So that’s the price of a slave in 2025 huh?
“Little India(s)” (not my wording, just what they’re called) have popped up around every major tech company in Texas. Entire neighborhoods of 1,000 homes with nothing but visa workers hired on the cheap by tech companies. I’m honestly surprised the suburban Republicans haven’t been going after this more
This is an interesting move especially since he’s so buddy buddy with the tech CEOs.
I’m curious what these exceptions are and whether they already know how to exploit them.
I’ve never liked seeing tech companies abuse the H1B process, but I always thought it was better than outsourcing.
At least with H1B, you’re competing against someone who has to pay rent and taxes and grocery prices in the US.
If they don’t also tariff outsourcing, companies could just do more of that.
Can’t speak to IT but this will absolutely destroy the sciences. Americans are generally not interested in STEM and a large number of the scientific workforce in universities and industry are foreigners that have obtained their PhDs in the US and are staying for postdoctoral fellowships or industry positions.
This argument has the same flaw as arguments about Americans “not wanting to work” in other jobs that are majority immigrant like construction and agriculture.
If any of these jobs paid well for the level of profit they generated, Americans would do them. Everywhere you see an immigrant filling a role in America (MAGA would say “talking a job”), you’re looking at a horrifically undercompensated worker being abused by greedy capitalists.
The only bad guys in America are the ultra wealthy, their apologists (paid or no), and their enablers. They should all go up against the wall and get a very stern talking to.
Those abused workers are our comrades.
I now cannot edit posts (keep getting a 403 returned), but to be clear - I believe the same thing should happen for science as I would like in IT, perhaps even more so - immigration should be relaxed outside the parameters of H-1B, and it should be something fast-tracked as much as possible for this kind of work especially. Last thing we need to do is have even more of a brain-drain.
For IT, it’d be about calling the bluff of many companies saying they cannot find talent here for people to write code - for science, I’m sure it’s actually true that you really want to scour the globe for talent. But it’d also be ideal that they have as much autonomy as anyone else here in the workforce, and not tied down by one entity.
In the abstract I agree with you. The problem is that this administration has implemented this with absolutely no plan, no consultation, no protocols for implementations and no way to transition. To do what you suggest requires years of deliberate planning and funding of sciences so that there is continuity as the nation builds its domestic STEM workforce. Which by the were ALL THINGS NSF was studying and implementing before the administration gutted them.
Yeah no joke. STEM research is already ~50% (usually more) foreign; I don’t have the numbers but I would wager that there are more academic H1Bs than industry ones (since academic has no cap) and they are the main victims of this policy
Even before Trump I’ve heard anecdotes of ppl fighting tooth and nails with their uni/institute for H1B sponsorship because it would cost the employers a few thousand extra per year. This ends up with a lot of international postdocs on the highly temporary and sometimes predatory J1/OPT statuses… Slapping a $100k fee on H1B would just kill the field lol. Not that this administration cares about STEM to begin with
Speaking of which… I was the one warning my colleagues that Trump would come for the H1Bs and no one listened. Guess I was right after all…
And before anyone says “but theyre just taking skill out of the country” no they usually work inside the US. As it turns out being taught by and alongside Americans makes you most ready for an american workplace.
You have any numbers? The way the H-1B system is exploited in IT is a shit show.
True, US got Melania, right?
She got an EB-1 visa.
“Got”
Honestly, I detest Taco, but the H-1B thing - at least within IT - is a scam to suppress wages within the IT industry. Not that I think Taco is doing this for labor rights, but more for the xenophobia. I’d much rather more oversight was put on this and far, far fewer visas issued, and only for very extreme, well vetted, situations.
If companies really need more workers, give more foreigners full citizenship and the ability to properly negotiate wages! But they do not want workers with actual mobility, they want obedient indentured servants who are highly fearful of losing their job.
Also, never believe the bullshit coming from companies about not being able to source talent in the United States. Especially when there are so many job-seekers - you can just assume that is total bullshit.
