They can, which is why many companies do the bare minimum malicious compliance to claim thet they attempted to hire Americans for these jobs. Things like ads in the local newspaper that 99% of qualified Americans will never see:

https://www.newsweek.com/h1b-job-ads-green-cards-targeted-im...

Those newspaper tech job ads have been going on for at least the last... 20 years. When you see those, the company already has the role filled, they just need a justification for the visa. "We tried to find a US worker but failed!" Which honestly may or may not be true, I think the ad is just standard procedure at this point.

Fraud and dishonesty is the SOP. Whole thing needs to be burned down.

If you are willing to discuss and argue with arguments, I can prove that the whole critique of H1B is nothing more than racism, hatred, and bigotry, from the people who are worst and least qualified to talk about the subject

Surely the malicious compliant job ads are proof positive that everything is above board.

job ads in local paper are requirement by the DOL.

it is a goodwill compliance, not malicious. You are again just being racist and uneducated about the subject and reasons for that requirement

We have very different ideas of what 'goodwill' looks like.

have you considered asking DOL (staffed by White Americans) and Congress (staffed by White Americans) why they have that requirement, instead of blaming foreigners ?

Why do you assume everyone who works for the government is white?

I'm not assuming, I am speaking from knowledge. Congress has always been mostly white, as do DOL leaders, this is especially true for current administration

So your position is that it's 'white people's fault'?

Even better, why do they think everyone in the government is working for the interests of Americans and not corporations?

the newspaper ad is not for H1B, it is for PERM process, which is different.

Second, the local newspaper requirement is created by the Dept of Labor itself, specifically to protect local workers in the area where Labor Market Test is being done!!!

It is not malicious compliance by firms, it is goodwill compliance by firms, to whatever DOL requires them to do. Dont like it? ask your DOL why.

Third, paper ads create audit trail that DOL wants, they dont recognize e-boards like linkedin/indeed as their audit trail is considered "soft"

Being deported if you get fired is a basic job requirement. Keeps people in line.

Americans can't compete with that.

Well they can compete with that.

Being fired means you lose healthcare and much needed benefits and of course a paycheck and all of that stuff, right? If you're going to take this wildly cynical approach you should at least do a more proper comparison....

I think forcing this comparison shows a lack of empathy for how compromised of a position the H1B really is.

If I lose my job I have unemployment insurance, cobra benefits, personal savings, and I don’t require another employer to sponsor my visa. If I lose my job the most likely outcome is I find another one after searching a few months.

If someone on an H1B visa loses their job the most likely outcome is they are forced to leave the country.

Well, truthfully I don't really care all that much about it any more than I do any other problems that people generally experience. It's even more tragic that someone has an H1B means other folks don't - aren't their lives even worse for not having the opportunity that someone else does? Can the H1B visa holder even compete with the person denied the H1B?

The reason I wrote this comment is because the OP itself decided it was warranted with this cynical comment to suggest Americans don't work hard because oh if they get fired well they just find another job but the H1B visa holder gets gasp deported. But this itself diminishes the stresses and experience of those who don't find that other job, or don't find that replacement tech job, or any other devastating affects that someone experiences from job loss. Yea you might have a few months of COBRA benefits, but then what? You might not even have any savings because of some emergency that occurred. What's worse, being deported after a couple of months or becoming homeless in America? What if you're deported to Australia or Japan? Why are you or others assuming a happy ending for someone laid off in America but assuming the worst case scenario for an H1B visa holder and then comparing the two in that way?

Yeah, sounds like your situation is insecure too. That really sucks.

That's not correct lol

I mean worst come to worst you can drive Uber full time until the market recovers? And this is certainly not an option for H1B.

Unless Americans does not want this type of job, which actually validates your cynical interpretation of OP's comment. Meanwhile a lot of illegal immigrants are happily driving for Uber and plenty more will be if they can do it legally.

> I mean worst come to worst you can drive Uber full time until the market recovers? And this is certainly not an option for H1B.

Why can't the H1B visa holder also just be deported and drive for Uber in their home country full-time until the market recovers?

> Meanwhile a lot of illegal immigrants are happily driving for Uber and plenty more will be if they can do it legally.

As a capitalist I'm all in favor of driving wages for workers to as close to 0 as possible. If Uber is $1 for me instead of $15 that's great. I don't think our unions or blue-collar workforce are in favor of that though.

> Being fired means you lose healthcare and much needed benefits and of course a paycheck and all of that stuff, right?

I think there's some law that lets you stay on health insurance for a few months at least, and you can save up as a countermeasure to the loss of the paycheck. Bad as it is it's not comparable to getting deported after a couple of months.

