A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it).
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
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Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Econ 101: increased supply lowers prices (wages).
> Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens.
Then why did my wife's friends that lost their H-1B jobs have to leave America?
American citizens don't face deportation with job loss.
Also, as a US citizen, I'm free to quit my job anytime I want. If I don't like putting up with my job because of some bullshit my employer pulls, I can easily leave. That is absolutely not the case for sponsored workers.
H-1B workers are stressed out and paranoid about their employment. They'll put up with far more, for far longer, with less compensation.
> No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.
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> Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it.
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
Why?
In addition to the U.S. citizens in that graduating class.
Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
> The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
You can't be serious. On every job application I've ever filled out the last question is always a variation of: "Do you now or will you in the future require employer sponsorship to work in this country?"
> The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
This might be the most amusing thing I’ve read all day.
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Old news. This has been going on for decades. If you even look badly on youtube you will find corporate videos from "HR Consultants" teaching companies how to bury job listings so noone will be likely to find them.
Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
> Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
We could also give them a clear, short path to citizenship if we didn't have enough. Instead we do our best to keep it as chaotic as possible so that those SWE we need can't push for 175/225k
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How about we stop centralizing tech talent around 7 big companies that hire H1Bs, and instead let all companies engage in international (and domestic) exchanges of labor and services? Aka, all software engineers now self organize into small groups funded by independent contracts from larger companies.
This solves many, many problems, including where should laborers live, fairness in interviews, etc.
For those curious, a common method is to publish the job listing in the newspaper classifieds.
This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.
Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.
There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..
Usually it’s a newspaper in the middle of nowhere too, in fine print, in the classifieds.
A newspaper of record is in theory something you are “supposed” to continually read, but it’s kind of like saying you’re “supposed” to know all the laws of the land. While probably true, no one actually can or would do that.
The thing this article didn't mention and the author likely doesn't know is that there's a guide going around instructing people on how to apply for H1B jobs on forums like 4chan.
I've got out of work friends that would love to see this guide. Please share.
This is unlikely to be of use to your friends. Companies hide these job openings because they aren't real: they are filled by a real person right now. If someone applies, they won't be hired because there's no extra headcount. They will just be rejected after a resume review. Companies usually don't even extend interviews to such candidates. Applying only delays the green card process of a foreigner since they will need to rewrite a job description to be even more tailored to that already employed person.
So…. Locals shouldn’t delay or poison the process for a foreigner that would take ‘their’ role, while bored on unemployment why?
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You can't comment like this on Hacker News. Please avoid flamebait and slurs against groups of people. The guidelines make it clear we expect much better than this here.
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Please take care to observe the guidelines when commenting here, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
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Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The immigration raid and what was happening at these plants is 100% different…not sure how you can even pretend they are the same. The system they are discussing is one where you’ve already been in the US legally for 6 years.
I'm Indian so I can be excused for this,
but there is a MASSIVE number of execs -> hiring managers that are Indian and focus primarily on hiring only other Indians. It's extremely racist.
I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
The government is in the hands of D&F players.
Only because the politics of most common idiot id the cheapest for monied interests to manufacture.
Business is much worse at the same scale.
Infact, you probably cant find any org at large scale that functions in rational, logic driven capacity.
So theres just a bogeyman, not a useful critique of government.
That’s extremely racist to assume that Indian execs are all D tier or worse.
> It's extremely racist
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
If the process becomes magically racist when everyone involved is white, but the only difference is another race or ethnicity, then its still racism.
The -ism suffix implies it's about a systemic hierarchy. Are you implying that power in the US is systemically, structurally, in the hands of "indians" and that this is reflected in and reproduced by the dominant social ideology?
That's a made up deffinition only recently invented. Racism is hating another group of people based on physical or cultural background.
The US is the most powerful country does that mean if I go to india I can't experience racism because technically India is "weaker" ?
Isn't this example literally a group of stronger indians being racist to weaker individuals (job applicants)?
This also implies they are not hiring black, asian, or hispanic people either but because they're a minority that's ok?
Such a bad take.
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This is an incredibly weird hill to die on.
I never understood this redefinition of the word...
Racism means prejudice based on race. Period. Thats all it means. Redefining the word like you suggested is moving the political goalposts
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How do the nazis qualify as not prejudiced?
I think you've earned a Godwin point. "The Nazis weren't prejudiced" isn't a great start to an argument, even as a strawman of someone else's position.
Ism doesnt mean systenic hierarchy. Does gigantism mean a systemic hierarchy of giants? Does botulism mean systemic hierarchy of botulinum. Hobestly what the hell are you talking about?
So are you saying that if you were to put white people into a country that is systemically ruled by non-whites, they can’t be racist there?
At certain companies and it’s org structures yeah
What about these cases happening outside of the US?
White people are fully in control of the government at all levels, as well as the economy, in this country. This power dynamic makes the difference between an act of discrimination vs one of racism.
Ignoring whether the claim is accurate or not, if Indian hiring managers are preferentially hiring other Indians, yes of course this is racism, because it means they are also discriminating against all other PoC candidates, not just white people.
Please think a little bit harder before claiming something isn't racism because it might somewhat counteract the structural privilege enjoyed by white people. Yes, white privilege is a thing, and if the claim was that Indian hiring managers were giving preference to non-white people, your comment would at least be worth discussing in the context of a society which overall still privileges white people. But that wasn't even the claim.
That’s simply an outlandish claim. Most people are not in control of any level of the government.
I mean there is that one group.
Which group? Politicians?
You can't compress the complexities of all social dynamics to a single axis. What's the distinction you're trying to make between "act of discrimination" and "racism"? Usually the distinction people try to draw is something like "systematic" vs "one-off" (the difference between one person yelling at you on the street, and lots of people yelling at you in particular throughout the month), but the behaviour alleged here is systematic. I suspect you don't have any particular meaning in mind, instead having taken a habit of language that works well in certain situations, and falsely generalised it outside of its domain of validity.
I made the mistake once of insinuating the reason no else was complaining about current conditions was that everyone else was on a visa. That was pretty much the end of my job there. Which only made me more confident in my opinion in the end.
Yup. You see this when any org hires a top exec externally: they bring their trusted lieutenants/golf buddies and push out the old brass, and then this repeats down the chain when these hires do the same.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
In other words, it's racism. Hiring your in-group because you have power within your in-group is racism.
How do we draw the line between whatever -ism and Bayesian inferences? You are seasoned manager for years, you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background. Let's say it's a fact that you identified through years of trial and error. Based on this fact, you decide to hire only certain groups. How is this racism? How is this different from a university has a college list. Any graduate who does not graduate from the list will not have an interview with your company -- It's super narrow minded and it can considered discrimination, but is that some kind of -ism?
> you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background
Two points.
First: a good, seasoned manager adapts their leadership style to their employees. So the premise is a bit backwards.
But second, let's suppose we use something more valid like "ability to follow instructions". And suppose there are real differences in groups. You still don't stereotype on groups, because lower-performing groups still have high-performing members. So you have your interview examine the actual skill you need on an individual basis. You don't make assumptions based on group membership.
Now, for practical reasons candidates need to be reduced to a reasonable number to interview. That should be done according to personal accomplishments and experience, not groups.
The college you went to is tricky. Only hiring from a select group is not very defensible mainly because it's a bad signal. It reflects mostly your high school test scores and grades, which was years ago. On the other hand, some colleges teach in certain departments better or worse, your grades might matter and depend on the college, etc. So you need to calibrate for a bunch of achievement-based signals where the college name can matter, rather than whitelist only certain colleges.
If you're a seasoned manager, you have learned to work across cultural differences. Being a lazy manager who doesn't want to understand how to work with others is shortsighted on its own and is not an excuse for being a racist.
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My brother in Vishnu what do you think racism is
There are also Indians who loathe being on such teams and actively seek diverse meritocratic teams, as one of those Indians.
I have seen this myself. I have also experienced more than a few Indian colleagues who were far more critical of Indians in management than the rest of us were. I feel like there is an extra layer of dynamics that just isn't apparent if you are not accustomed to seeing it.
Out of curiosity, do they favor hiring Indians in general, or Hindu Indians in particular. (To the exclusion of Muslim Indians)
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination (by skin color, name or something else, I'm not sure) by other Indian managers and execs.
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]. A pair of professors are having a bad time trying to got CSU’s ban on caste-based discrimination thrown out on the grounds of being religiously discriminatory [2].
In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.
(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)
For whatever it's worth, that's been a consistent trend with other things Newsom has vetoed with statements that he considers the vetoed item to be already covered by other laws, including some purely technical legislative things. I think it's likely that he sees himself as trying to keep California bureaucracy from growing indefinitely, especially with his push for things like CEQA process reduction/simplification.
It’s capital, political and financial. Everything costs, got to pay for gerrymandering somehow.
Vetoing costs. More than half the legislature voted for it.
It can win you a few friends but you lose more.
> but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
What do you think the intersection between HN and Blind is?
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In the end nothing came of those allegations. There was no evidence of it. Lawmakers, who seem to have an anti Indian bias, pushed legislation banning something that wasn’t happening. It seemed to really just be a way to harass Indians or their religion, which is why it got vetoed I think.
Does caste discrimination still exist in India?
If yes, what leads you to believe that all first gen immigrants from India to the US magically stop doing it?
funny question, I believe we're more precisely talking about Brahmin "upper" caste hiring only from their caste. Muslims don't even come into the picture...
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
> I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians
I'd guess this varies massively depending on whether the hiring manager and the people they're hiring are H1-Bs.
Unless they have any personal advantage in doing so.
that is definitely part of it
Yep. And caste based discrimination is legal in the USA. Its not a protected EEOC class, as much as that doesn't matter in our legal environment.