I have direct experience of knowing someone that not only was underpaid for their work, they were also footing the bill for legal and via fees to maintain the h1b. Its a huge oversight problem that the government is too lazy to fix so they are going the easy way out and making it financially difficult to justify the visa application. What about the EB1 visa? Is that the gold one now?
Bingo. I had interviews with Apple and Google with 2 relevant collage degrees. They offered $18/hour. I quit a $25/hour job to get through college.
Too bad back then. I was an Apple fanatic back in the day and their next ad campaign was exactly my skillset. The whole experience really soured the company for me and I never bought another product from them again.
Followup - I’m glad to see this upvoted so much. I remember trying to talk about this in the 90s - online as well as IRL - and people would just generally shrug and just say, “well, you’re just racist”. Which is just an incredibly stupid dodge and has nothing to do with any of the matter at hand.
I honestly think it was intentionally set up just like that so much discussions about it were thoroughly ignored and sidelined with such “arguments”. Reminds me of the way Israel was discussed, TBH. I think the tide is turning on both for similar reasons - there is no longer such a choke hold by corporate gate-keepers.
I think we should grant them full residency for the duration, with an easy path to permanent residency if they behave while they’re in the country (eg not getting arrested or something, being gainfully employed throughout in their field). If these are people that really have skills we have a critical shortage of, then we should be begging them to stay in the country.
I think the main problem is one of lateral mobility once they have a visa. Having people who make 10x what they make in their home country, and they can’t change jobs if they’re mistreated, effectively means they’re okay with being treated like slaves for a few years. Which makes the market suck for everyone else. If companies had to actually worry about retaining H1Bs because they could change jobs after sponsoring a visa, the problem would mostly solve itself.
Yep. I’ve been saying this since the 90s. :)
We should want this kind of talent here, and we shouldn’t be treating them like shit and acting like it’s some kind of major privilege to even be here 6 years (max) since they don’t make as much at home.
We should entice them to come and stay here, not treat them like a used Kleenex once their six years is up…if we are even supposed to believe the narratives from the capitalists, they are precious commodities to be found nowhere else. But then we kick them out after 6 years unless they find some other way to stay? The narrative is not even consistent.
Yep, as long as the employer is the one paying the $100k, this is actually a good change.
Employers are the ones generally sponsoring these visas, but when they cost more than hiring domestically, maybe that’ll change.
No, it just means they’ll offshore even more jobs than they are now.
Look up the Hire Act of 2025. I think the GOP is finally doing something helpful. Somehing about a clock being right, twice a day, etc.
Good grief, what a great idea. This is the kind of thing that progressive and even moderate Democrats should be doing. It’s weird to see the GOP reverse themselves of decades of “free trade” dogma and, on some things at least, starting to sound like the kinds of things you’d hear left-leaning people say in daily life. Given that it’s the GOP, I have to suspect the motives, but still…
I think a good idea would be to give companies some time to adapt, with a planned hike, constantly making it more and more steep. Something like 25% now as the act proposes, raising it 10-15% every year, to hit some max planned amount, but then revisiting and adjusting year after year, based on whatever variables would be relevant, like how many Americans are estimated to be out of work in related sector(s), etc.
many small or medium-sized companies “will tell you they actually can’t find workers to do the job”.
Hahahahahahahaaa… BULLSHIT.
There are PLENTY of workers out there, there just aren’t many willing to work for sub-poverty wages.
If your business relies on H1B workers in order to exist, then you either have an abysmally shitty business plan, or you’re pulling too much out of the company for your own benefit.
Exactly. H1B’s are the band-aid companies use to pay $60K/year for $125K/year jobs, not because “they can’t find talent”, but because they “can’t find talent willing to do the job for that little”. It’s another form of “socialism for the rich”.
