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.

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.

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.

Yep, as long as the employer is the one paying the $100k, this is actually a good change.

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?

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.

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.

Fascism is infectious so, kinda.

Texas would be blessed to have killer Mexican AND Indian food. Nearly everywhere that's good at one sucks at the other with the exception of a small minority of tier 1 cities.

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).

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

You have any numbers? The way the H-1B system is exploited in IT is a shit show.

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.

That’s comparing giving money away to charging money.