So yeah, you can discriminate against Dalits, and hire predominantly Brahmins.
Except in Seattle, which explicitly bans caste discrimination as of 2023, and in California, which interprets its own state anti-discrimination laws to already include caste discrimination in other broader categories (which was the reason Governor Newsom gave when he vetoed a bill in 2023 to explicitly ban caste discrimination).
Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
What’s the evidence? I remember seeing allegations but all the court cases resulted in nothing, because there was no evidence of such discrimination.
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How so? There are 172 million Muslims in India.
I think he means since they aren’t originally “Indian” but are colonizers of India who arrived through invasion.
That might have been the case 200+ years ago but for sure the majority of Indian Muslims these days are just descendants of converted Hindus and Buddhists, etc.
So are the brahmins. The indigenous religions of India are basically gone. Only remembered in various folklore.
Where can I read more about this? That the indigenous are gone?
Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.
I wouldn’t say it’s people ‘preferring’ it. The fact is, finding people that are competent enough to be hired is easier through referrals than other ways. And if you are receiving referrals, why wouldn’t you put them through the hiring process to see if they’re talented enough to hire? Rejecting those because they share the same race as the hiring manager is itself racist (since it would be taking race/ethnicity as a factor). In most big companies the hiring process has enough checks and balances to prevent nepotistic hires anyways (for example hiring panels or bar raisers or whatever).
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
> ”racist" seems to fail the Occam test here
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
This reminds me of the aphorism "The purpose of a system is what it does."
DEI arose to public consciousness around the same time that "whiteness" was often used as a synonym for bigotry and privilege. So long as academic circles (and those who come from them, such as the people now in HR departments) believe that having white skin is a sin, DEI will never be D, E or I.
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
I've never met a single HR person that could be characterized as coming from, or even brushing up against, an academic circle.
Much the opposite. They are usually the weaker animals in the herd or people who flipped out of corporate finance to negotiate benefits.
> HR departments [...] believe that having white skin is a sin
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
I've watched HR people break the law discriminating against white job applicants in the name of DEI. One in particular was fired for it, but it'd be foolish to think that it isn't happening more elsewhere.
And the upthread commenter has personal experience with HR people discriminating too. So what? The answer is both cases is clear regulation, which is what DEI is about. Can it be misapplied? Sure. Do people do bad things? Obviously. Is the specific anti-white conspiracy you imagine a direct threat to society? Please.
I’ve personally, repeatedly, and in writing seen HR actively discriminate against white men - as in refuse to hire them, and actively go out of their way to push them out due solely to their skin color and gender. At major fortune 50 companies. For years.
And I’m not the only one.
In fact, consent decrees with the DOL and at least one major fortune 50 (Google) explicitly required them to do so, to maintain ‘proportional representation with the population’ because of ‘over representation’. Meanwhile, Indian men got a free pass (for one example).
Trump is mostly bullshit, but he’s in power because of bullshit like this pissing people off. That is a threat to society.
Mostly because none of the things he’s doing are going to actually solve the problem but just get people angrier and angrier at each other. But the problem, at least at one point, was very real.
How is DEI about clear regulation? Equity is literally the opposite of "equal opportunity". It presumes that your skin color matters more than your personal circumstances.
And no, I don't think it is a threat to society. You don't need to invent fake arguments to put in my mouth.
All I said was that the packaging DEI is wrapped up in is toxic (actually, I said poison).
One of the knock-on benefits of DEI is that it allows second rate minds to self-identify. Empathy is massively important in this line of work, and you need to be curious instead of confused and upset when you run into Chesterton's Fence.
This is why DEI is so important. It’s a blunt tool, but still a tool, to short circuit the basic human desire to be within their network.
That's not what DEI does in practice. When you move away from merit hiring, you just end up hiring the minorities in your social network. Who, if they're from an "underprivileged" group, are usually even more privileged within that group than you are in yours, or else they wouldn't have met you.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
Or ‘even better’, someone in the same circle who can somehow check the box you need. Harvard grads hiring other Harvard grads, etc.
Coarse grained attributes like race, gender, sex, religion, etc. are not useful predictors of individual behavior or background.
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It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
Thanks, was actually my main question on reading the article. "Why go to all that effort if an American will accept the job for the same pay and you don't have to deal with sponsorship?" This seems like one of the most likely reasons. Racism's been mentioned, yet leverage over employees who have very little other alternative seems somewhat more likely. American's will just leave and go look for another job. Probably much larger chance of having them lateral to a different company also.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
Do you see them selectively picking based on the caste of the Indian?
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What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.
> What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent?
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
You really think nobody in the continental US can do good work in tech? You will have to fight really hard to convince me that all the talent is non existent.
I didn’t say non existent. But in short enough supply at the appropriate level of skill to have different skews without any discrimination happening
For some visa types, companies are obligated to prove that they advertised the position to American citizens. Failed, hence they needed the foreigner.
This is a huge dealbreaker for campus hires, and specifically masters/PhDs who are, well, by definition, specialized in their field and hence very rare.
So you recruit at her graduation the girl who has done groundbreaking research in deep neural nets and is the key to one of your big projects. She happens to be non-American (because the majority of postgraduates are non-Americans).
Now what? You know that there is nobody else on the planet that has done this research, yet you have to start recruiting for this position for Americans.
What is the incentive you have as a company to pour a ton of resources on this effort? Recruiting is very expensive. Time is also very expensive when you are at the forefront of innovation.
So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface.
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
Isn’t it funny that in the past the only thing you had to do was simply show up?
"The "hacker ethos" seems to be in decline, for any number of interconnected reasons"
Instead of having job openings posted by those who don't want them found what if people posted willingness to work, perhaps in some sort of registry. That way a company would have to prove that none of the people willing to work are qualified. I'm sure many qualified people would be open to moving.
To anybody playing attention it's very clear SV tech vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local. It has been this way for multiple decades now (and gets worse every year.) I don't see this changing any time soon. Sure they get the occasional slap on the wrist, but the wage suppression saves them way more money over time.
> vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
Nope, Infosys and friends aside, in SV companies would rather hire green card holders and US citizens because you have to sponsor the H1B/park and get a L-1, and sponsor the green card process. You just can’t ignore foreign talent, otherwise you’ll miss out on an incredible number of good employees
> the wage suppression
Do immigrants earn less than locals?
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
Yes, but because the H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude. That forced loyalty, more than the salary, is the real draw.
It's 60 days, not 2 weeks, and you can transfer an H1B over to a new job within that 60 days, or if you know you're going to be terminated (e.g. you're on a PIP) then you can transfer the H1B to a new employer anyway.
Wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to do so, but it's not an automatic deported from the country kind of deal.
This is the wrong logic. Immigrants can make exactly the same as natives and still suppress wages.
Fundamentally how prices are set is someone sets a price, and if there are no takers they change the price. If a company offers a salary, and they bring in an H1-B to fill the role, they don't have to raise the salary. Over time it suppresses the wage.
If that was the case, why would they have to hide the job offer? If no American citizen is going to take the job at the lower pay, there is no need to hide the offer from them. If they are going to take the lower pay, there is no advantage to hire an H1-B.
Presuming we're talking about the job offers from the article, it's for PERM, part of the process for green cards, not for H1B. As far as I know, you don't need to post a job offer to consider local candidates for someone to apply for an H1B, only for them to get permanent residence.
Employee works for a company under an H1B, company likes their work, wants them to stay longer (H1B has a max of 6 years unless you sponsor the employee for permanent residence). Employee doesn't want to be in this weird temporary worker status forever (and again, after 6 years they'll need to), so the company has two choices: either hire a new employee, hope they've as good as the one you already have under the H1B, train them up to be as familiar with the job and its work as the H1B, and then forget about getting the existing employee permanent residence, OR, just sponsor them for the PERM process, put out a job ad with a really low likelihood of anyone applying, and move on with their lives.
The way the PERM process is set up, there's really no reason not to do the hidden job ad, it's not really regulated against, there's not much financial harm in doing it, and they already have an employee they like and who wants to stay, so for those two parties (and presumably anyone who likes working with this person, and any friends they have in America and so on), there's no reason not to just put out the hidden job ad.
As far as I understand it, it's not just that they need for no American citizen to take the job. They need for no American citizen to apply for it.
Well that's precisely what they say on the visa sponsorship "we can't find the talent", no you can't find the talent at that price.
This assumes that the number of jobs in the US is magically fixed.
The thing is that all these mega-corporations have offices across the world, but currently want to hire in the US. You and I want our personal jobs to be expensive, but we don't want the prospect of hiring us where we live to be too expensive. And even aside from cost, you also don't want them to say "there's not enough employees there, it's not worth hiring."[0]
[0] I'm technically no longer living in the US, but I was until recently.
I don't think wages are suppressed because immigrant tech workers make less money. Instead, It seems like the effect of the dramatically increased supply of workers would dominate, effectively lowering wages; i.e., you can pay less money for a job the more workers there are to take the job.
If you look at the total cost of an employee and not just an annual salary, then the fact that they have far less mobility makes them cheaper. Why hire the person who will bail when you mistreat them so you have to spend all that time and money finding someone new when you can have someone who risks deportation if they decide they are done with your bullshit.
I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
It's just outsourcing training/education (again, the first wave already happened circa 2009-2013).
It’s not just that. It is also that people will do unsafe and unethical things to avoid being sent (back) to India. If it were only outsourcing it wouldn’t be dominated by Indians.
Bingo.
So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.
