Fewer H-1B Visas Did Not Mean More Employment for Natives (2017)
33 comments
·September 25, 2025fooker
Big tech has negotiated this H1B narrative very well.
It kills two birds with one stone -
* Easy excuse to reduce hiring junior engineers just as AI is getting good. People seem to think there are 'slots' to fill with reduced immigration, but no, not this time.
* Streamlined hiring experts. If you want a linux kernel developer with ten years of experience, now you can just get one instead of going through the lottery and waiting ~8 months before they can start working. (And no, you are not going to find many unemployed US citizens with ten years of Linux kernel development experience.)
mikert89
Outsourcing has never worked for core products and innovation. Anyone claiming all these jobs will go over seas has never tried to outsource something complex. Zero large cap businesses have succeeded at this. The outsourcing comes in long after the innovation has stalled and the product is KTLO
sokoloff
Many companies off-shore without outsourcing (and often with success).
Outsourcing: another company. Hard and a bad idea for your core competency.
Off-shoring: another country. Much easier if you keep it as part of the same company.
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ThrowawayR2
Apropos of nothing, I'm really enjoying my TSMC-fabbed microprocessors.
DrewADesign
Tell that to the VFX industry
whatever1
The question of finding cheap competent programmers has already been answered via remote work.
There are tons of agencies who provide access to good to excellent talent from abroad (India, Eastern Europe even Latin America if you prefer same time zone) for a fraction of what the US market offers (even after accounting for overhead).
You can literally find someone vetted to work on your project within hours. No mess with payrolls, insurance and whatnot, you just pay a consulting fee.
So if the H1Bs were not really better than the expensive local and cheap remote talent, why would the companies get into this mess?
echan00
Big tech will likely just employ the same talent but abroad.
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justinhj
Or pay $100k
whatever1
If I charge you a fee of $10000 / month for home internet, while useful, you will prefer to just not use it and find other ways to access it (maybe from a library or a coffee shop).
Similarly the employers will just cut the bleeding edge programs that require specialty skills and will focus on others that the local labor market can cover.
justinhj
The argument is that companies cannot hire locally the talent they need. The super star devs that make or break a company. And yet they are not worth $100k?
kevin_thibedeau
Trumpcards for the 10X-ers.
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SpacePortKnight
Vancouver is very close to Seattle. Would restrictions in H-1B result in increased hiring in Canada or a higher usage of L-1 visa perhaps?
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kevin_thibedeau
The reality will probably be hard to discern. Programming has become the new doctor/lawyer "big money" job in the past 25 years. That has drawn a lot of people unsuited for the work. Add the lack of a meaningful gatekeeping accreditation system like the other professions and you get a system burdened with a lot of dead wood.
The outcome going forward might end up looking superficially bleaker than the recent gravy train of overhiring suggests but that doesn't mean it's a valid indicator. Lots of disingenuous media outlets are cherry picking the COVID tech runup from 2020-2022 as an indication of a trend that collapsed but the real long term trend has corrected back to where it should have been all along.
potato3732842
>Add the lack of a meaningful gatekeeping accreditation system like the other professions and you get a system burdened with a lot of dead wood.
It's way worse in industries where there's external licensing. If you're a terrible therapist, professional engineer, lawyer, etc, etc, some company will keep you around for your license.
jgalt212
The NBER can cherry pick the data all they want, and change the argument from wages to jobs, but the H-1B system (as it has existed for the last 20+ years) is bad for American workers.
dangus
Of course it doesn’t.
Don’t forget that immigrants are participants in the economy. If they are removed there are fewer customers.
Without immigrants, the US is losing population. That is fact.
cranberryturkey
well it don't mean less either.
Herring
It almost certainly does mean less. Numerous studies have shown that immigration generally has a net positive effect on the US job market. It’s the broad consensus among economists.
Racism is crazy. Everyone can look at the US south and plainly see the results of failed policies .. everyone except the Southerners.
whackernews
Why should we care what economists think? Kind of a genuine question.
rtpg
I mean I don't think it's easy to conclude much here, because economics research is the act of trying to figure out how to look at two different points in time in some way and try as hard as possible to ignore every other of the billions of inputs when looking at a single input.
Dumb example: foreign company wants to start a branch office in the US, by sending in a bunch of people from its head office to spin it up. The branch office will be in a new building, and the branch office needs a janitor. Visa shenanigans mean the foreign company decides against doing this. Branch office is shut down, one less janitorial job.
Silly but I think it's very easy to concoct these kinds of qualitative stories to infer the theoretical possibility of some quantitative result. Probably why so many of these discussions go in circles!
The easy counter to the above is to say that the foreign company wanted to start a branch office for reasons, and that those reasons remain true with our without H-1B. My impression is that lots of company decision making is of two varieties:
- If you are ginormous: sometimes you are big enough to where you really can't find 500 IT people for your office in some mid-sized market no matter how much money you throw at the problem, so you try to hire from other places. If you aren't able to find 500 people "quickly" the idea stops being interesting
- If you are smaller than ginormous: almost every decision about hiring is actually extremely personal. New offices get opened because you have a handful of people linked to an interesting opportunity, and its through those people that it will happen or not. Denying access to even a couple of them just denies the whole opportunity.
This is just my own view of the world though
There is some evidence of fraud, substitution of native workers with H-1Bs, power imbalances and more playing a part in the labor market. A lot of Americans, including in tech seem to be clamoring for less H-1Bs and immigrants, let them have it and see how it goes. Maybe it really will be better. It should be a win-win where India gets to keep more of its best talent and the US native population has less competition.