- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/627596
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The part few people seem to be mentioning is that visa fees are a source of funding for ICE, if companies actually end up paying these fees at current visa rates it would be $6.5 Billion annual funding for ICE
LOL. This isn’t going to happen. Trump himself is an idiot but I’m sure there’s someone on his staff who realises that this would decimate the US tech industry. This is another one of those TACO art of the deal type situations.
So many people replying who would have been very wrong every other time he TACO’d.
Trump himself is an idiot but I’m sure there’s someone on his staff who realises that this would decimate the US tech industry.
The tech industry itself is probably bugging him about this. They’re kinda on his staff.
You missed the headline, it has already happened. Whether he caves later, is a different story.
Not really, that’s just how Trump does things, like the tariffs.
You think anyone on his staff gives a fuck about employment? That’s cute.
Who said employment? It hurts the companies, and by extension the CEOs.
You do realize that they actually want to decimate the tech industry and stop funding for all scientific research?
Cutting all STEM and biomedical research has decimated the US tech industry already. This will end foreign trained post docs in the US and US trained alternatives are third rate.
this isn’t going to happen
Watch it
How many American tech workers are unemployed right now?
Plenty, and that’s actually part of the problem. The tech industry has used “there are no local workers so we need H1B’s” as an excuse to keep wages artificially lowered and working conditions in the fucking toilet. There are plenty of skilled tech workers in America… They just don’t want to put up with the bad pay and 80 hour crunch weeks that the industry is demanding.
The H1B system has been a conduit for worker abuse for a long time, because it ties the worker’s legal status to their job. So they’ll be willing to put up with awful working conditions, because quitting means they’ll be facing deportation. The same way that the agriculture industry relies on illegal immigrants to cheaply harvest crops, the tech industry relies on H1B workers to keep wage expectations suppressed.
Honestly, this feels a little like a “broken clock is right twice a day” moment. Trump is doing this for all the wrong reasons, (he’s probably trying to recoup a portion of the massive tax cuts he gave to the rich, and have some leverage to use against the tech industry to get them to fall into line with the regime), but I do think it’ll be a net benefit for American tech workers. I foresee it hurting the smaller startup companies the most… But that’s because Trump is likely going to go “if you agree to fall in line, I’ll waive the fees.” But that will only apply to the big companies that Trump actually cares about.
The bigger concern is actually academia. There are a lot of H1B visas in universities, and those visas are largely earned. These are well respected researchers and professors who are the best at what they do, and deserve those visas because the university can make a genuine “this talent isn’t available in our country” argument. And Trump almost certainly won’t offer any kinds of waivers to the universities, because conservatives hate higher education. These tech industry will shift towards outsourcing, (which is already extremely common), but academia won’t be able to do that.
I suspect that these are fully separate things. They won’t find people in the US with the required knowledge of skills and hire them in other countries instead.
All the ones that will still be more expensive than Chinese ones I guess.
This will severely mess up academia. A large portion of faculty and post docs are on H1Bs. These are people who are literally the best at what they do and all of them are going to be kicked out.
He might TACO over the tech industry, but it’s pretty clear at this point he’s happy to bury labs and universities.
Academia has already been shut down by NIH and NSF cuts. This is just more anti intellectual action targeting the research that used to drive the US economy.
Or maybe the US GDP will recover on Labubu dolls.
“Smart people don’t like me.” – Trump
Forced brain drain
Based on the 2024 H1B numbers, that translates to roughly 35,000 NEW H1B applications for 2025 Q4 that will be affected.
Over the next year the expected impact is 85,000 jobs (the cap of 65,000 plus 20K advanced degree holders) and $8.5B in salaries to US workers, assuming that no company is willing to pay the fee, that no role is outsourced, and that the job vacancy is actually filled by a US worker.
I’m not sure what renewals look like if they are also affected by the $100K fee or included in the 85K cap.
assuming that no role is outsourced
Sure dude.
I think you’re on to something. This could accelerate the movement of tech jobs to India & other countries vs just importing cheap labor.
In the past, when tech jobs were outsourced, it was just the coders. Lately, ilve noticed entire teams being outsourced, manager, project/product managers, coders, agilists, designers and others. Big companies are letting all technology be performed offshore and only the business units remain. This administration policy move could accelerate this trend, which could have far reaching implications.
Always assume that companies will be motivated by profits. Since Trump has made it expensive to hire H1bs expensive, the companies would rather pay non-Americans because that’s still cheaper than hiring Americans.
But don’t tell that to the racists on reddit. They’re very happy by this decision.
Uplifting news. Remember when Musk said he would go to war for H1Bs?
Added fees to cover the cost of deporting you the minute you enter fascist land states.
I think that’s a good thing, right? They’ve been using these to under pay people for ages.
Makes it hard to use h1bs the way they were supposedly meant to be used; to make it easier to hire talent that can’t be found domestically. It think this will accelerate offshoring even more. I would have preferred the program was just reformed to make gaming the “prevailing wage” requirement harder, and to give h1b workers more freedom so they’re not as easily exploitable.