Hard to say how directly they can compare, and it probably depends on the individual situation and of course their line of work and other such items. In the woe-is-me olympics they both seem pretty awful and, one might even say, competitive in terms of how awful they are. Maybe being deported means you go back to France or Canada or something.

> I think there's some law that lets you stay on health insurance for a few months at least

Yes, but often you will have to pay the full cost in order to do so, which will be difficult for many people after having lost their source of income..

Because they were laid off?

We can, that's not the purpose of this.

Maybe there aren't a ton of people in Alaska?

TFA is about teachers in Alaska. I'm guessing from a brief skim that no Americans want to be school teachers in Alaska for the money local school boards are offering.

This actually highlights two dumb things about the USA: prejudice against immigrants, and unwillingness to fund education.

This sounds like a self-correcting problem, if you don't allow immigration. Schools will have to pay more for teachers, which will raise salaries for native born teachers, instead of paying a lower rate to someone on a temporary work visa.

The matter is a little more complicated than that, because Alaska also has some of the nation's most stringent licensure requirements with no alternative routes for high-demand low-supply subject area teachers. You could probably relax those artificial barriers to employment and get more Alaskans teaching without raising the salary as much as if you kept the licensure requirements. You could also promise student debt relief for teachers who serve in rural areas for a certain length of time.

>student debt relief

It already exists its called PSLF

Alaska is already one of the top states for educator pay, and as you know how US government has continioualy failed to solve problems by throwing more money at it, you know more money will simply cause more general inflation and will never solve it.

US already spends more for education with worse results

> unwillingness to fund education.

"The United States spent $15,500 per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level, which was 38 percent higher than the average of OECD countries3 reporting data ($11,300). The United States had the fifth highest expenditures per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level in 2019 after Luxembourg, Norway ($18,000), and Austria and the Republic of Korea ($15,900 each)."

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

First, I think the H1B does need genuine reform to keep the big companies from gaming the lottery system.

Having said that, I’m not sure banning H1Bs or immigrants in general is going to help American workers. Take tech for instance. Many tech leaders are immigrants. If they hasn’t taken in the Jensen Huang’s, Sergei Brin’s, Sundar Pichai, etc… the companies they lead and jobs they created would be elsewhere. It’s amazing how immigrants have shaped the US tech scene:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2026/06/03/immig...

Second, when you ban immigrants/H1B, companies get around the ban by outsourcing to foreign countries.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2017/06/10/if-yo...

The 45th president was supposed to deliver that reform. Then they went all out and... commissioned a study. Then they did nothing, once the puppet masters let it be know they didn't want to lose their servile work force chained to their visas with a green card dangled in front of them.

They raise the cost of housing and suppress wages. The people who benefit from immigration are the billionaire class.

Sundar Pichai is a terrible example, he presided over the enshittification of Google and led the company basically nowhere. Satya Nadella is a similar story for Microsoft. The real reason Google is turning around on AI is because the founders quietly returned and have been leading the charge internally to save Google.

>the companies they lead and jobs they created would be elsewhere.

1/2 of Google's founders were Americans born in the US and the search industry already existed before Google was founded. I don't think there's a real argument that the search industry would have been founded anywhere else other than in the US. There's virtually no chance that had Sergei Brin's family stayed in Moscow, that Google would have been founded in Moscow and all of Google's jobs would today somehow exist in Russia. Same goes for Nvidia and all of these other companies. Silicon Valley was already a booming hub which had invented almost all of the foundational tech that today's computing industry was built on. It was built by Americans and regardless would have continued to be built by Americans.

“It was built by Americans and regardless would have continued to be built by Americans.”

The xenophobic ignorance of this sentence is breathtaking. America, of all places, is a nation built precisely by immigrants.

Settlers not immigrants. Immigrants come to a country and people that already exist. Settlers build anew.

Historically then, unless you are a Native American, you are an immigrant.

Perhaps it’s time for to GTFO? Is that the message?

Hacker News really resembles a MAGA rally at times

When the plymouth colony was established the amerindian population was greatly reduced due to disease that swept through <5 years before. The colonists found many empty villages.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5xp7B7ISI1DymhuoGuoN_WWl...

Refugees is maybe more accurate when it comes to country. We sprouted out of the social scene that was displaced by the English Civil War.

And the wars of religion generally. Eg, the Dutch in Pennsylvania and hugenots.

The fact that the billionaire class has convinced you to argue against your own interests (importing tens of millions of people to compete with you for housing and jobs) shows how effective their media control is.

Using the word "immigrant" to blanket all people who have moved here, as if anyone who moves to the US is exactly the same, is a trick. Someone who moves here from Norway is obviously not the same as someone who moves here from Chad. The settlers who built towns and cities from raw wilderness are obviously not the same as someone who gets on a plane and flies to New York to claim free government benefits.

