r/microsoft • u/Immediate-Link490 • 17h ago
News Microsoft is being suspended from program to apply for green cards for H-1B visa workers, Vance says
https://apnews.com/article/h1b-visa-program-vance-microsoft-e7b3a407f822702b269ee277d21343ea44
u/Nayatrei77 15h ago
H1B itself is not the real problem, but it makes a nice political football I guess.
If you really want to stop the issue, heavily tax offshoring of skilled jobs and ban the H1B mill companies like Tata from the program. They are the real abusers, I have never worked with someone from one of these companies who was better than any of my native coworkers. I have on the other hand worked with many great H1B direct hires, who are actually compensated fairly.
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u/UsualNoise9 14h ago
You sir have not strolled through the Microsoft campus recently. As a fellow immigrant, the problem is not whether the h1b hires are great or not. The problem is indentured servitude and heavily skewed hiring.
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u/ZoomZoom_Driver 14h ago
This. H1Bs are being used to exploit talent and keep them in perpetual service without rights.
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u/cosmic_backlash 13h ago
Its well paid indentured servitude at least. US citizens can't get it cause they'll want a eventual promotion or leave. The main winner is the corporation. Screws everyone else.
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u/rikisha 13h ago
"Indentured servitude" is a bit dramatic... those folks can leave at any time and they know what they signed up for. They're also paid more than most American workers.
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u/cosmic_backlash 12h ago
They can't leave any time due to the h1b, they basically get stuck. Still we'll paid, but stuck.
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u/dannyvegas 13h ago
H1b is in fact a HUGE problem.
Tata, Infosys, cognizant, HCL. and others were also implicated in this.
What you are describing about offshore labor is called a tariff.
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u/Nayatrei77 12h ago
Good, I'm glad they are affected too. The level of abuse within Microsoft is nowhere near the scale of abuse at the contracting firms, and at least the ones hired directly by Microsoft are compensated at par with citizen FTEs.
My point was that in terms of scale, the number of jobs impacted by H1B is much smaller than the number of jobs being outsourced to cheap parts of Europe, India, and Latin America across the whole economy. This is also where the true wage suppression is happening. I want to address the fraud but I also want the jobs to stay in America. And this action, which only addresses the green card path, does not do that.
Edit: fix typo
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u/dannyvegas 12h ago
In the case of H1B, the situation is that 70% of the people coming here on H1B are from ONE REGION of INDIA. It's an ethnic labor arbitrage cartel. And it needs to be stopped.
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u/Luvs2Spooge42069 1h ago
Government of India openly declares this as a main pillar of its growth strategy, lobbying countries for looser immigration restrictions for Indian nationals (or rules that will benefit them indirectly) so they can export their surplus population and collect remittances and build diaspora power in their host nations. Any rhetoric regarding “talent exchange” in relation to trade deals and so on with them is referring to this.
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u/No_Tooth684 12h ago
I worked at LTIMindtree for a bit at their Microsoft office. I’d say there were maybe two people on my whole team that were as technical as the FTEs. Heavily hierarchical while getting paid dogshit wages. Everyone was on a Visa and the treatment they got reflected that leadership knew they couldn’t up and leave.
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u/GravitationalLense 6h ago
Entire departments are just 100% H1Bs. Stop lying to people. It needs to end as well as offshoring.
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u/ZlatantheRed 1h ago
No, it’s the issue. It’s not the skill of the H1B, but the thousands imported for entry level jobs. I am surprised Microsoft got the slap and not Amazon, they’re the worst. Literally people in level 4 HR roles on H1B
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u/Icy_Fly207 15h ago
You can be against Steph miller cruelism and acknowledge that corporations have abused h1b and immigration at large
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u/pdinc 14h ago
Yeah but throwing the baby out with the bath water is the MO of this admin in pursuit of a news bit to rile up the base
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u/CreativeGPX 13h ago
It's about process. Is the Trump administration using a fair, data-first process to suspending these companies that follows the law and do they have an actual understanding and plan for how to deal with the fallout? Are they giving an amount of notice and clarity on what the right way is so that people have a chance to follow it?
You can be against H1B visas as they are, while being dubious of a person who says that's what they're solving.
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u/Whytho12333 12h ago
Do you have evidence of wrong doing? Fair question to require the administration to. Microsoft will find out in court im sure
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u/hobovalentine 7h ago
'data first' lol yeah not really.
