Does it make sense to declare the "America is full" and deporting people who have been granted asylum while welcoming white South Africans with open arms?
> On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers
HN had its mask off moment some time around the 2024 election.
That change FAR predates the most recent election.
This is just what happens when communities get bigger, they become more reflective of the societies which the people are drawn from.
I do remember HN getting much nastier around 2015-16, and again around Covid, but this is just a reflection of society again and unlikely to be a purely HN thing.
If anything, in the 15 (fuck) years I've been hanging out here, it's amazing how well the community has held up.
If you made assumptions that turned out to be wrong, that might look like a "mask".
You're advocating against people seeking higher salaries because that hurts competitiveness? That is competitive behavior in a nutshell.
...or the Bay Area scene has become - or no longer cares to hide its misanthropy, as examplified by senior leadership at YC, a16z and other places telling us how they really feel. Even Paul Graham went mask-off in the afterglow of Trump's second inauguration - February 2025 has some truly wild, victory-lap takes that almost seemed coordinated.
So I think what some in this thread are saying is it quite literally 'will' bring American workers the literal jobs that the H1Bs aren't doing anymore.
> but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots
So two things can definitely be true here. They can be hardworking and well-intentioned, and they can still be used as a wedge between American workers and slightly better jobs
Americans work hard to have a middle-class lifestyle. Non-Americans work hard just to be Americans.
I have a Chrome extension there but I also have an iOS app that I use for myself alone (it’s really not production grade). The Chrome extension is pretty rudimentary so if you want to replicate it you can just tell your agent to do so and if it helps the source is on GitHub. The iOS app is vibe-coded entirely so perhaps you’re better off starting from scratch there.
It’s a pretty basic requirement to interact with social media these days, I think because the information feed is full of noise.
Here’s another user who implemented a different approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459985
You may like his approach as well.
Hacker Smacker in particular would be awesome if more users picked it up (since it's a web of trust, albeit 1 hop only).
The top level has something like 1133 comments, 745 blocked. And I can usually take a few seconds and move users into the block lists. I see it as just the curation of my space. It would be silly to claim threads like these are useful honeypots and then to not actually use them as honeypots.
The rest of the time the site just is a lot more useful to me.
(a) competent enough to pass the hiring bar (b) willing to move to places like Seattle / SF / NYC where these companies were hiring.
You only need to scroll back to a couple of years ago where people were turning their noses up at all forms of recruiter outreach and complaining about how aggressive the recruiters were. What privileged times we lived in.
Since 2022 / post COVID interest rate hikes / AI, the hiring dropped and college kids can't get jobs. The first bump in the economic road you hit, you want to scale down H1B capacity, cancel green cards, banish people. What happens if hiring picks up again? Do you just re-instate the H1b program? Or be resigned to getting high tax paying / high spending jobs shipped off shore? Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
IMO this is all very short term thinking / political theater to score brownie points with the republican base for the elections.
Nothing here is good policy. Sure there's fraud, fix the fraud. You don't like the ad process, make it better.
But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false. These companies are huge organizations. If you laid off 2k people during your annual cycle in Xbox and start hiring 2k people in cloud 2 months from now (some of whom maybe H1Bs who are also impacted by layoffs), it's not the equivalent of firing an American and hiring a lower paid H1B.
As far as I know there isn't any wage discrimination at these big companies like Adobe or Microsoft. Everyone gets paid basically in-line with what levels.fyi says as a band for their level.
Visa issuance the world over are designed to work exactly this way: to scale (foreign) labor up and down as needed. You may scale just the intake (if it is for permanent residency, like the much praised point-system used by Canada), you can also spin up or spin down the entire temporary visa labor force by changing the renewal and first issuance numbers.
I don't think any country invites and then carries out a massive purge of existing labor as it sees fit.
If it does, then it won't be appealing to the class of person you're seeking to attract.
Perhaps you could attempt to steel-man why point-based immigration allocate and de-allocate points for certain professions over time? Or why temporary visas exist in the first place.
> If it does, then it won't be appealing to the class of person you're seeking to attract.
Such is the nature, complexity and self-contradicting character of any large-scale public policy; and it's "classes" (plural) because immigration cuts across social strata, not just your software and service industry "rockstar" geeks.
Yes, why not? Or more practically: keep the program but adjust the quotas annually or even quarterly based on needs. When you see tech companies laying off workers by the thousands, as happened over the past few years, that's the sign that there is plenty of local talent to be hired.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
The solution to that is to separate visa renewals from new hires: allow companies to keep existing workers, while forcing them to hire new ones locally. This actually makes America _more_ attractive for immigrants because they know they cannot be replaced with a new generation of cheap workers from their home country when economic conditions worsen.
> But even the narrative that hey microsoft fired 1k citizens and hired 1k H1bs that are lower paying is false.