This is my belief. Companies will hire people in their existing foreign offices and that talent will never come into the US.
Not really. The desire to under pay people is stronger than the desire to have a workforce in the US.
Also, the term “under pay people” is a complex one. Sure, it might be below average for a US citizen, but a great opportunity for someone from somewhere else.
At the same time, recent headlines about “CS degree holders aren’t guaranteed a job anymore” wouldn’t be happening without the program.
H1Bs were badly abused, companies would post jobs with ridiculous requirements, throw away the resumes they got, and then claim there were no Americans willing and ready, so they neeed that immigrant. It’s driven down wages and jobs.
But the solution wasn’t to axe the program, rather figure out a better solution that doesn’t fuck over Americans.
for technology? no. they will simply hire remote outsourcing firms instead of importing people
They already can. How is hiring an H1B any different than outsourcing? For a higher cost, you get a local workforce in the same time zone with a higher quality of work. That’s the same proposition as hiring citizens. Sure, if H1Bs didn’t exist, or were made more equitable such that H1B workers are fairly compensated, some percentage of the current H1B jobs would be outsourced. But I bet it’d be a low percentage since that option already exists yet companies have decided that a local workforce is worth an extra cost.
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outsourcing firms pay their staff maybe 1/10th what the h1b guys are making.
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all the h1b tech guys i know are happy about living in the us. i think many of them intend to go for citizenship
Yeah, H1B people are people too. They’re capable and looking to better their lives. It’s a better deal for them to come and work in the current conditions than it is for them to stay home, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. But the problem is, they’re stuck in their jobs under threat of deportation, and companies know that treating them like shit is still better for them than going home. Companies use it as a way to extort them, pay them paltry wages, and to lower the leverage of citizens so they can pay them less too. So we either need to make the H1Bs less appealing to companies so that employing H1Bs is not preferrable employing citizens (i.e. add massive cost), or give the H1B people additional leverage so that if companies treat them like shit, they can work elsewhere.
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Doesn’t that contradict their requirement to be in the office??
what
If they’ll outsource the workers overseas, instead of hiring citizens, that would go against their pushes to get everyone to return to the office.
Most American tech companies have offices in India.
Microsoft alone has at least 10 offices.
Google has 7 offices. 3 of them are in Bangalore. Facebook and Apple have 5 each.
And it’s not just tech. Morgan Stanley has 4 offices in India, JPMC & Goldman Sachs each have 3.
Trump will waive the fees for compliant companies (Amazon, etc.) while enforcing it everywhere else. Small companies will lose, and it’ll be just that much more leverage that Trump has over corporations in general.
They’ll pay the fee and underpay the H1-B visa holders even more to make up the difference.
They’re indentured servants. They can’t quit or they risk being deported by an increasingly violent ICE.
They can’t make up the difference, they pay them less than $100k. This could work out if it makes hiring H1Bs more expensive than hiring citizens. After all, the reasoning behind H1Bs is that the skills are so specialized that companies can’t find citizens to fill the positions, so it’s only logical that such skill would cost a premium (it doesn’t because it’s being abused to exploit immigrants and suppress wages for everyone).
H1Bs are temporary, the workers are going back at some point. And with the job market as competitive as it is, do we really need to bring in more workers?
I’m sure this will be astonishingly poorly implemented, if it ever gets past the “say random shit to distract from other issues” phase. But the core of the idea is solid.
Which was my original point. Nurses especially suffer in states like Florida, where they can get away paying them $30/hr to take on 7 high acuity patients, because if they won’t work for that, the hospitals just bring in H1Bs.
According to the article there’s no details on how the fee is to be applied, but it’s certainly not going to workers.
Quite the opposite, thyell recoup it from the workers.
Well, they’re also raising the minimum amount that the h1b workers can be paid (yes, that’s a thing, it’s called “prevailing wage”), so the goal of this is to make hiring h1b more expensive overall.
In practice, what I think will happen is a combination of more offshoring of junior by big tech, an increase in the number of h1b positions that big tech will take out of the lottery pool for senior positions. If big tech is already paying a senior, well qualified, h1b position with total comp of $300k or more, a 30% increase in total costs probably won’t make an impact.
For other fields working on smaller profit margins, they’ll likely stop bidding in the h1b lottery.
If the administration were serious about their goals of increasing stem capacity in the country they’d be partnering with higher education to drive more talent into those fields. But the admin is openly hostile to education, so that’s clearly not the goal.
Currently, there’s an oversupply of comp sci recent graduates trying to find jobs.
My guess is that this change by itself won’t do much to increase domestic demand for early in career comp sci graduates, but will increase it intentionally. The us government is doing other things that will marginally increase domestic demand, like only allowing people physically located in the us to work on the datacenters that AWS, Azure, etc run for the FedGov exclusive use. But that’s not going to create enough positions to really make a impact on the overall industry.
Username does not check out
It’s still a $100,000 deterrent, and maybe when news of the degrading working conditions reach the homeland there will be less applicants.
Probably fewer instead
It’s a $100k fee, not a $100k minimum salary. Meaning it will be that much more expensive to employ them
