1A and L-1B petitions. The additional H-1B fees would apply to all petitions postmarked on or after December 18, 2015, and until September 30, 2025.The opportunity created in the US is due to the concentration of talent, high productivity, and extensive networks of people creating innovation that inflated the pie even larger.
Go ahead and move to any of those countries from the US, it's prettt easy, because everybody wants to be like the US! The only possibly better passport was a Canadian one!
Something deeply sick has infected the US when we no longer recognize the source of the wealth of our nation. Nobody could touch us. At least until we started to intentionally make ourselves poorer.
fake news
The EO expires in 12 months, so, yes, it's short-term.
Maybe in a year the administration will rethink things. Maybe sooner.
There are big issues with the h1b, particularly how strongly tied to the employer the employee is and how few of these we give away. But this basically closes the door for hiring foreign talent to anyone but BigCo.
It is a sad shotgun shell on the right foot on a long streak of the US feet shooting it's way out of relevance.
> the US wins wins when people move to the US, especially young, skilled people.
I personally lean towards this being true, but it is a claim that needs to be demonstrated comprehensively for your argument to hold water. It is not trivially true.
But me personally, I advocate many fewer student visas.
Again, these are the most talented, most affluent minds that China has to offer. Sure, let’s have them work for the CCP rather than keeping them in the west.
2) The O1 visa is open to “the most talented minds” so why couldn’t they get that.
3) They were always working for the CCP.
As for #1, who is 'we'?
-You're a Chinese national in the US on a work visa or student visa
-CCP asks you to do something
What do you do?
- You're an American running a business in the US (or somewhere else).
- Trump (or some TLA) demands that you do something, holding a threat over you.
What do you do? Are all Americans actually pawns of MAGA, or the spook agencies? How should the world respond to this implication?
If these people have not defrauded the US then they would not know what to do with a work visa as they'd be hurrying back home as soon as they received their diploma, pulled by those strong ties and the desire to finally put the education to use at home.
It is your comment in fact that decided to assume I missed the point, while assuming something that’s almost certainly not easy to assume.
What someone's labor is worth is up to the market to decide. Also those $100k are taxed out of the employer and employee's value.
On the benefits of people moving to the US: it's been widely studied and it's basic economics, immigrants bring both supply and demand, so the size of the economy grows and so the opportunities to current residents.
Take the extreme: when people leave a country or city the economy there collapses, see Detroit or the increasingly old and depopulating European countries.
Or take the extreme on who comes: fiscal studies show that even low skilled immigrants are net positive fiscally. Only very old and unskilled immigrants are a fiscal burden.
Finally, thinking that we can capture the world's economy in a bottle and live lavishly without competition is delusional. If we stop letting people build here, they will build elsewhere and without us. We are increasingly less relevant.
Imagine spending 25 years raising, educating, feeding, and clothing a person, investing over a million dollars of money and labour in them, and then they just pack their bags and leave.
Educated, skilled, young immigrants are a colossal gift to the host country, and a crippling debit on the welfare and prosperity of the country they have left.
---
Anyone who has ever given it more than thirty seconds of thought knows that countries become wealthy when people living in them work - and make stuff. So what do you do to improve a country's prosperity?
Obviously, in backwards-logic, you start raising barriers to people who want to do useful work in it.
(Because dealing with the systemic issues that have resulted in the country becoming prosperous not being correlated with the plurality of people in it not becoming prosperous would upset wealthy people who don't actually build anything.)
I'm by no means xenophobic. Bring in all the immigrants you want. But I can't agree that H1Bs are working as designed and pull in labor that doesn't otherwise already exist in the US.
The logic from this administration and it’s supporters is opposite of Benjamin Franklin. Rather than thinking that it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer. They think it is better a hundred guilty persons be punished than one innocent person’s suffering. We have seen this from the South Korea detainees debacle and here too.
There is fraud in H1B system. People do take advantage of it. People do suffer from ghost jobs. But the question at the heart of the matter is what is the basis for a flat 100k fee? Because lots of numbers from this administration seem to be pulled out from thin air. There are reasons fines are set low in comparison to a company revenue but POTUS doesn’t seem to know.
Also, I don't know how many h1bs have you worked with. I have worked with many (hundreds), and it's the same spectrum of talent you'd find anywhere. This is probably not the intent of h1b, but banning a set of countries is not the solution. Changing the criteria is.
So many places were under the yolk of the same historical forces and managed to pull themselves together - India is rather unique in its inability to do so.