In what sense is it false? Microsoft claims that of its 6,800 H1b filings 80% were “related to employees already working at Microsoft” (note no mention _which country_ those employees were working in) which translates to 20% to or 1720 new employees they hired.
And for pay, they only state that “international workers that Microsoft does hire through the H1b visa program are paid the same level of compensation that a worker from the US would receive”, but of course the point is that the average level of compensation for new hires today is significantly lower than it was 10 years ago, when there was a tech worker shortage.
So it can be simultaneously true that the current-year H1b hires are hired at the same rate Americans are, but that those rates are substantially lower than the negotiated compensation of the people Microsoft laid off. The fact that Microsoft declines to comment on this,
So the following are almost certainly all true:
- Microsoft fired (or laid off) over 1000 American citizens last year
- Microsoft applied for H1b visa for at least 1000 _new_ employees
- Those new employees will almost certainly receive lower compensation than the citizens that were laid off
I don't think this really holds up. They could offer the American engineers the opportunity to move divisions, but they don't because what they really want to do is what they did do: Fire Americans and hire foreigners.
> Will people really come to the US on a H1B if they know they can get scaled down like a cloud server at the first sign of economic trouble or the first sign that some politician wants some brownie points?
Then make H1B what it is supposed to be for: elite specialists, not infinite low cost non-American laborers. Then you won't even need to have this discussion.
The contention is pretty clear to me: the law currently says hiring companies should look for Americans who can do the jobs first (not best), and only sponsor visas if they can't find them - but tech companies behavior ranges from being nationality-blind (i.e. hiring "the best" interviewer), to actively hiding opportunities from American job-seekers.
Sure, immigration is hard, stressful and gruelling fight against an an uncaring system. But the damaging aspects of widespread illegal corporate[1] conduct shouldn't be ignored.
I'm saying this as someone who believes American should increase its immigration and end widespread gray-area tolerance that harms the immigrants - who have the least power of all parties involved, which employers love to exploit. Sadly, partisanship makes otherwise smart voters really dumb, with one party lying to its base and the other going along with it and avoiding hard discussions about why America needs immigration.
1. Or farmer/roofer/construction
The later is specifically called out for an EEOC discrimination. https://www.eeoc.gov/national-origin-discrimination
> National origin discrimination can include preferring foreign workers, including workers with a particular visa status, over American workers.
> ...
> National origin-related disparate treatment in hiring related to job advertisement also can include an employer making it more difficult for applicants from one national origin to apply for positions (for example, subjecting U.S. workers to more laborious application methods than H-1B visa holders during the PERM labor certification process).
Part of the challenge here is that the EEOC tends to not be funded well and is limited to acting on tips rather than being able to investigate or audit.
And they do act... https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/eeoc-sues-sibitalent-h-1b-visa... for example...
Though note:
> The EEOC is the sole federal agency authorized to investigate and litigate against businesses and other private sector employers for violations of federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination.
And if this is important...
https://cwc.org/CWC/CWC/Updates/2026/Partial-Spending-Deal-W...
> Congressional negotiators have reached a bipartisan deal to fund the EEOC at $435.4 million for fiscal year 2026. The funding level is the same as that requested by the White House, but nearly $20 million (4.3%) less than last year’s budget.
And the funding and staffing by year: https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc-budget-and-staffing-history-1980-p...
In reality, what reasonable people actually do is use all the information available to them to make decisions (which may be flawed). Which is what is happening.
How about sparing a moment for the anguish of American citizens and graduates that either lost their jobs, or cant find work, because they were replaced by foreign scab labor willing to work longer hours, for less pay, with no mobility?
They should get paid the sane as American workers is all...
Source? If the job legitimately needs to be done, and the foreign option is eliminated, the domestic option is what's left.
Switzerland: 10 million people, around 600'000 with permit B (limited to 5 years), over a million with permit C (persistent living permit, but no citizen, available after 5 years of B).
When Microsoft lays off 6.000 American workers and then refills those positions with H1Bs, I would argue that cancelling visas will definitely bring those jobs back.
I think you missed the arguments. It's not they're not 'deserving' - although you should probably say qualified as it sounds less moral in the context of job competition. No, it's that as indentured servants, they effectively allow corporations to hire cheaper, more pliant workers. H1 workers from India might be very qualified, but they keep their heads down and work long hours to avoid risking getting sent back.
We don't like that. Would you want co-workers who say yes to everything and accept long hours, all due to immigration? It's a form of labor power dilution and it hurts us all.
On the flip side it always surprises me how rabid HN can be about throwing out H1B workers. I am sure some of the people who you may have come across were not deserving of it, but a large amount of them work hard to come here and setup roots. Cancelling visas or deporting them will not get American workers their jobs back. Please spare a moment to consider the pain and anguish it brings to families.
> with clear path to citizenship.
Or no path at all. Tying the citizenship carrot to the visa and letting the employers hold the stick is the worst of all possible outcomes.