>It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
Then work for a body shop for 1/4 the billing rate in Arizona, Lansing or whatever. You can get a better gig at Burger King.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
Outsourcing needs to be eliminated. If the company is doing 20% of their business in Ohio, 20% of their workforce needs to be in Ohio. 12% in NY State, 12% of the workers need to be in NY State etc.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
I have no problem with giving the job to someone overseas but they can do that on their home turf.
Reminds me of the shenanigans you see when a govt job is required to be posted for open bid, but the dept already has an internal hire lined up.
I see everyone is for maximizing shareholder value until they are reminded they are workers first.
From experience: big tech has to post jobs to US citizens before it can hire on a visa or sponsor a green card. So the trick is to put an ad in a physical news paper and present that as evidence.
> According to the Justice Department, the companies absurdly required applicants to submit applications by mail [...] How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
I always wondered how they made sure no one applied to the position they wanted the H1B to fill
>Should the system rely so heavily on asking out-of-work Americans to act as goalies — if or when they happen to have the time?
A zinger of a concluding line if ever there was one.
All the h1bs constitute less than 1% of the jobs in us. They just want to divert the focus ! This is propaganda!
That's not the only way you can work in the US. "In 2023 17.9% of employed workers were immigrants"
Immigrants are defined as foreign-born residents, including those who became US citizens
1% of all jobs is still a huge number of jobs in total terms. Spitball math put's h1b's much lower than that actually, .4 to .5% of all FTE positions.
That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.
If we were to separate all jobs into categories like most-preferable, least-preferable, and a few other buckets in the middle of those, would the H1Bs be evenly distributed among them?
What percentage are they of the top (preferable) quintile of jobs? Are they just 0.5% of those, or are they more like 4% of those? Is it higher still?
Ranges from 20%-80% in tech roles from my experience.
What percent of tech jobs?
Don't have a percentage handy, but these resources are likely useful for your inquiry.
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
> About 400,000 H-1B applications for high-skilled foreign workers were approved in 2024
Fun fact: the payout from the meta settlement they reference works out to there being less than 4,000 members of the eligible class. Otoh getting a large check is always a pleasant surprise. I kept the letter cause it’s a huge amount
I recall there being a proposal to prioritize H1Bs based on salary, which would at least lessen or eliminate the race to the bottom and stuff like people training their lower paid replacements
We effectively replaced 43 h1b’s with AI. Looking to do more soon.
> However, in order for applications for permanent residency to be successful, companies must certify their inability to find a suitable American candidate to take the position they’re looking to fill with a foreign national
I mean, you know, if you already have an employee working on H1B, why would you take the risk to hire someone else to replace them? The perm process is pretty broken in that way.
If Apple and Meta have had to pay $38 million for engaging in these practices I don't understand why they used the subtle "chronically-online" dig against people trying to expose it:
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
What the… Yeah, I’m with you on that one. “We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling chronically onlines seeing if we’re obeying federal law!”
The whole thing seems to oddly disdainful of the people being impacted:
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
To "use" a post office?
What like... any... other... store or building where you walk in, perform an action, and leave?
Ah crap, here I've been trying to walk into the side of the building for the past 3 hours.
"Midvale Post-Office for the Gifted."
I feel like there was a lot of nonsense ideas for what is such a short, and supposedly journalistically rigorous article
The Hill stays afloat by laundering political operative and rat-fucking articles. Politico to a lesser extent, but similar. Read those two sites with suspicion. Always.
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One popular trick was to advertise the jobs in newspapers. The dead-tree edition only.
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
Ok, come on, this is just an insulting "kids these days" throw-away line that is absolutely not necessary.
Doubley stupid because the task is about mailing a letter, which does not require a post office.
That's an editorial point, not a substantial one. Obviously requiring an application be submitted by an inconvenient and antiquated method that isn't used by the demographic in question is going to create friction and reduce the number of applications.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
It also has the effect of making the job posting seem fake, or like a scam, because who in their right mind would believe META, who has their own, in-house operated, online job application portal, would require a job application to be mailed in.
Right, imagine if the same posting was onlinen in a legitimate-looking spot, but for some reason the process required credit-card validation up front.
I'm not complaining about the substance, but the tone feels weirdly disdainful of the people impacted across the whole thing. It almost feels like the author was assigned this topic & overall goal, but hates the people she's writing about.
The crucial thing if you’re a foreigner is to look at the comments here and be very careful as to whether you’d empower a software engineer union full of these people to deport you.
In Savannah, the local unions got the Koreans deported from the Hyundai factory.
Didn't Apple used to post job openings in small local newspapers in the Midwest?
This crime has yet to be addressed.
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While I don't support the general intention of what MAGA and this movement to get H1bs out via the tactics described in this article, it's total bullshit to try to silence them in the legal tactic that instacart is using. I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
A lot of WASPs got very mad when Vivek wrote that tweet calling them out for being behind a lot of H1bs in quality but he's right on the mark. Sorry Peter and Paul, but you really did get B+'s when the H1b who takes your job got A+++ in everything for 4 years.
Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs.
They already do though. Do you own any items made in other countries? If so, you’re competing with other workers already. It seems weird to focus on immigrants workers in America versus citizens in America while importation is allowed at all. I find all of this also very much in conflict with HN’s anti tariff attitude.
The US has been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The result of trying to wall out competition is not going to be jobs for Americans. The result will be what happened to the American automotive industry, the American electronics industry, etc. They could not deliver competitive products at competitive prices and the various "Buy American" advertising campaigns were ignored by American consumers. Your Nintendo Switch, your Samsung SSDs and smartphones, your Hynix RAM, your Toyota cars, etc. are all proof of that. And it's much, much easier to for a competitor to create a new developer job opening overseas than construct a physical factory.
This doesn't holds water as an argument against labor protectionism, since we can point to China as a contemporary example with the opposite result. Much of the US's industrial base wasn't destroyed by consumer choice, but was intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons. It wasn't even simply about implementing an economic power structure the US could use to extend its influence. The Asian Tigers were built up to facilitate more powerful "strategic partners", a South Korea poorer than Gambia wouldn't be a very useful friend. That Samsung SSD is the product of a need for strategic power balancing in East Asia. The consumer doesn't matter nearly as much as you think they do when policy is the primary agent that shapes cost, often intentionally through second order effects like infrastructural design.
>>intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons
not geopolitical, but economical. US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits (you can lookup S&P 500 chart)
USA got S&P500 chart going up
China got industrialization
If either way I'm homeless, I'd at least rather have a chance at having the job rather than have my own government work against me.
The best jobs are with large corporations with offices all over the world. Workers from all over the world are competing with each other, regardless of the Kafkaesque state of American immigrant policy.
(if you're a company with no US nexus or presence, and no access to the market, your hiring practices are up to your local jurisdiction; if you want access to the US market, you can hire in the US, I find this to be very reasonable)
If you're a US company that wants access to the Italian market you can hire in Italy.
I find this very reasonable.
This bill is a hunk of Swiss cheese. Great for lawyers and bankers and possibly global tech companies, depending on how it parses out in court.
I'm willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere.
> willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere
It doesn’t walk anywhere. It’s another handout to finance and law. The B2B carve-out and lack of border adjustments makes this a regressive tax on consumers and manufacturers to fund tech, law and finance. (The only jobs this would materially cover are those in call centres for consumers. Which in practice, means voice LLMs.)
Like, I made money from tariffs. I will do well from the OBBA. I will do well from this bill. But American consumers and workers will keep getting screwed, and I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
>… I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
Just toss 170 billion to one of your various police forces so you’ve got the manpower to tamp down any tantrums from the people. It’s a pretty well worn tactic
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> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs
Why not?
Also friendly reminder 99.999% of US population is made of immigrants.
The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.
I assume they would try to venue-shop for somewhere Anti-SLAPP protections are much weaker. Maryland and Virginia look particularly bad, for example (but IANAL).
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).
Yeah, I think people mistake country and geographic area. The US is the 300+ million people that build and apply systems and institutions within an area, not the area itself. Coming to the conclusion that people here are interchangeable with people anywhere else and should constantly have to earn their place is fundamentally divorced from reality.
That's the real reason for the job market crisis; it is not AI, it's just corporate greed to have borderline slaves to lower job wages and workers willing to work extra hours for peanuts. AI is just the scapegoat, easy to blame it on something that's still new while also milking investors' money by promising how it will reduce costs and increase profits. If the job market crisis were really from AI, not only should it happen within a few years of adopting such new tech, but we should see its impact on other industries like lawyers, medical doctors, administrators, and lastly on tech workers, not the other way around.
That's why I keep saying and repeating: the tech industry and especially the engineering one should be further regulated and restricted just like other professions out there, otherwise, you are only allowing anyone to scam and game the system with any potential bubble currently happening.
I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
Yea that's exactly the point I'm making. If they came and paid a high visa payment, then they would not be significantly cheaper.
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).
Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.
The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
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This will incentivize foreign intelligence services to fund their own market of conveniently cash flush moles.
Ah yes, any foreigner must be a secret agent
I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).
"On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens."
This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
Essentially, they want to hire a specific person, while the law requires that they post the job and prefer American citizens, so they don’t want American citizens to apply not that they prefer foreign workers in general they just have a specific candidate in mind.
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
If they had someone specific in mind the usual method is to have their resume next to you when you write up the job app. Make the requirements perfectly match their skills. Now you can say when you picked them that they were the best candidate all along.
I think it’s lot tricker for the large companies that tend to hire H1B visa holders to do this, because a manager would need to convince the HR department to violate the law, and the company might be concerned the risks involved are not a good idea if enough candidates apply.
Plus, there seems to be some indicator tha the job you are applying is an H1B position and they are posting them on sites for Americans to apply too. So it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of highly qualified idealogue’s applying to jobs they never wanted in the first place and reporting them to the government when they get rejected.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea to try and manipulate the system with the current government’s willingness to go after companies.