In that case, better to rephrase to "US should close borders for Indians (and China?) workers and companies". Why sugercoat it?
Maybe this 100k thing will fix it and maybe this wont. My main complain with this administration is always the chaos and impulsiveness which doesn't bring much confidence that they are actually capable of actually fixing the problem, as it always doesn't seem well thought through or executed. More like headlines to get some cheering from MAGA crowd.
I think it could also be that they don't want to fix any problems, but they do want the chaos and media attention that provides catharsis to the voting base.
Moreover, they openly brag about it. My wife's brings stories from her hair stylist that's very chatty about the ways they literally move their family from India to US and Canada. People fake marriages, divorces, report abuse etc etc. I'm still not sure if it's all true, but the very fact she brags about it is astounding.
You felt it appropriate to jump on your little throne and pass judgement on large groups of people, but cried ad-hominem when I slightly criticized you. Sensitive much?
Sure. But we are arguing about two separate things here. I am pro-immigration. But I am also against using immigrant primarily to depress wages.
Does it suck that billions of people were born into lesser global economic circumstances? Absolutely. Does that mean we should allow corporations to exploit labor (both imported and citizens who have to compete against that imported labor) at the disadvantage of domestic citizens? No. This is workers vs capital, not immigrants vs citizens.
The US as a feature of it geography and population (Japan, UK and the Philippines) can choose isolationism as a policy. But the rest don't have it as an option due to direct contact to neighbors or economics too small to sustain. Most of the world will not follow the on-shoring path, because they cannot.
https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
https://www.columbiathreadneedleus.com/institutional/insight...
Old and still accessible beats inaccessible. BTW the source of the USAs demographic resistance to aging has been the sheer fact it was that immigration melting pot of bringing in young talent to offset its local aging population. A few decades of this path and the US can be just as dismissed as Japan who have taken this path decades in advance.
India’s total fertility rate is already 1.9, below 2.1 replacement rate. Its demographic dividend (and any potential capital investment opportunities) is already on borrowed time. So capital would rotate and reallocate there, while there is still time, regardless.
https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/dont-panic-over-falli...
Per exhibit 5 of your first link: The US still to be as bad as Europe and Japan you disparage as "old" and that is based on 2024 analyses. A few more years of these events if sustained will drop that further.
And per Exhibit 1 of that same link, sure India will be at 1.9. And the US was at 1.6 two years ago, which is worse.
https://www.science.org/content/article/population-tipping-p...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/15/5-facts-a...
Most of the world will be below fertility replacement rate by 2030. This is important, because the faster fertility rates decline, the faster the light cone of capital returns into the future shrinks (people = profits = returns).
So, to tie this all together: for the reasons I’ve laid out in this subthread (with citations), I’m not too concerned about the need to cater to the demands of capital. It needs returns more than humans need it considering population growth is almost over, and it will continue to slowly exhaust investment opportunities as the global demographics transition continues.
the US is no longer the clear destination for the best and brightest
Mohamed "John" Atalla, raised in Egypt, and Dawon Kahng from Korea, who together invented the MOSFET transistor, which underpins modern electronics and computing. Both immigrated to the United States for graduate engineering education and made their breakthrough at Bell Labs in 1959.
Yann LeCun, born and raised in France, immigrated to the U.S. in 1988 to work at AT&T Bell Labs, where he became head of image processing research and contributed significantly to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born inventor of the telephone, was a founder and major figure in the creation of the Bell Telephone Company; AT&T, created by American Bell in 1885, later established Bell Labs.
But let's consider one of the biggest innovations of recent times: Artificial Intelligence (transformers/LLMs specifically). Where was it invented? In America. Who invented it? Let's take a look. The seminal research paper that kicked off this revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. So only 25% US-born.
Have you watched OpenAI's demos and how many of their researchers are Asian? Would you prefer for them to remain in Asia and contribute to DeepSeek instead?
Looking at it solely from a perspective of competition between labor glosses over the fact that insufficient labor is also bad because it keeps companies from growing and hiring more people.
So sure, while the fewer jobs that they can fill could have higher wages (not a given, because lack of labor can stunt or kill companies) there could be much fewer people employed overall, which is clearly bad overall.
Of course, that assumes there is enough room for companies to grow. There are strong indications (e.g. the various labor and unemployment surveys) that this is the case in the US. In fact, there is a credible theory that the reason the US managed the inflation crisis so well was due to the immigration crisis.
