Notable due to it being written by Bloomberg's editorial board, acknowledging the failings of the program.
> First, the lottery — by design — doesn’t reward top talent. This deficiency, coupled with loose oversight, has made it vulnerable to gaming and doomed to mediocre results. A recent Bloomberg News investigation found that IT staffing firms routinely flood the pool with entries, often for more visas than they need, crowding out companies that play by the rules. These practices — which US officials have called fraudulent — prioritize a sector that tends to pay relatively low wages for routine IT work. (New rules to curb abuse don’t go far enough.) As a result, many of the world’s smartest engineers are shut out from the most lucrative, in-demand jobs, and shortages at the top end persist.
> Second, visa holders with middling skills are more likely to be substitutes for, rather than complements to, American workers. Replenishing the job market with extraordinary talent that can’t be filled domestically increases productivity, innovation and growth; saturating it with lower-paid workers will tend to drive down wages. Official data show that 85% of H-1B petitions are awarded to employers paying well below the median wage, as determined by occupation and location.
The obvious counter is to make it not be a lottery but rather an auction, the highest-paying employers wins the slot. This would get rid of the bottom-feeding body-shops that rent out H1-Bs by the hour.
It would also cut off non-tech businesses like restaurants employing specialized chefs. Perhaps do this in bands by industry (this info should already be collected as part of the Dept of Labor certification).
It will also cause a lot of things to be shut down. This Will work for the FAANGs of the world and for very very few of the industries where there is a genuine labor shortage and hiking the cost up on them makes it unproductive to stay in business
Probably. I want to laugh at the idea that "startups" need H1Bs but I should cry. If someone is really a "key employee" of a startup they can't be subject to a game of chance.
Google, IBM, Infosys and others who file thousands of them can easily play the numbers.
I quit the ACM because I couldn't accept their policy of 100% advocacy of H1Bs and joined the IEEE Computer Society because it refused to take a position. (An anti policy could be easily misunderstood)
I am not against immigration, in fact I've seen H1Bs put people in a terrible position -- I knew a brilliant data scientist who was being dicked around and I wanted to tell them "your skills are in demand and you can get a better job" but it wasn't true. This person would tell me about his struggles with immigration and realized my story that my ancestors left a failing agricultural economy in Quebec and the horrors of WWI in what was then Austria-Hungary and made a new home here would be cruel to recount to him.
Lets not ignore O1 visas either. O1 visas are, in my opinion, what we should lean into instead of continuing with employer specific specialized worker visas - if you're accepted into the US you should be free to work for whomever you chose and the power to change jobs is requisite to ensuring a fair labor market.
The H-1B program is about wage suppression, not talent. If it was about talent we would just offer the top students & researchers in all countries immediate, strings-free citizenship.
US companies are far more concerned about wage suppression than talent, so the system will not change unless tremendous pressure comes from without.
Adding some data. Draw your own conclusions about wage suppression
Googles AI search
"As of January 2025, the median H-1B salary in the United States was $141,000 per year, or $11,750 per month. The average salary was $167,533 per year, or $13,961 per month."
Not to be pedantic, but this is exactly the scenario when you want to use the median or mode, not the average. Incomes are power law distributed, so one H1B or non-H1B borderline executive could be throwing off the average non-trivially.
It is not about wage suppression. It is about obedience. An H-1B visa is the biggest chance for upward mobility people from less wealthy countries will get. Listen to whatever we tell you to do, work however many hours we tell you to work, or get fired and sent back to your own country.
Maybe with the lottery, because getting another one is subject to luck. But H1Bs are transferable - why wouldn’t companies shut out of the lottery hire away another companies H1Bs ?
I would argue its about improving labor productivity.
What you are saying is American corporations want labor with higher productivity and even willing pay more for more productive labor (by paying immigration costs).
Thats why SWE salaries overall increased and H1Bs are making the same salaries as citizens, because of higher competition leading to higher productivity.
Importing foreign workers (and culling bottom 10% via forcing curve/pip) forces average labor productivity to increase
It is not about wage-suppression, if it was there wouldn't be rules that stipulate the visa holders are paid market rate for their jobs (enforcement can be improved but the rule is there).
This logic cuts both ways.
Many US companies are concerned about wage suppression, but many are also concerned about talent. And when it comes to software devs, there are definitely H1Bs who outmatch their citizen peers.
I don't think the recent H1B debacle spread outside the boundary of tech very much simply because a) There is now an increasing abundance of domestic tech workers, and b) The layoffs haven't been so severe outside as much as in tech.
Fields like Architecture, Agriculture, Forestry, Medicine, etc still need a lot of skilled workers that may not be available domestically. So I'm increasingly skeptical whenever someone claims that the solution to H1B is auctioning or a significant increase in wages as other fields outside of tech may not have the resource to bid for talents. US already has a diversity based immigration system called DV, maybe a diversity based system w.r.t. jobs is warranted?