If they’ll go after a US ally like Hyundai for using ESTA under the VWP illegally, when Hyundai could probably have easily applied for and been granted B-1 visas. Can you imagine what they would do to a company illegally sponsoring H1B visas?
That's one of several tactics. But if someone did apply and was close enough, you still have to do the interview and reject song and dance. Better to deter applications in the first place.
This is hilarious.
There's another thing happening which people haven't really heard much about, which is basically ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments. And so people that previously would never have filed something like a discrimination lawsuit can now use ChatGPT to understand how to respond to managers' emails and proactively send emails that point out discrimination in non-threatening manner, and so in ways that create legal entrapment. I think people are drastically underestimating what's going to happen over the next 10 years and how bad the discrimination is in a lot of workplaces.
> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
Posted my response below, you have no idea how impactful this is going to be
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That's all well and good, but anyone who does this will likely just be terminated asap without cause, possibly as a part of a multi-person layoff that makes it appear innocuous.
First call should be to an employment attorney and the EEOC, no matter what, before you sign anything.
That’s not quite right. To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year. Most people can’t afford a lawyer to manage that. But if you’re a regular employee, you can use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently. With diligent, organized evidence, you absolutely can build a case; the hard part is proving it, and ChatGPT is great at helping you gather and frame the proof.
> To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year
Where did you hear this?
> use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently
This is terrible advice. It not only makes those messages inadmissible, it casts reasonable doubt on everything else you say.
Using an LLM to take the emotion out of your breadcrumbs is fine. Having it draft generic stuff, or worse, potentially hallucinate, may actually flip liability onto you, particularly if you weren't authorised to disclose the contents of those messages to an outside LLM.
With respect, it seems you haven’t kept up with how people actually use ChatGPT. In discrimination cases—especially disparate treatment—the key is comparing your performance, opportunities, and outcomes against peers: projects assigned, promotions, credit for work, meeting invites, inclusion, and so on. For engineers, that often means concrete signals like PR assignments, review comments, approval times, who gets merges fast, and who’s blocked.
Most employees don’t know what data matters or how to collect it. ChatGPT Pro (GPT-5 Pro) can walk someone through exactly what to track and how to frame it: drafting precise, non-threatening documentation, escalating via well-written emails, and organizing evidence. I first saw this when a seed-stage startup I know lost a wage claim after an employee used ChatGPT to craft highly effective legal emails.
This is the shift: people won’t hire a lawyer to explore “maybe” claims on a $100K tech job—but they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull. On its own, ChatGPT isn’t a lawyer. In the hands of a thoughtful user, though, it’s close to lawyer-level support for spotting issues, building a record, and pushing for a fair outcome. The legal system will feel that impact.
> they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull
This is correct usage. Letting it draft notes and letters is not. (Procedural emails, why not.) Essentially, ChatGPT Pro lets one do e-discovery and preliminary drafting to a degree that’s good enough for anything less than a few million dollars.
I’ve worked with startups in San Francisco, where lawyers readily take cases on contingency because they’re so easy to win. The only times I’ve urged companies fight back have been recently, because the emails and notes the employee sent were clearly LLM generated and materially false in one instance. That let, in the one case that they insisted on pursuing, the entire corpus of claims be put under doubt and dismissed. Again, in San Francisco, a notoriously employee-friendly jurisdiction.
I’ve invested in legal AI efforts. I’d be thrilled if their current crop of AIs were my adversary in any case. (I’d also take the bet on ignoring an LLM-drafted complaint more than a written one, lawyer or not.)
No I think the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it. You obviously can’t copy paste its email output, but you can definitely verify what are legal terms, and how to position certain phrases.
> the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it
Totally agree again. LLMs are great at collating and helping you decide if you have a case and, if so, convincing either a lawyer to take it or your adversary to settle.
Where they backfire is when people use them to send chats or demand letters. You suggested this, and this is the part where I’m pointing out that I am personally familiar with multiple cases where this took a case the person could have won, on contingency, and turned it into one where they couldn’t irrespective of which lawyers they retained.
The legal system is extremely biased in favor of those who can afford an attorney. Moreover, the more expensive the attorney, the more biased it is in their favor.
It is in effect not a legal system, but a system to keep lawyers and judges in business with intentionally vaguely worded laws and variable interpretations.
Exactly. And it’s comical that the person I was debating with doesn’t understand this. Proclaimed investor in legal tech misses the biggest use case of ai in legal - providing access to people that can’t afford it or otherwise wouldn’t know to work with a lawyer
It isn't just corporations, its the federal government. The same ones hiding the rampant student rape issue at UIUC Champaign
A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it).
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Econ 101: increased supply lowers prices (wages).
> Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens.
Then why did my wife's friends that lost their H-1B jobs have to leave America?
American citizens don't face deportation with job loss.
Also, as a US citizen, I'm free to quit my job anytime I want. If I don't like putting up with my job because of some bullshit my employer pulls, I can easily leave. That is absolutely not the case for sponsored workers.
H-1B workers are stressed out and paranoid about their employment. They'll put up with far more, for far longer, with less compensation.
> No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.
> Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it.
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
Why?
In addition to the U.S. citizens in that graduating class.
Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
> The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
You can't be serious. On every job application I've ever filled out the last question is always a variation of: "Do you now or will you in the future require employer sponsorship to work in this country?"
> The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
This might be the most amusing thing I’ve read all day.
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Old news. This has been going on for decades. If you even look badly on youtube you will find corporate videos from "HR Consultants" teaching companies how to bury job listings so noone will be likely to find them.
Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
> Your country sold you down the river 30 years ago.
Jm2c but I think the harsh truth is that US while having a decently sized population of good software engineers, it is still nowhere near the required amount.
Thus, many companies would rather give 150/200k to someone who's actually good at it and will be impressed by that money rather than some half assed US graduate who only went into SE because he wanted a cushy well paying job.
We could also give them a clear, short path to citizenship if we didn't have enough. Instead we do our best to keep it as chaotic as possible so that those SWE we need can't push for 175/225k
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How about we stop centralizing tech talent around 7 big companies that hire H1Bs, and instead let all companies engage in international (and domestic) exchanges of labor and services? Aka, all software engineers now self organize into small groups funded by independent contracts from larger companies.
This solves many, many problems, including where should laborers live, fairness in interviews, etc.
For those curious, a common method is to publish the job listing in the newspaper classifieds.
This is what my old employer did to sponsor the visa for the company’s CTO.
Newspapers are used for a surprising number of various public announcements. E.g. in New York you must publish a notice in a newspaper for 6 weeks (or something like that) when establishing a LLC.
There’s something to be said for reading the paper even in 2025! Although I suppose the notices are probably also online..
Usually it’s a newspaper in the middle of nowhere too, in fine print, in the classifieds.
A newspaper of record is in theory something you are “supposed” to continually read, but it’s kind of like saying you’re “supposed” to know all the laws of the land. While probably true, no one actually can or would do that.
The thing this article didn't mention and the author likely doesn't know is that there's a guide going around instructing people on how to apply for H1B jobs on forums like 4chan.
I've got out of work friends that would love to see this guide. Please share.
Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments)
https://jobs.now
This is unlikely to be of use to your friends. Companies hide these job openings because they aren't real: they are filled by a real person right now. If someone applies, they won't be hired because there's no extra headcount. They will just be rejected after a resume review. Companies usually don't even extend interviews to such candidates. Applying only delays the green card process of a foreigner since they will need to rewrite a job description to be even more tailored to that already employed person.
So…. Locals shouldn’t delay or poison the process for a foreigner that would take ‘their’ role, while bored on unemployment why?
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You can't comment like this on Hacker News. Please avoid flamebait and slurs against groups of people. The guidelines make it clear we expect much better than this here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please don't post in an inflammatory style or make swipes at the HN community. We don't know what "a large portion of HNers" think about any topic. Controversial topics bring out the people who feel the strongest about that topic, but the people commenting are only a tiny share of the whole community. Your point about the different reactions people have to different kinds of immigration controversies is valid, but topics like this need to be discussed with sensitivity.
Please take care to observe the guidelines when commenting here, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
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The immigration raid and what was happening at these plants is 100% different…not sure how you can even pretend they are the same. The system they are discussing is one where you’ve already been in the US legally for 6 years.
I'm Indian so I can be excused for this,
but there is a MASSIVE number of execs -> hiring managers that are Indian and focus primarily on hiring only other Indians. It's extremely racist.
I've noticed this as well, but see it mostly as "A players hire other A players, B players hire C players". The top tier of Indian execs/management that I've met will hire diverse teams, just like the top tier of every other ethnicity will as well. There's simply not enough people at the top to put a racial/ethnic/caste filter on it. But then once you get down to the second tier, people will happily hire people like themselves, because at that level you're hiring on vibes rather than data and similar people give you fuzzy comfortable vibes.
Unfortunately most Fortune 500 companies are in the hands of B players now, and it goes all the way up, with the government (multiple governments, really) being in the hands of B/C players. The A players are happily retired and pulling strings in the background with their 501(c)4s.
The government is in the hands of D&F players.
Only because the politics of most common idiot id the cheapest for monied interests to manufacture.
Business is much worse at the same scale.
Infact, you probably cant find any org at large scale that functions in rational, logic driven capacity.
So theres just a bogeyman, not a useful critique of government.
That’s extremely racist to assume that Indian execs are all D tier or worse.
> It's extremely racist
I'm not sure if the motive behind such behavior is racism. Instead, I think it's more likely the power play. That is, they would pick the population that is the easiest to command and to push them up the corporate ladder.