Yep, 100% this. I was in IT during the dot-com bubble burst, and unfortunately, things like H-1B caps are not lowered to accommodate the realities of the job market - or at least not nearly soon enough. And bastard companies were claiming they still needed H-1Bs in the huge downturn where hundreds would apply for the most shitty of low-level web coding jobs. No, they needed that to boost their quarterly earnings and funnel more money to mahogany row instead of paying market rates for the work.
I would think right about now that we need about ZERO H-1Bs in America’s IT market given the way things are. If there really is some crazy niche thing that requires some truly rare talent, okay, sure. But bringing tens of thousands in only to do the same kinds of things people here can do and many of them are jobless? No, fuck that.
How do you feel about people who, as foreign students, have just completed a 4-year degree at an American university and need an H-1B to get a job in and remain in the USA?
What I’m proposing is that people have an easy path to stay and work here, ideally permanently (but of course up to the individual), without the H-1B program being used.
You will likely need to work for a company that can have you remote or in another office that’s outside the US…
I’m not the person up above, but I think your question might not be meaningful. The fact that some people are willing to work under a visa that is being abused by hundreds or thousands of employers doesn’t mean that those people are bad, or that they don’t deserve to have a job somewhere, but it does mean that the visa program should be fixed.
We also see in many countries, and I think in the United States, that when you have narrowly tailored work visas implemented in careless ways, it gives the employer leverage to abuse their employee, especially in the period leading up to visa renewal, but just in general. If we want to minimize human rights violations and labor exploitation, we should give people general residence visas that are not tied to jobs, or at least not tied to any specific job or field.
I mostly agree except for two things:
- I am financially biased in this matter, so my perspective is suspect.
- This is literally the only policy I’ve ever agreed with Trump on during either of his terms. I suspect there’s an angle I haven’t considered because why would Trump ever do anything that wasn’t horrible?
I just left my position as a contractor with a major car company due to RTO. I was one of two non-Indians on my team and I know most if not all of them were on visas. This is going to be a big disruption. I’ll bet that RTO policy goes into the toilet.
RTO = return to office?
Yes
This goes into effect in around 24 hours. It looks like it’s gonna be as chaotic as the Muslim travel ban. You’re gonna have some H1Bs that have already started their air travel right now. And they’re gonna show up on Sunday after a long flight, and customs is gonna ask them to pony up 100 grand on the spot at the airport or get deported.
UPDATE: An anonymous white house official told the New York Times that the situation is not as fast moving as the above interpretation suggests. The administration intends to apply the fee to new applications only, regardless of what the stupid proclamation actually says.
Yeah, as usual with Taco, his implementation is garbage. In this case, there is actually a decent seed of an idea, and I’m surprised his owner-donors even allowed it.
I suspect if something were to happen to him, and “JD” “Vance” were to take over, this would be reversed ASAP and probably even have the WH issuing grand apologies to the owner-donors. I’m sure this has positively enraged the tech bros and if they can get away with it, they’ll move as much offshore as a way to punish any workers here that might be getting uppity notions.
So I (kinda) understand where this is going with an attempt to protect Americans. but how does it not just blow up and instead of offering more jobs to Americans in the US, won’t companies just offshore the jobs instead of offering them here?
What jobs? Nobody is hiring other than ICE.
That’s the threat that American companies use to keep the thing going. Honestly, we should tax the living shit out of services done offshore, too.
That is correct. Actually an economist on NPR suggested that the main theory is that access to those workers tends enable some places (in this case the Hyundai plant) to open more locations since they can scale better.
That’s not to say you can have zero rules, but it doesn’t historically come at a cost the same way off shoring does (and it’s usually still more expense than offshoring, though for manufacturing that’s getting obvious hiccups).
Make it a million.
Also, I doubt this will actually happen.
And if it does, all those megacorps will simply enhance their offshore development centers. They’ll not hesitate to fuck over the h-1b holders, who are mostly perfectly nice and normal people just like everyone else. Heck, most of the ones I’ve met were really nice.