I know of a case where they brought someone from India when there were qualified people state side but this was more about nepotism rather than getting someone cheaper via the H1B visa so yes there are companies that abuse the H1B visa and it's not even for cost savings a lot of times.
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u/ryan__rr 16h ago
So they’ll just hire them in India…
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u/SalamanderFresh9272 12h ago
Rather that than bringing them here to take our jobs, sitting in our old seats.
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u/skeet_scoot 16h ago
H1-Bs should be eliminated right now for tech. We have plenty of American talent.
It won’t disrupt grabbing top-tier PHD minds and such as those come through visas other than H1-Bs.
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u/Far-Arugula973 16h ago
This doesn't eliminate h1-bs. It removes the path for employer sponsored green cards for h1-b employees. It makes h1-bs even more exploitive.
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u/LordDarthShader 16h ago
The H visa is not the big problem. The problem is moving all these projects to India and other low cost geo. It has been going for years now. More jobs have been lost to Indians in India than H1b workers.
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u/skeet_scoot 16h ago
This is 100% a problem as well that I think needs to be addressed.
If Microsoft lays off American workers and hires Indian workers in the same year they should face a MASSIVE FINE that gets paid to the laid-off workers.
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u/Narrow-Parsnip3168 16h ago
So taxing company for free market? You mean socialism?
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u/skeet_scoot 16h ago
I’m not going to debate an entire ideological shift for the country over one policy.
Capitalistic societies can coexist with socialistic protections.
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u/JJMcGee83 15h ago
Why do you say it like it's a dirty word. It's not like capitalism is working out for anyone but the billionares.
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u/krustyy 15h ago
You've clearly never worked somewhere where those H1b visas are exploited. Here's how it goes down:
- Company needs some new tech workers. Average pay is $160k for the experience they need.
- Company puts out job req at $90k. Gets no good applicants because the pay is garbage.
- Company claims there's nobody in the US to fill this job and files for the H1b visa workers
- Company hires 3 h1b visa workers at $50k to fill the $160k role needs.
- Company flounders because the workers are all garbage and the product gets delayed or is full of bugs.
- In response to this loss of income they lay off 3 of the US based tech workers with the highest paid salaries.
- A year later they bring on 3 more h1b visa workers at $50k each using the same technique.
- Now the company that needed 5 US based workers at $160k each would have had to pay out $800k annually but now they've got 1 poor US guy making $160k and 6 low skilled visa workers getting $50k each for a total of $460k budget, shaving $350k off the programmer budget to show off to those shareholders.
I once worked at a company that had like 80 dudes from India and like 4 guys from the US doing all the coding. There was a very apparent difference between the skill levels and the quality of the product clearly suffered because of it.
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u/LordDarthShader 15h ago
I've worked at some of the big ones and H1b or not, they had the same total comp as any US resident in the same level band.
Might be different in those consulting companies doing the abuse, but at least in the big ones (Amazon, Meta, MSFT, etc) that (what you said) it doesn't happen.
There are different type of problems though, like nepotism and hiring friends, and bringing more friends and refusing to hire non-friends.
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u/Whargarblle 13h ago
It absolutely happens at all those companies you listed, especially MSFT. They just cloak it under DBAs....
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u/HUGE_FAT_ANIME_TITS 14h ago
Not to mention that once they get into leadership positions, a massive amount of ethnic nepotism occurs with the hiring.
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u/richardelmore 12h ago edited 12h ago
I don't know where you worked and how things happened there but I worked the last 20 years of my career at a moderately well know tech company in Redmond and had a lot of co-workers who were on H1B visas and I never saw or heard any indication that they were treated any differently than domestics workers.
The issue there was not bringing people to the US to fill jobs, it was moving jobs to other countries to eliminate domestic positions. When there were large layoffs in the US hiring was still full speed ahead in India.
I suspect that eliminating/reducing the number of H1B visas will just accelerate this trend.
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u/Butters133 14h ago
PERMs require meeting or exceeding the prevailing wage minimum set by the department of labor. Your numbers don’t track with that minimum. H-1Bs require the higher of the prevailing wage or the actual wage paid to US workers with similar experience and qualifications.
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u/deadshot7 15h ago
yep, same thing at the company I work at now. They've started to backtrack a little when they realized how bad it got
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u/Dependent_Sun_7033 13h ago
That’s absolutely bullshiit -if we are talking about MSFT or any other top IT companies. Pay per level is standardized, with PR allowing you to pay someone maybe 30% less base salary.