If the process becomes magically racist when everyone involved is white, but the only difference is another race or ethnicity, then its still racism.
The -ism suffix implies it's about a systemic hierarchy. Are you implying that power in the US is systemically, structurally, in the hands of "indians" and that this is reflected in and reproduced by the dominant social ideology?
That's a made up deffinition only recently invented. Racism is hating another group of people based on physical or cultural background.
The US is the most powerful country does that mean if I go to india I can't experience racism because technically India is "weaker" ?
Isn't this example literally a group of stronger indians being racist to weaker individuals (job applicants)?
This also implies they are not hiring black, asian, or hispanic people either but because they're a minority that's ok?
Such a bad take.
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This is an incredibly weird hill to die on.
I never understood this redefinition of the word... Racism means prejudice based on race. Period. Thats all it means. Redefining the word like you suggested is moving the political goalposts
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How do the nazis qualify as not prejudiced?
I think you've earned a Godwin point. "The Nazis weren't prejudiced" isn't a great start to an argument, even as a strawman of someone else's position.
Ism doesnt mean systenic hierarchy. Does gigantism mean a systemic hierarchy of giants? Does botulism mean systemic hierarchy of botulinum. Hobestly what the hell are you talking about?
So are you saying that if you were to put white people into a country that is systemically ruled by non-whites, they can’t be racist there?
At certain companies and it’s org structures yeah
What about these cases happening outside of the US?
White people are fully in control of the government at all levels, as well as the economy, in this country. This power dynamic makes the difference between an act of discrimination vs one of racism.
Ignoring whether the claim is accurate or not, if Indian hiring managers are preferentially hiring other Indians, yes of course this is racism, because it means they are also discriminating against all other PoC candidates, not just white people.
Please think a little bit harder before claiming something isn't racism because it might somewhat counteract the structural privilege enjoyed by white people. Yes, white privilege is a thing, and if the claim was that Indian hiring managers were giving preference to non-white people, your comment would at least be worth discussing in the context of a society which overall still privileges white people. But that wasn't even the claim.
That’s simply an outlandish claim. Most people are not in control of any level of the government.
I mean there is that one group.
Which group? Politicians?
You can't compress the complexities of all social dynamics to a single axis. What's the distinction you're trying to make between "act of discrimination" and "racism"? Usually the distinction people try to draw is something like "systematic" vs "one-off" (the difference between one person yelling at you on the street, and lots of people yelling at you in particular throughout the month), but the behaviour alleged here is systematic. I suspect you don't have any particular meaning in mind, instead having taken a habit of language that works well in certain situations, and falsely generalised it outside of its domain of validity.
If you genuinely believe that the "single axis" approach is valid, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality.
I made the mistake once of insinuating the reason no else was complaining about current conditions was that everyone else was on a visa. That was pretty much the end of my job there. Which only made me more confident in my opinion in the end.
Yup. You see this when any org hires a top exec externally: they bring their trusted lieutenants/golf buddies and push out the old brass, and then this repeats down the chain when these hires do the same.
Unsurprisingly, an Indian exec's trusted lieutenants and golf buddies will also be Indian, likely from the same university, caste, etc. They will not be hiring random people just because they happen to be Indian; if anything, there's been plenty of lawsuits over Indians of the "wrong" caste, language group etc getting pushed out.
In other words, it's racism. Hiring your in-group because you have power within your in-group is racism.
How do we draw the line between whatever -ism and Bayesian inferences? You are seasoned manager for years, you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background. Let's say it's a fact that you identified through years of trial and error. Based on this fact, you decide to hire only certain groups. How is this racism? How is this different from a university has a college list. Any graduate who does not graduate from the list will not have an interview with your company -- It's super narrow minded and it can considered discrimination, but is that some kind of -ism?
> you found that your fellow countrymen are much more likely to follow your leadership style than any other group of different cultural background
Two points.
First: a good, seasoned manager adapts their leadership style to their employees. So the premise is a bit backwards.
But second, let's suppose we use something more valid like "ability to follow instructions". And suppose there are real differences in groups. You still don't stereotype on groups, because lower-performing groups still have high-performing members. So you have your interview examine the actual skill you need on an individual basis. You don't make assumptions based on group membership.
Now, for practical reasons candidates need to be reduced to a reasonable number to interview. That should be done according to personal accomplishments and experience, not groups.
The college you went to is tricky. Only hiring from a select group is not very defensible mainly because it's a bad signal. It reflects mostly your high school test scores and grades, which was years ago. On the other hand, some colleges teach in certain departments better or worse, your grades might matter and depend on the college, etc. So you need to calibrate for a bunch of achievement-based signals where the college name can matter, rather than whitelist only certain colleges.
If you're a seasoned manager, you have learned to work across cultural differences. Being a lazy manager who doesn't want to understand how to work with others is shortsighted on its own and is not an excuse for being a racist.
My brother in Vishnu what do you think racism is
There are also Indians who loathe being on such teams and actively seek diverse meritocratic teams, as one of those Indians.
I have seen this myself. I have also experienced more than a few Indian colleagues who were far more critical of Indians in management than the rest of us were. I feel like there is an extra layer of dynamics that just isn't apparent if you are not accustomed to seeing it.
Out of curiosity, do they favor hiring Indians in general, or Hindu Indians in particular. (To the exclusion of Muslim Indians)
It's been awhile since I've seen it, but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination (by skin color, name or something else, I'm not sure) by other Indian managers and execs.
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]. A pair of professors are having a bad time trying to got CSU’s ban on caste-based discrimination thrown out on the grounds of being religiously discriminatory [2].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/us/california-caste-discrimin...
[2] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/23...
Newsom vetoed the ban [1]
From that article:
In a statement explaining his veto decision, Newsom said the measure was “unnecessary” because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited in the state.
(Just adding context that I would have missed if not for another commenter pointing it out further down)
For whatever it's worth, that's been a consistent trend with other things Newsom has vetoed with statements that he considers the vetoed item to be already covered by other laws, including some purely technical legislative things. I think it's likely that he sees himself as trying to keep California bureaucracy from growing indefinitely, especially with his push for things like CEQA process reduction/simplification.
It’s capital, political and financial. Everything costs, got to pay for gerrymandering somehow.
Vetoing costs. More than half the legislature voted for it.
It can win you a few friends but you lose more.
> but there was a very brief and small wave of articles perhaps a few years back claiming a lot of Indians in the US were still facing caste-based discrimination
Those articles based on a lawsuit were very heavily promoted on HN, however the complaint was by a single disgruntled employee who just happened to invoke the caste card and the suit was thrown out by the court.
The California DoJ failed to do basic due diligence before filing the lawsuit to the extent that the defendants filed a civil suit saying they were being discriminated against because of their race by the CA DoJ. Of course, these followups never got any traction on HN, because they didn't fit the narrative.
And now there are so many people, especially on HN and other developer forums that are utterly convinced caste based discrimination is very prevalent.
What do you think the intersection between HN and Blind is?
In the end nothing came of those allegations. There was no evidence of it. Lawmakers, who seem to have an anti Indian bias, pushed legislation banning something that wasn’t happening. It seemed to really just be a way to harass Indians or their religion, which is why it got vetoed I think.
Does caste discrimination still exist in India?
If yes, what leads you to believe that all first gen immigrants from India to the US magically stop doing it?
funny question, I believe we're more precisely talking about Brahmin "upper" caste hiring only from their caste. Muslims don't even come into the picture...
I don't think so. I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians. If they have to favor Hindu, Brahmin, Muslim is very subjective, depending on that person's background, but I would say very rare. If they really have a prefrence, it will be "the connect", like if they both can connect based on region (ex: Delhi or that region) but very few Indians of current generation would care about caste or religion.
> I feel Indian managers have a tendency to hire anyone else but Indians
I'd guess this varies massively depending on whether the hiring manager and the people they're hiring are H1-Bs.
Unless they have any personal advantage in doing so.
that is definitely part of it
Yep. And caste based discrimination is legal in the USA. Its not a protected EEOC class, as much as that doesn't matter in our legal environment.
So yeah, you can discriminate against Dalits, and hire predominantly Brahmins.
Except in Seattle, which explicitly bans caste discrimination as of 2023, and in California, which interprets its own state anti-discrimination laws to already include caste discrimination in other broader categories (which was the reason Governor Newsom gave when he vetoed a bill in 2023 to explicitly ban caste discrimination).
Quite a lot of tech companies hire in either Seattle, California, or both.
What’s the evidence? I remember seeing allegations but all the court cases resulted in nothing, because there was no evidence of such discrimination.
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How so? There are 172 million Muslims in India.
I think he means since they aren’t originally “Indian” but are colonizers of India who arrived through invasion.
That might have been the case 200+ years ago but for sure the majority of Indian Muslims these days are just descendants of converted Hindus and Buddhists, etc.
So are the brahmins. The indigenous religions of India are basically gone. Only remembered in various folklore.
Where can I read more about this? That the indigenous are gone?
Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.
I wouldn’t say it’s people ‘preferring’ it. The fact is, finding people that are competent enough to be hired is easier through referrals than other ways. And if you are receiving referrals, why wouldn’t you put them through the hiring process to see if they’re talented enough to hire? Rejecting those because they share the same race as the hiring manager is itself racist (since it would be taking race/ethnicity as a factor). In most big companies the hiring process has enough checks and balances to prevent nepotistic hires anyways (for example hiring panels or bar raisers or whatever).
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
> ”racist" seems to fail the Occam test here
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
This reminds me of the aphorism "The purpose of a system is what it does."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...