They’ll not hesitate to fuck over the h-1b holders
This is the entire point of the system. It’s to make them beholden to the company and entirely disposable. It’s also set up to be rampantly ageist. What happens after the 3/6 year term is up? Well, time to replace you with a new one, probably younger, because Jebus forbid we pay you market rates for your seniority! Away with you…
A far more healthy option would be to offer full citizenship to the workers we supposedly cannot source locally. That doesn’t put the company in the driver’s seat. It would benefit America, though, by having this talent come here, grow roots, and enrich the nation. We want to encourage smart people to come here and be full participants, not indentured servants that only stay here on a company’s whim. Hell, more than a few might even start businesses of their own, and in this free market system, aren’t we supposed to be celebrating that?
Honestly, if Taco were to just unconstitutionally declare tariffs on random countries and at random levels, we could do worse than having services like offshoring heavily tariffed.
There is no reason that work cannot be done here, most especially if we have people in IT looking for work. This is one area where jobs can and would be done locally, without drastic retooling, retraining, and building out infrastructure, unlike the kind of things Taco has been doing on a whim to manufacturing and farming.
I make that point every time the Trumpers in my family rail on about the small number of manufacturing jobs we might see come back due to tariffs. Outsourced jobs are in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and none of them require massive infrastructure re-shoring to get off the ground.
If a company can’t profit without offshoring jobs, they don’t need to exist. There are plenty of companies ready to fill that gap with people that live and work onshore, and plenty of people with entrepreneurial spirit ready to start new companies when they aren’t competing with labor making 10% of what someone here would make to do the same job.
I could not agree more. Think of it - so many Americans were/are told that the information economy is the future, we need technocrats, information workers, etc., and to go get educated (or in some later cases, people were told to go to coding boot camps) and get a bachelor’s, probably in something like computer science.
And people do that, putting a whole lot of time and effort into that, often coming out carrying a big load of student debt.
Then, absurdly rich oligarch assholes actively work to take AWAY all of those jobs (starting at least as far back as the 80s) and that path to the American dream by constantly finding the cheapest places to do that work. In some cases, the government actually had programs to help companies do this (offshoring). For companies that don’t necessarily want to work with people in other time zones, they set up the H-1B so they could bring cheap exploitable labor here. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because companies would do this kind of shit for coal mining - bring in a foreign labor force to help set labor upon labor.
I mean: what the actual fuck are we even doing here? And this kind of schizophrenic messaging and policy has dragged on for decades. I get that not everyone is cut out for this kind of work, but if you said this was the future, while hollowing out manufacturing at the same time and saying the information sector was where things are going, and then work to fuck up that, too, well, no fucking wonder a lot of Americans are hopping mad about it.
The HIRE Act of 2025 is the other edge of the double-edged sword on that front. In order for jobs to really be re-shored, we need both the fix to the H1B program, and that act. Both make it prohibitively expensive to replace American workers with cheaper labor source from outside the country. I hope we get both, but I’m also a pessimist.
I really thought it was a Flu variant when I read the title.
Fascism is infectious so, kinda.
RIP high tech work force
Let’s make it $200,000.
Yeah… the problem is outsourcing, not H1B
That is actually pretty easy to remedy, and Taco might actually do something like that, but for entirely the wrong reasons. I’d still be very much okay with it.
To paraphrase the likes of Chomsky - there is no law of nature that should allow capital and services to flow unfettered around the globe (while humans are restricted in that movement, oddly enough). There is every reason to believe and to expect that a responsible government would punitively tax such things as services being sought at bargain basement rates. I know capitalists might like to claim that they would be getting “punished” merely for “innovating”, but seeking out the cheapest labor and maximizing the exploitation is hardly innovation.
If those companies cannot hire workers here (ones here already or ones they have enticed to come here to be full citizens) and at market rates, they don’t deserve to be in business.
I mean, they could make the sponsorship of the visa cost money instead…