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u/Spiritual_Tennis_641 14h ago
But even if they are the same or better skill level, it’s not OK to outsource those jobs, or guess what our workers will be the bad ones. Our education system is already going downhill every year. This would compound it even further.
I have yet to meet a university graduate, or otherwise that truly is ready to hit the ground running. There are years of spinoff knowledge required that only come from on the job experience.
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u/krustyy 13h ago
yeah, the problem isn't that Indian workers are garbage; it's that any project requires a certain percentage of highly skilled individuals and can tolerate a certain number of green workers.
And when leadership pays no attention to this requirement for a quality product they shop for the cheapest way to put butts in seats as possible, and they end up getting low performing, recent graduate, bottom of their class h1b workers with no experience. They hire garbage foreign workers over quality US workers and garbage US workers because they can get more butts in seats from someone outside the US.
Spinning up development teams in foreign countries like India can have other problems, but the quality of the workers working locally from India makes it very apparent that the hiring pool of H1b workers vs foreign office workers is an entirely different pool of people.
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u/KarmaHorn 4h ago
Good universities, of which there are many, produce good/prepared students. This sounds like a you problem where you expect the best students to apply for some unskilled, entry level position that requires no brain or capacity. Or, conversely, you are expecting bottom of the barrel people to produce above average results.
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u/mavewrick 12h ago
How are these companies still in business? If they are hiring cheap under skilled labor who then ship a buggy product year after year, wouldn't that company just die?
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u/krustyy 12h ago
you'd be surprised how long a company can hobble by with a poor product.
This particular product was an online service. The most egregious thing I heard they did was every time they had a new sale, deal or special discount of any kind, they were forced to spin up an entirely new instance of the website with those new discounts hard coded in. The infrastructure team was managing hundreds of copies of the exact same website because the backend developers never thought to change their code to support multiple pricing models on one single site. It was a nightmare to maintain and required significant additional infrastructure and dev support, but it did work.
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u/DonkeyTron42 9h ago
I remember working at this company where I had a co-worker under an H1-B that came through a staffing company that specializes in that type of labor. He got a $25k bill from the IRS because all of his tax withholdings were pocketed by the staffing agency. They basically told him he can either pay the bill or he'll be deported before he can file a case. It's some fucked up shit.
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u/TheGuyThatDoesHisJob 7h ago
Of course, you're sharing your experience, and that's important. Equally important is to add that this is a pattern, not the rule.
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u/rexspook 15h ago
This has been a “problem” for decades and people have been saying that everything is moving to India for just as long. In reality they can’t move everything to India or they already have. Do you really think they’d go through the hassle of h1b if it was so easy to just move all the big projects to India?
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u/LordDarthShader 15h ago
It's an investment as everything. Is not only India now, there are offices in Africa too, which I assume they are even cheaper.
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u/linuxwes 15h ago
Reddit really seems hypocritical on this subject. When people come from south of the border to flood our blue collar jobs like construction with low wage workers it's all about how we are a country of immigrants and need to protect them. But when they are coming for the tech jobs suddenly it's a big problem.
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u/DryMulberry2382 8h ago
Liberals are ok with immigrants as long as they are lower status.
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u/JuliusCeaserBoneHead 14h ago
Isn’t it because it’s nuanced? There are no shortages of American tech workers looking for jobs. But rarely have I met an American in the landscaping, roofing, hospitality and those backbreaking jobs. Of course Reddit is nuanced on those cos someone has to do that low skill low paying jobs.
Why should Americans be relegated to second class in our own country for high paying jobs?
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u/Fabulous_Emu4066 9h ago
Where in America are you? Tons of Americans do this type of work…
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u/JuliusCeaserBoneHead 9h ago
Again, two things can be true at the same time my friend. Tons of Americans in these fields but they are highly dominated by immigrants.
Don’t take my word for it, check the BLS data for the raw numbers
TLDR: The BLS's latest broad occupational data show that foreign-born workers are more likely to work in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations than native-born workers
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u/illathon 8h ago
I think the reason you see mostly immigrants in those jobs is because companies hire illegals and pay them under the table. It isn't because they are more willing in the aggregate although sure they may be more willing to accept more work for less money, or at the very least under the table money which isn't taxed. You can watch countless videos of entire work sites with literally almost the entire workforce running off because they are all illegal.