DEI arose to public consciousness around the same time that "whiteness" was often used as a synonym for bigotry and privilege. So long as academic circles (and those who come from them, such as the people now in HR departments) believe that having white skin is a sin, DEI will never be D, E or I.
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
I've never met a single HR person that could be characterized as coming from, or even brushing up against, an academic circle.
Much the opposite. They are usually the weaker animals in the herd or people who flipped out of corporate finance to negotiate benefits.
> HR departments [...] believe that having white skin is a sin
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
I've watched HR people break the law discriminating against white job applicants in the name of DEI. One in particular was fired for it, but it'd be foolish to think that it isn't happening more elsewhere.
And the upthread commenter has personal experience with HR people discriminating too. So what? The answer is both cases is clear regulation, which is what DEI is about. Can it be misapplied? Sure. Do people do bad things? Obviously. Is the specific anti-white conspiracy you imagine a direct threat to society? Please.
I’ve personally, repeatedly, and in writing seen HR actively discriminate against white men - as in refuse to hire them, and actively go out of their way to push them out due solely to their skin color and gender. At major fortune 50 companies. For years.
And I’m not the only one.
In fact, consent decrees with the DOL and at least one major fortune 50 (Google) explicitly required them to do so, to maintain ‘proportional representation with the population’ because of ‘over representation’. Meanwhile, Indian men got a free pass (for one example).
Trump is mostly bullshit, but he’s in power because of bullshit like this pissing people off. That is a threat to society.
Mostly because none of the things he’s doing are going to actually solve the problem but just get people angrier and angrier at each other. But the problem, at least at one point, was very real.
How is DEI about clear regulation? Equity is literally the opposite of "equal opportunity". It presumes that your skin color matters more than your personal circumstances.
And no, I don't think it is a threat to society. You don't need to invent fake arguments to put in my mouth.
All I said was that the packaging DEI is wrapped up in is toxic (actually, I said poison).
One of the knock-on benefits of DEI is that it allows second rate minds to self-identify. Empathy is massively important in this line of work, and you need to be curious instead of confused and upset when you run into Chesterton's Fence.
This is why DEI is so important. It’s a blunt tool, but still a tool, to short circuit the basic human desire to be within their network.
That's not what DEI does in practice. When you move away from merit hiring, you just end up hiring the minorities in your social network. Who, if they're from an "underprivileged" group, are usually even more privileged within that group than you are in yours, or else they wouldn't have met you.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
Or ‘even better’, someone in the same circle who can somehow check the box you need. Harvard grads hiring other Harvard grads, etc.
Coarse grained attributes like race, gender, sex, religion, etc. are not useful predictors of individual behavior or background.
It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.
I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.
So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.
Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).
So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
Thanks, was actually my main question on reading the article. "Why go to all that effort if an American will accept the job for the same pay and you don't have to deal with sponsorship?" This seems like one of the most likely reasons. Racism's been mentioned, yet leverage over employees who have very little other alternative seems somewhat more likely. American's will just leave and go look for another job. Probably much larger chance of having them lateral to a different company also.
fmajid in another thread had a similar paraphrase
> H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude.
It's probably greater difficultly to lateral also, since then there's another company talking with the government about sponsorship on somebody you're already sponsoring. A lot of banks and financials already have standing threats to fire anybody they even find looking around.
Do you see them selectively picking based on the caste of the Indian?
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What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent? There are more Indians in universities than the general population, and a lot more of them in engineering degrees than other degrees. It makes sense there are lots of Indians in some industries, both in the management roles and in the populations that managers are hiring from.
> What makes you think they’re racist versus just hiring the best available talent?
Yeah that’s never considered an acceptable argument whenever the ratio of white people in a company gets “too high”, don’t see why it should be any different with Indians.
You really think nobody in the continental US can do good work in tech? You will have to fight really hard to convince me that all the talent is non existent.
I didn’t say non existent. But in short enough supply at the appropriate level of skill to have different skews without any discrimination happening
For some visa types, companies are obligated to prove that they advertised the position to American citizens. Failed, hence they needed the foreigner.
This is a huge dealbreaker for campus hires, and specifically masters/PhDs who are, well, by definition, specialized in their field and hence very rare.
So you recruit at her graduation the girl who has done groundbreaking research in deep neural nets and is the key to one of your big projects. She happens to be non-American (because the majority of postgraduates are non-Americans).
Now what? You know that there is nobody else on the planet that has done this research, yet you have to start recruiting for this position for Americans.
What is the incentive you have as a company to pour a ton of resources on this effort? Recruiting is very expensive. Time is also very expensive when you are at the forefront of innovation.
So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface.
It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.
So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.
Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.
As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.
That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.
Isn’t it funny that in the past the only thing you had to do was simply show up?
"The "hacker ethos" seems to be in decline, for any number of interconnected reasons"
Instead of having job openings posted by those who don't want them found what if people posted willingness to work, perhaps in some sort of registry. That way a company would have to prove that none of the people willing to work are qualified. I'm sure many qualified people would be open to moving.
To anybody playing attention it's very clear SV tech vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local. It has been this way for multiple decades now (and gets worse every year.) I don't see this changing any time soon. Sure they get the occasional slap on the wrist, but the wage suppression saves them way more money over time.
> vastly prefers to import foreign labor rather than hire local
Salaries are extremely high in SV, why would they bother hiring foreigners if they can find good candidates locally?
I work in a big US tech company, and I do interview lots of candidates. Most of them graduated outside of the US. I can't believe that leadership would go to such great lengths to avoid local candidate. I think there are just not enough qualified applicants.
Nope, Infosys and friends aside, in SV companies would rather hire green card holders and US citizens because you have to sponsor the H1B/park and get a L-1, and sponsor the green card process. You just can’t ignore foreign talent, otherwise you’ll miss out on an incredible number of good employees
> the wage suppression
Do immigrants earn less than locals?
My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.
My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
Yes, but because the H1-B holders have to find a new employer within 2 weeks or lose their visa, the threat of firing is the same thing as deportation, making for a form of indentured servitude. That forced loyalty, more than the salary, is the real draw.
It's 60 days, not 2 weeks, and you can transfer an H1B over to a new job within that 60 days, or if you know you're going to be terminated (e.g. you're on a PIP) then you can transfer the H1B to a new employer anyway.
Wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to do so, but it's not an automatic deported from the country kind of deal.
This is the wrong logic. Immigrants can make exactly the same as natives and still suppress wages.
Fundamentally how prices are set is someone sets a price, and if there are no takers they change the price. If a company offers a salary, and they bring in an H1-B to fill the role, they don't have to raise the salary. Over time it suppresses the wage.
If that was the case, why would they have to hide the job offer? If no American citizen is going to take the job at the lower pay, there is no need to hide the offer from them. If they are going to take the lower pay, there is no advantage to hire an H1-B.
Presuming we're talking about the job offers from the article, it's for PERM, part of the process for green cards, not for H1B. As far as I know, you don't need to post a job offer to consider local candidates for someone to apply for an H1B, only for them to get permanent residence.
Employee works for a company under an H1B, company likes their work, wants them to stay longer (H1B has a max of 6 years unless you sponsor the employee for permanent residence). Employee doesn't want to be in this weird temporary worker status forever (and again, after 6 years they'll need to), so the company has two choices: either hire a new employee, hope they've as good as the one you already have under the H1B, train them up to be as familiar with the job and its work as the H1B, and then forget about getting the existing employee permanent residence, OR, just sponsor them for the PERM process, put out a job ad with a really low likelihood of anyone applying, and move on with their lives.
The way the PERM process is set up, there's really no reason not to do the hidden job ad, it's not really regulated against, there's not much financial harm in doing it, and they already have an employee they like and who wants to stay, so for those two parties (and presumably anyone who likes working with this person, and any friends they have in America and so on), there's no reason not to just put out the hidden job ad.
As far as I understand it, it's not just that they need for no American citizen to take the job. They need for no American citizen to apply for it.
Well that's precisely what they say on the visa sponsorship "we can't find the talent", no you can't find the talent at that price.
This assumes that the number of jobs in the US is magically fixed.
The thing is that all these mega-corporations have offices across the world, but currently want to hire in the US. You and I want our personal jobs to be expensive, but we don't want the prospect of hiring us where we live to be too expensive. And even aside from cost, you also don't want them to say "there's not enough employees there, it's not worth hiring."[0]
[0] I'm technically no longer living in the US, but I was until recently.
I don't think wages are suppressed because immigrant tech workers make less money. Instead, It seems like the effect of the dramatically increased supply of workers would dominate, effectively lowering wages; i.e., you can pay less money for a job the more workers there are to take the job.
If you look at the total cost of an employee and not just an annual salary, then the fact that they have far less mobility makes them cheaper. Why hire the person who will bail when you mistreat them so you have to spend all that time and money finding someone new when you can have someone who risks deportation if they decide they are done with your bullshit.
I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
It's just outsourcing training/education (again, the first wave already happened circa 2009-2013).
It’s not just that. It is also that people will do unsafe and unethical things to avoid being sent (back) to India. If it were only outsourcing it wouldn’t be dominated by Indians.
Bingo.
So grateful to see this being picked up by mainstream news outlets. Anecdotally I know quite a few engineers with experience ranging from small startup to long FAANG tenures that cannot even get an interview. It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs. At some point that became a radical stance and I'm sure I'll be flamed for it here.
>It makes no sense to source outside of the US when qualified American workers cannot get jobs.
This. It's getting to a boiling point now with so many people out of work who are more than qualified for these jobs being shunned from them, and now they are fighting back. I'm sure there are many here who work in tech that can relate who have gone through hundreds, possibly thousands, of applications and not hearing anything back.
Then work for a body shop for 1/4 the billing rate in Arizona, Lansing or whatever. You can get a better gig at Burger King.