They are different in a million ways, and using "immigrant" to blend them together is a sleight of hand. Anyone with common sense understands that the nation of the USA is/was a place with a specific culture and genetic makeup. Indeed much of Silicon Valley was built and founded during what was a period of very LOW immigration (1950's and 1960's).

To expand even more: importing people from a place makes your country more like the place those people come from. Europe had invented and built incredible things when the USA was founded, almost EVERY immigrant who came to the US until 1965 was from Europe. It's no wonder that the USA became the world's only superpower. Since 1965 we have switched our policy to import people from the entire planet (at much higher numbers than before) and we are pretending that it will have the same result as importing only Europeans.

“Anyone with common sense understands that the nation of the USA is/was a place with a specific culture and genetic makeup”

This is genuinely racist. You are a vile human being.

Reported.

I have no hate for anyone. Applying the "phobic" and "racist" labels to things you disagree with is just a way of avoiding engaging with ideas. Most people can see that. If you want to win the argument long term, you need to engage with these ideas and actually provide a decent counterargument.

Was the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration act a good thing? Has the country improved the quality of life for its citizens since then?

The answer is obviously "no" for anyone who's not a billionaire.

> They raise the cost of housing

Oh! how dare they! How can they even think of finding a place to live

The country has a huge housing crisis, young people rank it as their biggest problem by far. Bringing in more people to further drive up the cost hurts Americans.

Because in America, the boomers' retirement accounts are partially funded by insane college tuition (through insane college services and textbooks), so college has essentially become a guaranteed debt trap that gives you a lottery ticket to maybe be in the top 1%.

They post the jobs in physical newspaper classifieds in the middle of nowhere, and do not post the job on their normal website, because if they posted a real job they would get hundreds of applicants immediately. It’s a fraud but it was tolerated until recently

Anti-immigration policy blocks them from being Americans.

I know an awful lot of skilled people that live in the US, pay high taxes, and for whose lives have been thrown into disarray by backwards, anti-immigration policy like this illegal $100k fee, but it's just the beginning of the ways that anti-immigration policy is being used to make the US far weaker, just in order for pyrrhic harm to immigrants. I'm pissed about it.

>Anti-immigration policy blocks them from being Americans.

Yes, because the citizens of a country (through their elected representatives) have absolute control over who they choose to allow into their country. Even blocking a brilliant surgeon or inventor, if they so choose. There is no moral right to come to America (or any other country).

Saying "I have absolute control" is not a justification for making bad decisions that hurt the US. Furthermore, it was never a question of the US had a right to make these decisions, of course it does.

Do you find the argument "I have the right to make any decision I want therefor it justifies bad decisions" convincing? I sure don't.

>Saying "I have absolute control" is not a justification for making bad decisions that hurt the US.

How is it a bad decision that will hurt the US? Can you make that argument on its merits? No one doubts that there isn't that one genius here or there

Last year, right here on HN I saw a headline where the "powers that be" wanted to increase Canada's population to 100 million (they currently sit at 30ish million). Is that a good decision for Canada? Where the fertility rate is so low population is shrinking? Like, do they need another 65 million people? Are there 65 million jobs going undone in Canada right now? Jobs that desperately need doing? The plan's the same for the United States, even if no one was careless enough to blare a similar headline from trumpets.

Bad decision for who? Their best interest is not your interest, no matter how you browbeat them.

> I know an awful lot of skilled people that live in the US

If they already live in the US, they're not applying for an H1B.

That's false. You can apply for an H1B while in the US (unless there has been another recent and random change to long standing policy for no reason except to make lives miserable).

H1B renewals are also common, and happen within the US.

The H1B visa is explicitly designed for high skill (high paying) jobs which companies have (supposedly) demonstrated they cannot find enough citizen workers.

There are much simpler mechanisms to making that would make the enforcement mechanism more effective without destroying the economy, like prioritizing them by salary instead of randomly.

You could also just have a more proactive government which punishes businesses for abusing the visa category.

"Immigrants taking good jobs" isn't an immigrant problem, it's a big-business problem

>There are much simpler mechanisms to making that would make the enforcement mechanism more effective without destroying the economy, like prioritizing them by salary instead of randomly.

The Trump admin already did that too:

https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-changes-pro...

They arent capable.

Do you want to move to Alaska, and rural Alaska at that (although even “cities” in Alaska are rural by most standards)? You get to be thousands of miles from your existing community, you won’t have a grocery store nearby, there may even be no way to get into or out of your village except by plane. Maybe in the winter you’ll be totally snowed in for weeks at a time.

You could offer me twice what I make as a software engineer and I wouldn’t take the job.