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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   33755 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa) to the government due to Donald Trump executive order, plus if you are currently overseas and hold a H1B you need to pay $100k effective immediately on your next entry into the USA if you are not within the country by the 20th of September.

As a foreign non-Lawyer I don't know how effective this is going to be/liable to be immediately derailed in the courts, but I do think it's a positive step towards ensuring skilled immigration is used for the genuinely effective instead of ye olde 'I can import a foreigner who I have more power over at a 10% discount rate to domestic workers'. I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires and wish them the best of luck in attempting to offshore the competencies required to make AI-powered Grindr for Daily Fantasy Sports

This may be "directionally correct" but it's too much and too sudden. This is currently positioned as a direct fuck-you to H-1B holders and the companies who hire them, with policy goals secondary. If they want to fix the abuse problem long term of companies underpaying H-1B, they can put a sliding salary tax for companies hiring under the median H-1B wage, up to a cap on the median wage. E.g. if you pay your tech guy 100k and median is 130k, then pay an addition 15k to the government.

Currently there are two problems:

  1. America has only 4% of the world's population but 25% of the GDP. We need to brain drain other countries to ensure economic dominance in the long term.

H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries. ~100-200k H-1B holders in the country is only 0.1% of the 160M workforce, which is evidence that it is used to attract exceptional talent, for the most part. Top companies like FAANG plays by the book here, they do not generally pay H-1Bs less than local talent, they just want the best people.

  1. There's H-1B abuse in lower tier consulting companies, where they use H-1B as a source of cheaper labor.

This is the problem the administration should fix by adding taxes and fees.

The difficulty is to solve both problems at once. I don't think the program is perfect, but effectively killing it will be detrimental to the US in the long term. Yes, instituting a 100k/year fee on top for every H-1B employee will effectively kill this program.

H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries.

Thats not what H1-Bs are for though. The EB-1A is the "genius visa", and it does not appear to have the $100,000 fee.

H1-Bs are for filling "specialist" roles that "cannot be filled by Americans", and are universally acknowledged to be heavily abused. While I have only run into a few H1-Bs in my industry, none of them impressed me with their acumen or work ethic, and frankly i would have let them go if I had control over it. The EB-1As Ive worked with though have all been frigging rock stars.

The EB-1 priority date for several countries is years back, which means you have to wait years before they'll even start processing the application. And the standards for it (and its non-immigrant counterpart O-1) are very high. H-1B is certainly abused, but it makes sense to have a visa for highly skilled in-demand workers who aren't the tippy-top of their field. Doing something to prevent bringing in interchangeable morons on H-1B woud be great. Nuking the program with a ruinous fee is not good at all.

I disagree. H-1B is not just "certainly abused", it's universally abused. I'm not saying that H-1Bs are all morons, but some are, and the not-morons are, while competetant, not above replacement level. America generates highly skilled in-demand workers from its domestic population in sufficient numbers to fill any role an H-1B would fill, its just that corporations jave not wanted to spend the time and money to develop the pipeline.

Also, 100k is almost the perfect amount of money to do what you say you want- if your talking about a highly skilled worker (lets be honest, a coder at FAANG or similar) than 100k per year is not actually that big of a deal compared to the rest of their compensation package. It will prevent companies like Cognizant from just chain migrating half of Bengaluru to provide substsndard IT services, and will also prevent scummy hospitals from hiring immigrants instead of domestic medical workers, but isn't stopping Apple from hiring some uber talented backend developer.

I disagree. H-1B is not just "certainly abused", it's universally abused. I'm not saying that H-1Bs are all morons, but some are, and the not-morons are, while competetant, not above replacement level. America generates highly skilled in-demand workers from its domestic population in sufficient numbers to fill any role an H-1B would fill, its just that corporations jave not wanted to spend the time and money to develop the pipeline.

It is not "universally" abused, though the fact that it is used to bring in people who are the Indian equivalent of the bottom half of the class at Directional State is infuriating. 100K a year wipes out nearly all uses, including Apple's backend developer, including most of the non-absuive ones. Although I'm not sure where 100K a year comes from; the proclamation appears to make it 100K for the application and 100K per entry of the alien, which is cheaper but rather cruel to the alien.

Eh, again YMMV but speaking to my experience and that of my colleagues and family, I cannot point to an H-1B that I would say is good for the country. So yeah, I would say its universal abuse (this is not a universal judgement about the character of people receiving those visas, many are fine folks put in a sub-optimal situation).

100k absolutely does not wipe out Apple's backend developer. Thats between 25-33% of their salary, not including benefits. It makes them more expensive, so you have to be more careful, but this is big tech we are talking about, they have more money than God and are not afraid to sling it around.

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