I agree. Additionally, there were always increasing tech workers, they just all got jobs when the market was hot. Now when there are less jobs, companies want the best candidates, and specifically in tech, a lot of times (not in the case of abusers like TCS) H1B holders are more qualified on paper due to usually having advanced degrees. School rank and ability matters more to employers these days, and that's tough for domestic grads who might not meet the bar
Replace H-1B with greencards. New arrivals to our country with valuable skills should be welcomed with a good path to citizenship, not beholden to whoever got the H-1B for them, and subject to being pushed out once it expires.
Intended purpose? I suspect it's purpose has been served as intended all along.
The "top talent" was the ruse to justify the program.
If it "accidentally" stopped serving that top talent purpose it was obvious years ago. Then , whoops! I guess we'll just have to keep letting in non-top talent...?!
It was a camels nose attack on IT sector workers salaries and the vitriol of anti-racism was used to defend it, along with other similar efforts to destroy American wages.
Oddly, in the 1970s, the Democrats would have spoken out against it, back when they cared about American jobs. Not any more.
Bernie speaks out against it. Unfortunately most politicians are totally owned on either side. I expect we will see (or not) a wild flip-flop of both parties similar to how Dems in the early 2000s were against gay marriage now its quite centered.
“In 2021, the proportion of foreign-born workers in STEM occupations (26%) was greater than the proportion of U.S.-born workers (24%), with more naturalized citizens in S&E-related occupations (11%) than noncitizens (5%) or U.S.-born citizens (9%).”
Does the US still need even more foreign visa workers given these statistics? What percentage is appropriate? How is this sustainable?
I think you may have misunderstood what those numbers represent. They aren't saying that there are more foreign-born STEM workers than US-born STEM workers.
They are saying that among all the foreign-born workers in the US, 26% of those workers are working in STEM. Among all the US-born workers, 24% are working in STEM.
There are around 29 million foreign-born workers in the US, and around 131 million US-born workers (if Google has given me correct numbers). In percentages 18.1% of workers in the US are foreign-born and 81.9% are US-born.
With 26% of the foreign-born workers in STEM and 24% of the US-born workers in STEM that would be about 7.5 million foreign-born STEM workers in the US and 31 million US-born STEM workers in the US.
Among STEM workers in the US then it would 19.5% are foreign-born and 80.5% are US-born.
Ok. Thanks for that clarification. Here is a more direct and startling statistic that demonstrates the point: Almost half of all software programmers are foreign born (in 2019 … probably higher now).
“In 2019, there were 647,000 immigrant software developers, making up 39.2 percent of all software developers (Table 4). In fact, software developers made up 47.3 percent of all foreign-born workers in the computer and math category in 2019.”
The more fundamental issue is that it’s legally a temporary visa program even though no one uses it that way. The law even acknowledges this with the dual intent doctrine.
If we are going to reform things we might as well scrap the visa altogether and roll whatever changes are needed into the employment based resident visas, including if necessary adjusting the numbers.
Of course that won’t happen because Congress doesn’t pass major overhauls of anything anymore. But if we are going to dream, might as well dream big.
This is true, but it’s also how basically every country runs their visa programs. They initially admit foreigners in a temporary status and after a few years grant a permanent status. This is how Mexico residency works in general, and even how marriage-based residency works in Colombia. I don’t really see it as much of a problem.
Contrast a new marriage. The government issues a conditional permanent residency and then two years later an application can be filed to remove the condition. It’s a similar story with the investor’s visa.
The H1B doesn’t lead to anything. It’s designed as if the alien is just going to leave after 3 or 6 years. Any kind of accommodations between it and the EB process are afterthoughts.
Yeah, personally I think they should keep the "temporary" aspect, that it's conditional on employment, and the lottery, but remove the employer lock-in. So an employer has to initially sponsor an H1-B, but they damn well better be paying competitive wages and benefits otherwise they're not going to be able to keep the H1-B. Once the H1-B immigrant enters the country and works one day, they personally can renew, transfer their employment, and make all the paperwork decisions.
There would probably need to be some tweaks (e.g. an employer looses sponsorship privileges if they can't keep the people they sponsor), but I think that's the right path.
Readit News
> First, the lottery — by design — doesn’t reward top talent. This deficiency, coupled with loose oversight, has made it vulnerable to gaming and doomed to mediocre results. A recent Bloomberg News investigation found that IT staffing firms routinely flood the pool with entries, often for more visas than they need, crowding out companies that play by the rules. These practices — which US officials have called fraudulent — prioritize a sector that tends to pay relatively low wages for routine IT work. (New rules to curb abuse don’t go far enough.) As a result, many of the world’s smartest engineers are shut out from the most lucrative, in-demand jobs, and shortages at the top end persist.
