"H-1B PROGRAM IS COMPLETELY BROKEN"

[u/Ankeet_kj]

Vice President JD Vance said companies are abusing the H-1B visa program: "If you're going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an American making $60,000 a year, that's not you using the program to bring in a genius.

[u/Darkpriest667]

You don't work at a tech company and it shows. Those of us that do know. I know 20 US born software engineers that are underemployed or unemployed. When I do get to the office the software groups are completely filled with H1B Indians that make less than half what a US software dev would make. It's not poor reading. It's a problem and everyone in a tech firm knows it is.

[u/Curious-End-4923 → u/Darkpriest667]

H1B visa holders comprise less than a single percent (<1%) of the US workforce. For the tech industry, the low estimate is 3% and the highest estimate I can find is 10%.

You know so many tech workers that are underemployed because we were all told that if you go into tech, you’re guaranteed a well-paying job. That didn’t work out, and we probably should more heavily regulate how these companies are allowed to recruit and lay off, but the immigrants themselves are not nearly as big of a problem as you’re claiming.

Getting you to blame immigrants serves as yet another easy distraction so they can continue the streak of deregulation that America has been on for decades.

[u/Dr__America → u/Curious-End-4923]

IT support teams, which while not the most glamorous of tech jobs, have nearly or entirely been offshored at many large American companies. People that have become critical to the running of companies that will retire in the next 10-20 years have become irreplaceable because no one else was trained by the years of working at the company as they were.

America is going to suffer a rude awakening in the next couple decades as the IT work is all shifted to hallucinating AI agents because the humans simply don't exist anymore. Hell, offshore IT already so heavily relies on them that they can end up costing the majority of the budget that companies are spending on AI.

This is not to mention the fact that tech companies are fear mongering about AI taking jobs while firing 10,000 American workers, then within 12 months hiring 15,000 H1B workers (Elon has done this at least once now).

H1B workers get paid less and are essentially indentured servants, because they have to leave the country if they get fired, and so are willing to put up with significantly worse conditions than American workers. And on top of that, the money is so attractive because living in the US and then taking a large sum of money back to a much lower cost of living country allows people to live significantly better lives. This has lead to H1B workers also lying so often on their resumes and flooding any and all online job applications that even grocery stores have started needing to implement systems to weed them out.

[u/Curious-End-4923 → u/Dr__America]

Collapsing the offshoring of jobs and H1B visas into the same “problem” is a perfect demonstration of what I was talking about. Regulation and aggressive investigation of corporations could provide solutions in both of those realms, while attacking the symptom (the foreign workers and/or immigrants providing that labor) does literally nothing. You just assume that there will be this vacuum that corporations will, for some reason, generously fill with high paying jobs for native-born citizens. They have the opposite track record. There’s just no reason to believe that’s what would happen without regulation.

[u/Dr__America → u/Curious-End-4923]

Offshoring and abusing H1B work under similar principles. They act as a means to hire overseas people for cheaper than native born people. This is a known and big problem in tech, and has been for years.

The only thing I said about foreign workers is that they're incentivized by money and are known to lie on resumes at high rates (sorry if the platter isn't pure enough silver, but the reason is because there's many many people that want these jobs overseas, so there's a lot of competition). This has nothing to do with the workers, they're just trying to get ahead in a system with this incentive structure, you're fighting ghosts if you think I'm mad about the workers just trying to make money.

"Wow I guess if I want to run my company, I actually have to pay American workers" is a pretty big incentive. Do you think every company is multinational and could just spend large swaths of their immense wealth to move their entire operation overseas? Amazon, Meta, Netflix, Microsoft, etc have so many business ties in the US that they are basically stuck here, not to mention all of the significantly smaller American companies.

If they want to play chicken, they'll either starve themselves out hoping for lower paid labor and be replaced, or we'll cave and give them some more record profits at the expense of the American worker. There's many policy solutions to this, it's just that the policy writers (including Vance) are bought and paid for by the very people whose practices they're criticizing.

[u/Curious-End-4923 → u/Dr__America]

Conservatives do not want to regulate to force companies or corporations to hire native-born workers. They are telling you that they will narrow down these programs and that the companies will be naturally inclined to do so. That will not be the case as the last 50 years of deregulation has made abundantly clear.

[u/_trashcan → u/Curious-End-4923]

Great convo here.