I elaborated more here (along with a couple of relevant empirical studies about how H1B actually impacted employment and wages of native workers): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308311
Every h1b role I see posted at my bank pays more than I make so I don't get the lower paid comments
Better instead to look at larger scale studies out there, including the ones I mentioned in the comment I linked. The results are much more nuanced, but generally they find negligible or mildly positive impact on native workers, suggesting they are largely orthogonal to foreign workers.
The point is that the dynamics are more nuanced than simple supply vs demand.
The economy kind of sucks right now but it ain't H1B visa holders that are the problem.
But what I can say adds on to the list of impulsive decision by administration led by a senile/racist president. Making a rule is one thing, but how you put it out there with reasonable clarity and information is another. There is currently lot of confusion and panic among H1Bs people who have planned vacation and what not.
In all these discussions people forget that there are actual humans who are on these VISA and many are not being "underpaid" or taking american jobs (not that its ok to dehumanize them as well ... at the end of the day its the companies that are abusing it).
And supposedly a lot of his power grab moves are being run by Stephen Miller: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/step...
If there are abuses, then let’s fix them. But this is too heavy handed, and may have an impact on US competitiveness for generations to come.
Is it really? Given the current salaries for AI talent ( or whatever future most desired skill sets are ), 100k seems like a decent enough spot to do the following:
- keep the program limited to what it was intended to do ( bring in the best people in, keep US competitive -- on tech, not on low wages ) - keep populace in a state, where they don't see a reason for a leadership change
Unless, of course, that is not what the program is used for ( and anecdotally, that take does not seem that far fetched ).
So my overall response is: good. Frankly, this made Trump's election worth it.
So - it's less heavy-handed than I thought. Given recent layoffs and the current state of the job market, I could maybe even be convinced that it's a good thing in the short term.
I do still have concerns about US comptetiveness in the longer term though if we incentive companies to hire in other countries vs bringing talent to the US.
The US competitive advantage is built on us being a destination for the best and brightest. Between this and the crackdown foreign students at US Universities why would the anyone want to come here?
The misuse of H1Bs is a small problem compared to the value it provides.
I assume that's because the wages are too low, since you have already described your skill level as merely above average. Unless I'm significantly misunderstanding something, Americans would be better off if your company had to pay higher wages, even if the company ended up shutting down as a result.
We pay taxes, we compete for limited schools and jobs, yet far more people want to come here than leave. Americans have become a lot less wealthy the last 40 years relatively thanks to stagnant wages and skyrocketing prices.
The last thing we need is an unlimited supply of competition that only moves in one direction. Average H1B salary is like 60k, rich companies like MS are employing thousands of IT workers. These are jobs that anyone here could do with a 1-2 year online technical degree.
The potentially sad thing/abuse that might come out of this is that employers will keep even higher margins from the H1 person and make them pay back that money faster. Even through some shady deal back in their home country.
The rich get richer.
The policy topic is irrelevant. This is not normal reform. Looking from the outside, the United States is clearly democratically backsliding and is imposing decree upon decree of emergency measures, without a functioning parliament, with a sand-in-wheels judiciary, along with an enormous cult of personality, without any empathy towards the victims of sudden policy changes and black-bag jobs.
this is a change in the direction of significantly reducing hiring of foreign workers by American companies, which is bad for everyone. It's bad for American companies, because it will reduce their growth. It's bad for American workers because when our companies don't grow, neither does our economy and that hurts Americans. So it's a change, but it's a dumb change.
Changing the statute requires Congress to act.
Do you personally know any H-1B visa holders? I can only assume that by your comment that you do not. The ones who play by the system have their entire livelihood and home held over their head while under an H-1B visa.
Punish the companies and staffing firms abusing the H-1B visas instead of creating a blanket, anti-immigration policy that will only bolster those abusing the H1-B visa, because those already abusing are the ones who have the funds to pay this fee. Companies who do things legitimately will not be able to easily absorb this fee.
I will lose friends and colleagues because of this imposed fee. This will kick out all the good people we actually want working in this country. This will further reduce good people wanting to come to this country.
The intent is obvious, but the foresight into potential outcomes is shortsighted.
Labor is expensive, more competition will rise overseas, as it will become more expensive to operate.
It also crushes the opportunities of a gigantic number of individuals who are here today who had a plan in place to exist in this ecosystem. Additionally the institutions that supported them will also be hurt. Although, they might have been aware of the writing on the wall over the past year.
H1B is ripe with abuse - this article by Bloomberg says that half of all H1-B visas are used by Indian staffing firms that pay significantly lower than the US laborers they are replacing:
- https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c...