> Second, visa holders with middling skills are more likely to be substitutes for, rather than complements to, American workers. Replenishing the job market with extraordinary talent that can’t be filled domestically increases productivity, innovation and growth; saturating it with lower-paid workers will tend to drive down wages. Official data show that 85% of H-1B petitions are awarded to employers paying well below the median wage, as determined by occupation and location.
It would also cut off non-tech businesses like restaurants employing specialized chefs. Perhaps do this in bands by industry (this info should already be collected as part of the Dept of Labor certification).
Google, IBM, Infosys and others who file thousands of them can easily play the numbers.
I quit the ACM because I couldn't accept their policy of 100% advocacy of H1Bs and joined the IEEE Computer Society because it refused to take a position. (An anti policy could be easily misunderstood)
I am not against immigration, in fact I've seen H1Bs put people in a terrible position -- I knew a brilliant data scientist who was being dicked around and I wanted to tell them "your skills are in demand and you can get a better job" but it wasn't true. This person would tell me about his struggles with immigration and realized my story that my ancestors left a failing agricultural economy in Quebec and the horrors of WWI in what was then Austria-Hungary and made a new home here would be cruel to recount to him.
US companies are far more concerned about wage suppression than talent, so the system will not change unless tremendous pressure comes from without.
Googles AI search "As of January 2025, the median H-1B salary in the United States was $141,000 per year, or $11,750 per month. The average salary was $167,533 per year, or $13,961 per month."
https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/visa-usa-inc-op0lw9gmkl/s...
This is excluding government costs of sponsoring the visa for the employee AND their family.
I am not supporting US companies by any means - they are as greedy as one can get.
Thats why SWE salaries overall increased and H1Bs are making the same salaries as citizens, because of higher competition leading to higher productivity.
Importing foreign workers (and culling bottom 10% via forcing curve/pip) forces average labor productivity to increase
This logic cuts both ways.
Many US companies are concerned about wage suppression, but many are also concerned about talent. And when it comes to software devs, there are definitely H1Bs who outmatch their citizen peers.
Fields like Architecture, Agriculture, Forestry, Medicine, etc still need a lot of skilled workers that may not be available domestically. So I'm increasingly skeptical whenever someone claims that the solution to H1B is auctioning or a significant increase in wages as other fields outside of tech may not have the resource to bid for talents. US already has a diversity based immigration system called DV, maybe a diversity based system w.r.t. jobs is warranted?
The "top talent" was the ruse to justify the program.
If it "accidentally" stopped serving that top talent purpose it was obvious years ago. Then , whoops! I guess we'll just have to keep letting in non-top talent...?!
It was a camels nose attack on IT sector workers salaries and the vitriol of anti-racism was used to defend it, along with other similar efforts to destroy American wages.
Oddly, in the 1970s, the Democrats would have spoken out against it, back when they cared about American jobs. Not any more.
“In 2021, the proportion of foreign-born workers in STEM occupations (26%) was greater than the proportion of U.S.-born workers (24%), with more naturalized citizens in S&E-related occupations (11%) than noncitizens (5%) or U.S.-born citizens (9%).”
Does the US still need even more foreign visa workers given these statistics? What percentage is appropriate? How is this sustainable?
They are saying that among all the foreign-born workers in the US, 26% of those workers are working in STEM. Among all the US-born workers, 24% are working in STEM.
There are around 29 million foreign-born workers in the US, and around 131 million US-born workers (if Google has given me correct numbers). In percentages 18.1% of workers in the US are foreign-born and 81.9% are US-born.
With 26% of the foreign-born workers in STEM and 24% of the US-born workers in STEM that would be about 7.5 million foreign-born STEM workers in the US and 31 million US-born STEM workers in the US.
Among STEM workers in the US then it would 19.5% are foreign-born and 80.5% are US-born.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/foreign-...
“In 2019, there were 647,000 immigrant software developers, making up 39.2 percent of all software developers (Table 4). In fact, software developers made up 47.3 percent of all foreign-born workers in the computer and math category in 2019.”
If we are going to reform things we might as well scrap the visa altogether and roll whatever changes are needed into the employment based resident visas, including if necessary adjusting the numbers.
Of course that won’t happen because Congress doesn’t pass major overhauls of anything anymore. But if we are going to dream, might as well dream big.
Contrast a new marriage. The government issues a conditional permanent residency and then two years later an application can be filed to remove the condition. It’s a similar story with the investor’s visa.
The H1B doesn’t lead to anything. It’s designed as if the alien is just going to leave after 3 or 6 years. Any kind of accommodations between it and the EB process are afterthoughts.
There would probably need to be some tweaks (e.g. an employer looses sponsorship privileges if they can't keep the people they sponsor), but I think that's the right path.