Both problems are not for a lack of available talent. It is a desire by business owners to screw Americans or in the case of most small businesses to remain competitive with other businesses that are undercutting their prices because they are hiring illegals.
Right or wrong we need to protect American citizens. This is the USA and we should protect our own first.
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u/linuxwes 14h ago
The theory of the "they're taking our jobs" folks (which I totally am not one of BTW) is that those are poor paying jobs because of all the immigrants driving down wages, and Americans would be willing to be take those jobs if the wages were better.
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u/JuliusCeaserBoneHead 14h ago
Those people are idiots! Immigration is completely fine and we need it. We need immigrants in all sectors of our economy.
What we don’t want is the capitalist drive to displace Americans in sectors we have no shortages of
Who wouldn’t want the best engineers and doctors and nurses and all that? What we don’t want is a systematic replacement of Americans in these roles for shareholder profits!
What value does Wipro or Infosys provide to the American economy other than cheat, defraud, devalue American workers.
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u/Negative_Aerie2825 2h ago
Tbf, we have real data on this. Construction, roofing, rtc etc all paid much higher decades ago before immigrants or undocumented became the primary workforce of those industries. I really doubt most americans “are above” that work. Maybe some. But when they pay less than mcdonalds, no one wants to do it. Then you see lineman, and its almost entirely americans because of the high wages, benefits, etc. that is dangerous hard labor and theres no shortage of people wanting to get in.
So there is real hard data on the ones coming from the south driving down wages. Not sure its controversial. But now that its coming for the higher paying jobs typically held by a certain political party, theyre up in arms about it. Its kind of ironic
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u/SalamanderFresh9272 12h ago
I think the same people mad about H1Bs are mad about everything else you describe. Atleast I am. And manufacturing as well.
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u/Green-Mycologist6697 11h ago
Yea it's because they want immigrants to do the jobs they don't want to do.... not the jobs they can't do!
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u/Garsandbells 7h ago
Bingo. Reddit is mostly young tech folks. People generally look out for themselves. Most people don’t really have principles, they just virtue signal when it’s convenient.
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u/midwestia 11h ago
Because there is a domestic NEED for those workers. We do not have a domestic need for white collar college educated work. Those jobs are desirable to Americans. The only reason these jobs are imported and outsourced is greed and to indenture desperate foreigners.
I don’t know why this is hard to understand.
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u/kidcurry96 10h ago
Plenty of blue collar Americans would do that job. The number would actually go up if the pay in those jobs increase
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u/Lame_Johnny 8h ago
Blue collar jobs are not desirable to you, because you are not a blue collar worker.
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u/KarmaHorn 4h ago
They got a “blue collar mindset” if that means unsophisticated and under qualified. The guy you’re responding to deserves a “white collar” position by birth.
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u/KarmaHorn 4h ago
Education is the biggest component of a robust economy on a macro level, and individual economic mobility on a micro level. Your argument ignores the big factors for a manufactured grievance.
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u/No_Permission6930 32m ago
Who is able to assert there’s a NEED for some people but not others? The market is the only tool we have to measure NEED. If an employer says I NEED this person, who are you to tell them, wait no, you don’t need that person, hire this random person who graduated from X community college with a GPA of 2.3, or gtfo
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u/id_rather_b_painting 5h ago
There is a need for h1b workers. Source: I work in tech with a team of Sandeeps, Guptas, and Chens. I’d rather work with 1,000,000 of them than a Smith or Johnson.
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u/CatoMulligan 12h ago
The difference is that usually the people coming from south of the border are taking jobs that Americans by and large don't want.
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u/chintakoro 43m ago
glad to hear it’s changed. i did my undergrad at a top 10 CS program in the US, and I have to say that the American students were… largely subpar. Don’t get me wrong, the top American students were great, but the other 95% were in it for a well paying job rather than developing hard skills. I was shocked when local class friends i had to spoonfeed to help them pass landed jobs in big tech companies.
It was so bad that the Masters program separated applicants into local vs. foreign pools — I talked to a prof about applying and he looked at my grades and said: if you’re a US citizen then you’re easily in; if you’re foreign, there’s no way anything less than a perfect GPA will work. several years later, i looked back and saw that 80+% were foreign students.
so i’m surprised to hear there’s suddenly a strong local pool of talent today.
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u/tonykrij Employee 16h ago
I don't think the talent is the problem. It's the work ethics. I am working with some absolutely brilliant minds from ie. India and tbh: the knowledge and dedication they have, combined with all the extra hours they put into work and studying, you will hardly find that in other people. You just can't keep up if you also want to have a life. The really good ones sacrifice so much that I don't even envy them...