There’s two ends to this market, the super smart people and the super dumb jobs. The volume is in people slinging COBOL, J2EE or whatever for awful wages.
The reality is the H1B in the dumb categories are keeping jobs onshore. Nobody is paying 2x for the work… the alternative is shipping everything, including the “better IT” and administrative jobs offshore.
Outsourcing needs to be eliminated. If the company is doing 20% of their business in Ohio, 20% of their workforce needs to be in Ohio. 12% in NY State, 12% of the workers need to be in NY State etc.
To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.
If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.
When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.
Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
I have no problem with giving the job to someone overseas but they can do that on their home turf.
Reminds me of the shenanigans you see when a govt job is required to be posted for open bid, but the dept already has an internal hire lined up.
I see everyone is for maximizing shareholder value until they are reminded they are workers first.
From experience: big tech has to post jobs to US citizens before it can hire on a visa or sponsor a green card. So the trick is to put an ad in a physical news paper and present that as evidence.
> According to the Justice Department, the companies absurdly required applicants to submit applications by mail [...] How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
I always wondered how they made sure no one applied to the position they wanted the H1B to fill
>Should the system rely so heavily on asking out-of-work Americans to act as goalies — if or when they happen to have the time?
A zinger of a concluding line if ever there was one.
All the h1bs constitute less than 1% of the jobs in us. They just want to divert the focus ! This is propaganda!
That's not the only way you can work in the US. "In 2023 17.9% of employed workers were immigrants"
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-percent-of-jobs-in-the-us-...
From your link
Immigrants are defined as foreign-born residents, including those who became US citizens
1% of all jobs is still a huge number of jobs in total terms. Spitball math put's h1b's much lower than that actually, .4 to .5% of all FTE positions.
That said, it almost certainly has an outsized impact on the tech sector, which only accounts for about 7% of the FTE positions nationally.
If we were to separate all jobs into categories like most-preferable, least-preferable, and a few other buckets in the middle of those, would the H1Bs be evenly distributed among them?
What percentage are they of the top (preferable) quintile of jobs? Are they just 0.5% of those, or are they more like 4% of those? Is it higher still?
Ranges from 20%-80% in tech roles from my experience.
What percent of tech jobs?
Don't have a percentage handy, but these resources are likely useful for your inquiry.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...
https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U...
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
(if you email Pew Research, I've found their research team to be receptive to inquiries when they have the data but did not include it in a publication)
> About 400,000 H-1B applications for high-skilled foreign workers were approved in 2024
That's more than I thought!
Compare to https://layoffs.fyi/
Fun fact: the payout from the meta settlement they reference works out to there being less than 4,000 members of the eligible class. Otoh getting a large check is always a pleasant surprise. I kept the letter cause it’s a huge amount
I recall there being a proposal to prioritize H1Bs based on salary, which would at least lessen or eliminate the race to the bottom and stuff like people training their lower paid replacements
We effectively replaced 43 h1b’s with AI. Looking to do more soon.
> However, in order for applications for permanent residency to be successful, companies must certify their inability to find a suitable American candidate to take the position they’re looking to fill with a foreign national
I mean, you know, if you already have an employee working on H1B, why would you take the risk to hire someone else to replace them? The perm process is pretty broken in that way.
If Apple and Meta have had to pay $38 million for engaging in these practices I don't understand why they used the subtle "chronically-online" dig against people trying to expose it:
"And this has given rise to a cottage industry of chronically-online types — in other words, typical tech workers — seeking to expose them."
What the… Yeah, I’m with you on that one. “We would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling chronically onlines seeing if we’re obeying federal law!”
The whole thing seems to oddly disdainful of the people being impacted:
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
To "use" a post office?
What like... any... other... store or building where you walk in, perform an action, and leave?
Ah crap, here I've been trying to walk into the side of the building for the past 3 hours.
"Midvale Post-Office for the Gifted."
I feel like there was a lot of nonsense ideas for what is such a short, and supposedly journalistically rigorous article
The Hill stays afloat by laundering political operative and rat-fucking articles. Politico to a lesser extent, but similar. Read those two sites with suspicion. Always.
One popular trick was to advertise the jobs in newspapers. The dead-tree edition only.
> How many 20-something software engineers even know how to use a post office in 2025?
Ok, come on, this is just an insulting "kids these days" throw-away line that is absolutely not necessary.
Doubley stupid because the task is about mailing a letter, which does not require a post office.
That's an editorial point, not a substantial one. Obviously requiring an application be submitted by an inconvenient and antiquated method that isn't used by the demographic in question is going to create friction and reduce the number of applications.
That this is expressed in a whimsical way (personally I liked the turn of phrase, but that's an issue of taste) might personally offend you but doesn't change the substance of the article.
It also has the effect of making the job posting seem fake, or like a scam, because who in their right mind would believe META, who has their own, in-house operated, online job application portal, would require a job application to be mailed in.
Right, imagine if the same posting was onlinen in a legitimate-looking spot, but for some reason the process required credit-card validation up front.
I'm not complaining about the substance, but the tone feels weirdly disdainful of the people impacted across the whole thing. It almost feels like the author was assigned this topic & overall goal, but hates the people she's writing about.
The crucial thing if you’re a foreigner is to look at the comments here and be very careful as to whether you’d empower a software engineer union full of these people to deport you.
In Savannah, the local unions got the Koreans deported from the Hyundai factory.
Didn't Apple used to post job openings in small local newspapers in the Midwest?
This crime has yet to be addressed.
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While I don't support the general intention of what MAGA and this movement to get H1bs out via the tactics described in this article, it's total bullshit to try to silence them in the legal tactic that instacart is using. I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
A lot of WASPs got very mad when Vivek wrote that tweet calling them out for being behind a lot of H1bs in quality but he's right on the mark. Sorry Peter and Paul, but you really did get B+'s when the H1b who takes your job got A+++ in everything for 4 years.
Regardless of H1Bs who received better grades, I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs. Citizens make the rules via governance, not corporations. You can hire someone good enough domestically vs the best globally to import. US corporations simply want the cheapest labor possible at the best possible price, which is where policy steps in. If it impairs your profits or perhaps even makes the business untenable, them the breaks.
At current US unemployment rates, no new H1B visas should be issued and existing visas should not be renewed based on criteria. If you're exceptional, prove it on an O-1 visa.
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-h1b-visa-middlemen-c... | https://archive.today/7JX9A - June 27th, 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (citations)
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
HN Search: h1b - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://h1bdata.info/
https://www.h1bsalaries.fyi/
> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs.
They already do though. Do you own any items made in other countries? If so, you’re competing with other workers already. It seems weird to focus on immigrants workers in America versus citizens in America while importation is allowed at all. I find all of this also very much in conflict with HN’s anti tariff attitude.
The US has been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. The result of trying to wall out competition is not going to be jobs for Americans. The result will be what happened to the American automotive industry, the American electronics industry, etc. They could not deliver competitive products at competitive prices and the various "Buy American" advertising campaigns were ignored by American consumers. Your Nintendo Switch, your Samsung SSDs and smartphones, your Hynix RAM, your Toyota cars, etc. are all proof of that. And it's much, much easier to for a competitor to create a new developer job opening overseas than construct a physical factory.
This doesn't holds water as an argument against labor protectionism, since we can point to China as a contemporary example with the opposite result. Much of the US's industrial base wasn't destroyed by consumer choice, but was intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons. It wasn't even simply about implementing an economic power structure the US could use to extend its influence. The Asian Tigers were built up to facilitate more powerful "strategic partners", a South Korea poorer than Gambia wouldn't be a very useful friend. That Samsung SSD is the product of a need for strategic power balancing in East Asia. The consumer doesn't matter nearly as much as you think they do when policy is the primary agent that shapes cost, often intentionally through second order effects like infrastructural design.
>>intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons
not geopolitical, but economical. US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits (you can lookup S&P 500 chart)
USA got S&P500 chart going up
China got industrialization
If either way I'm homeless, I'd at least rather have a chance at having the job rather than have my own government work against me.
The best jobs are with large corporations with offices all over the world. Workers from all over the world are competing with each other, regardless of the Kafkaesque state of American immigrant policy.
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/press-releases/new-moreno-bill...
https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...
(if you're a company with no US nexus or presence, and no access to the market, your hiring practices are up to your local jurisdiction; if you want access to the US market, you can hire in the US, I find this to be very reasonable)
If you're a US company that wants access to the Italian market you can hire in Italy.
I find this very reasonable.
This bill is a hunk of Swiss cheese. Great for lawyers and bankers and possibly global tech companies, depending on how it parses out in court.
I'm willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere.
> willing to walk before running. Have to start somewhere
It doesn’t walk anywhere. It’s another handout to finance and law. The B2B carve-out and lack of border adjustments makes this a regressive tax on consumers and manufacturers to fund tech, law and finance. (The only jobs this would materially cover are those in call centres for consumers. Which in practice, means voice LLMs.)
Like, I made money from tariffs. I will do well from the OBBA. I will do well from this bill. But American consumers and workers will keep getting screwed, and I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
>… I’m not sure how this playbook keeps working.
Just toss 170 billion to one of your various police forces so you’ve got the manpower to tamp down any tantrums from the people. It’s a pretty well worn tactic
> I don't think US workers should have to compete with 1 billion+ other global workers for their jobs
Why not?
Also friendly reminder 99.999% of US population is made of immigrants.
The Instacart thing is just bluster. If they tried to file any lawsuit against these guys it's be an easy SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) defense, which is a way to quickly throw out lawsuits in most states where corporations or others are trying to quell free speech.
I assume they would try to venue-shop for somewhere Anti-SLAPP protections are much weaker. Maryland and Virginia look particularly bad, for example (but IANAL).
>I really hope that it fails on freedom of expression grounds.
I really hope Congress acts to make Instacart's tactics felonious with harsh penalties that ruin the company so thoroughly that it terrifies the stock market to stop investing in companies with similar HR policies. Furthermore, if the HR employees who are responsible or even in the loop could be prosecuted and ruined, this would be good too.
The government has the power to allow corporations to incorporate and to continue to operate, but if these same corporations are harmful to our country's citizens then government also has both the power and responsibility to make it impossible for these corporations to continue to exist. There is no fundamental human right involved. Corporations exist at the sufferance of people, not the other way around.
This misses the point bigly. We can go ahead and use low-friction global best-candidate techniques as soon as we are all incorporeal ghosts in the digital world who don't physically live in any one country. Until then, we must protect our citizens (where "we" means everybody, not just the US).
Yeah, I think people mistake country and geographic area. The US is the 300+ million people that build and apply systems and institutions within an area, not the area itself. Coming to the conclusion that people here are interchangeable with people anywhere else and should constantly have to earn their place is fundamentally divorced from reality.
That's the real reason for the job market crisis; it is not AI, it's just corporate greed to have borderline slaves to lower job wages and workers willing to work extra hours for peanuts. AI is just the scapegoat, easy to blame it on something that's still new while also milking investors' money by promising how it will reduce costs and increase profits. If the job market crisis were really from AI, not only should it happen within a few years of adopting such new tech, but we should see its impact on other industries like lawyers, medical doctors, administrators, and lastly on tech workers, not the other way around.
That's why I keep saying and repeating: the tech industry and especially the engineering one should be further regulated and restricted just like other professions out there, otherwise, you are only allowing anyone to scam and game the system with any potential bubble currently happening.
I'm certainly not an expert in immigration law but this whole system seems pretty stupid.
On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens.
On the other hand, it would be extremely detrimental to the US to kill the golden goose of our tech industry by turning it into some kind of forced welfare for citizens. Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
And then of course, the entire program is structured in an extremely bureaucratic way, with all this nonsense about publishing job ads in secret newspapers.
It seems that these issues could be addressed very simply by tweaking Trump's proposed "gold card" system: anyone can get a work visa, by paying $100,000 per year. This is not tied to a specific employer. The high payment ensures that the only people coming over are doing so to earn a high salary in a highly skilled field. There is no tying the employee to a specific company, so it is fairer for citizens to compete against them.
> Another country which is able to hire the best from around the world will take our place.
But not all of the H1B folks are the best from around the world; they're simply significantly cheaper, and the reality of the H1B Visa also means that they're very unlikely to quit their jobs for greener pastures.
Yea that's exactly the point I'm making. If they came and paid a high visa payment, then they would not be significantly cheaper.
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).
Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.
The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
This will incentivize foreign intelligence services to fund their own market of conveniently cash flush moles.
Ah yes, any foreigner must be a secret agent
I'm beginning to see the tech industry as 1 part golden goose 10 parts shit to prop up an ailing stock market (aka boomer retirement funds). Theres going to be a weird deflationary/inflationary reckoning (depending on the market).
"On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens."
This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
Essentially, they want to hire a specific person, while the law requires that they post the job and prefer American citizens, so they don’t want American citizens to apply not that they prefer foreign workers in general they just have a specific candidate in mind.
I think Trump’s position of forcing companies to pay a substantial fee in exchange for a fast tracked green card is really the most sensible position instead of H1B. It should be less than $5 million, but I think if a company had to pay $300k not have any or limited protection against that person quickly finding a job in the. united states, then companies would generally prefer american workers in a way that makes economic sense, because talented workers can be acquired for a price, but not be kept for peanuts in exchange for less than an American worker, because they are stuck with the employer for 20 years if they come from a quota country.
If they had someone specific in mind the usual method is to have their resume next to you when you write up the job app. Make the requirements perfectly match their skills. Now you can say when you picked them that they were the best candidate all along.
I think it’s lot tricker for the large companies that tend to hire H1B visa holders to do this, because a manager would need to convince the HR department to violate the law, and the company might be concerned the risks involved are not a good idea if enough candidates apply.
Plus, there seems to be some indicator tha the job you are applying is an H1B position and they are posting them on sites for Americans to apply too. So it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of highly qualified idealogue’s applying to jobs they never wanted in the first place and reporting them to the government when they get rejected.
It doesn’t seem like a good idea to try and manipulate the system with the current government’s willingness to go after companies.
If they’ll go after a US ally like Hyundai for using ESTA under the VWP illegally, when Hyundai could probably have easily applied for and been granted B-1 visas. Can you imagine what they would do to a company illegally sponsoring H1B visas?
That's one of several tactics. But if someone did apply and was close enough, you still have to do the interview and reject song and dance. Better to deter applications in the first place.
This is hilarious.
There's another thing happening which people haven't really heard much about, which is basically ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments. And so people that previously would never have filed something like a discrimination lawsuit can now use ChatGPT to understand how to respond to managers' emails and proactively send emails that point out discrimination in non-threatening manner, and so in ways that create legal entrapment. I think people are drastically underestimating what's going to happen over the next 10 years and how bad the discrimination is in a lot of workplaces.
> ChatGPT Pro is really good at making legal arguments
It’s good at initiating them. I’ve started to see folks using LLM output directly in legal complaints and it’s frankly a godsend to the other side since blatantly making shit up is usually enough to swing a regulator, judge or arbitrator to dismiss with prejudice.
Posted my response below, you have no idea how impactful this is going to be
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That's all well and good, but anyone who does this will likely just be terminated asap without cause, possibly as a part of a multi-person layoff that makes it appear innocuous.
First call should be to an employment attorney and the EEOC, no matter what, before you sign anything.
https://www.eeoc.gov/how-file-charge-employment-discriminati...
That’s not quite right. To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year. Most people can’t afford a lawyer to manage that. But if you’re a regular employee, you can use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently. With diligent, organized evidence, you absolutely can build a case; the hard part is proving it, and ChatGPT is great at helping you gather and frame the proof.
> To win a discrimination case, you typically need to document a pattern of behavior over time—often a year
Where did you hear this?
> use ChatGPT to draft calm, non-threatening Slack messages that note discriminatory incidents and keep doing that consistently
This is terrible advice. It not only makes those messages inadmissible, it casts reasonable doubt on everything else you say.
Using an LLM to take the emotion out of your breadcrumbs is fine. Having it draft generic stuff, or worse, potentially hallucinate, may actually flip liability onto you, particularly if you weren't authorised to disclose the contents of those messages to an outside LLM.
With respect, it seems you haven’t kept up with how people actually use ChatGPT. In discrimination cases—especially disparate treatment—the key is comparing your performance, opportunities, and outcomes against peers: projects assigned, promotions, credit for work, meeting invites, inclusion, and so on. For engineers, that often means concrete signals like PR assignments, review comments, approval times, who gets merges fast, and who’s blocked.
Most employees don’t know what data matters or how to collect it. ChatGPT Pro (GPT-5 Pro) can walk someone through exactly what to track and how to frame it: drafting precise, non-threatening documentation, escalating via well-written emails, and organizing evidence. I first saw this when a seed-stage startup I know lost a wage claim after an employee used ChatGPT to craft highly effective legal emails.
This is the shift: people won’t hire a lawyer to explore “maybe” claims on a $100K tech job—but they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull. On its own, ChatGPT isn’t a lawyer. In the hands of a thoughtful user, though, it’s close to lawyer-level support for spotting issues, building a record, and pushing for a fair outcome. The legal system will feel that impact.
> they will ask an AI to outline relevant doctrines, show how their facts map to prior cases, and suggest the right records to pull
This is correct usage. Letting it draft notes and letters is not. (Procedural emails, why not.) Essentially, ChatGPT Pro lets one do e-discovery and preliminary drafting to a degree that’s good enough for anything less than a few million dollars.
I’ve worked with startups in San Francisco, where lawyers readily take cases on contingency because they’re so easy to win. The only times I’ve urged companies fight back have been recently, because the emails and notes the employee sent were clearly LLM generated and materially false in one instance. That let, in the one case that they insisted on pursuing, the entire corpus of claims be put under doubt and dismissed. Again, in San Francisco, a notoriously employee-friendly jurisdiction.
I’ve invested in legal AI efforts. I’d be thrilled if their current crop of AIs were my adversary in any case. (I’d also take the bet on ignoring an LLM-drafted complaint more than a written one, lawyer or not.)
No I think the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it. You obviously can’t copy paste its email output, but you can definitely verify what are legal terms, and how to position certain phrases.
> the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it
Totally agree again. LLMs are great at collating and helping you decide if you have a case and, if so, convincing either a lawyer to take it or your adversary to settle.
Where they backfire is when people use them to send chats or demand letters. You suggested this, and this is the part where I’m pointing out that I am personally familiar with multiple cases where this took a case the person could have won, on contingency, and turned it into one where they couldn’t irrespective of which lawyers they retained.
The legal system is extremely biased in favor of those who can afford an attorney. Moreover, the more expensive the attorney, the more biased it is in their favor.
It is in effect not a legal system, but a system to keep lawyers and judges in business with intentionally vaguely worded laws and variable interpretations.
Exactly. And it’s comical that the person I was debating with doesn’t understand this. Proclaimed investor in legal tech misses the biggest use case of ai in legal - providing access to people that can’t afford it or otherwise wouldn’t know to work with a lawyer
It isn't just corporations, its the federal government. The same ones hiding the rampant student rape issue at UIUC Champaign