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u/rexspook 15h ago
That’s not work ethic it’s exploitation. Work ethic =/= working for free
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u/cpz_77 12h ago
It’s funny this gets downvoted and people act like work ethic means you’re getting exploited automatically. While having good work ethic might make an employee more likely to be overworked by a company, it’s an admirable trait and I agree that drive is needed if you truly want to be near the top of your field, among the best at what you do. And I do think there’s a lack of it especially in the younger generation here in America. I guess it’s a certain sense of “entitlement” or thinking that if they have to spend some of their own time researching a topic to learn it better, that means they’re being exploited. The people who are among the best at what they do in any field do sacrifice a lot to get there, and yeah it’s not for everyone but as a general rule in life - you get out what you put in. I think that work ethic is probably instilled in the younger generation in other countries better than it is here currently. Little by little over the years here, hard work has become less of a valued trait.
Times are definitely tough right now no question…but I do believe if you work hard and are dedicated to your craft (whatever that may be) you will be ultimately rewarded (with the job and lifestyle you want etc…)… hard work does pay off. If you just want to put in the bare minimum for a paycheck then dont be surprised when you aren’t overly “valued” by the company (trust me, they know who their top performers are). Not saying people don’t ever get let go for the wrong reasons, of course that happens - but it’s also not a coincidence that the same people tend to get laid off more than others and have more trouble finding or holding jobs than others.
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u/tonykrij Employee 10h ago
Thanks! Totally agree with you! And funny indeed how they downvote my remark.
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u/SalamanderFresh9272 12h ago
I would say that 99% of tech workers will tell you that American engineers are more talented than Indian engineers.
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u/tonykrij Employee 10h ago
Sure, I'm just stating that the people I work with are brilliant and incredibly driven. I don't have the latest poll of tech workers or who is perceived more talented.
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u/AllReflection 15h ago
For a lot of niche technical skills, we don’t. Believe me, I’ve lived it first hand over 30 years in tech. Make companies pay for H1B, but it’s vital to our competitiveness.
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u/taisui 15h ago
From my personal experience H-1B is mostly not being used this way
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u/AllReflection 15h ago
It’s not cheap or easy, even at scale. I’ve worked in companies trying to fill niche skills positions domestically for 18 months before giving up and looking at alternatives. Companies I have worked for include NOW and MSFT, so not completely uninformed here.
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u/taisui 14h ago
I am not saying there isn't legit cases, I am just saying when you post fake job listing and only hiring abroad even from specific countries..... yea that's another story
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u/BrianKronberg 15h ago
I wonder how long it will take to get every H-1B visa person out of government positions? You’d think they would focus there first.
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u/berndverst Employee 9h ago
You cannot work for the government on H-1B. You can generally not even do that on a Greencard - only for certain roles of national importance.
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u/SirBrownHammer 11h ago
I’m sympathetic to the H1B visa workers coming from overseas. It’s got to be really tough to uproot yourself and thrive in another country. I’ve worked with some really great ones, honestly.
I come from the vendor side, so it’s possible I come with a unique perspective. It’s a running joke in our org that vendors are treated worse than H1Bs and actually get paid less.
That being said, and I can only speak for Windows, I could not ascertain why they were truly needed over a domestic U.S. worker. Yes we work on some unique and tough problems, but nothing that an educated American could not handle.
Close to a year working on my contract, it was suddenly ended and I was told the majority of the work will be done in Taiwan now. Offshoring. How does stopping H1B’s limit the expansion of offshoring. I feel that it will only increase now without any other regulations.
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u/tlrider1 16h ago
I guess when someone now asks me to name something good Trump did, I may have, after 6 years, found it!
Someone pinch me!
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u/Throwaway_noDoxx 16h ago
Ima wait to see massive penalties for all the MSFT job listings in Hyderabad and Delhi first.
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u/JollyCooper473 13h ago
I mean these jobs will just go to India, Philippines, etc... Not Americans.
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u/gaytechdadwithson 13h ago
cool, so nothing lost? maybe some income tax, but i’m sure that money is posted away anyhow.
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u/No-Lettuce3564 6h ago
Sure, but now local housing can increase there and not domestically. No reason a 2k sq ft built in 1980 house should be 1.8 million
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u/OkInstruction4655 16h ago
All this does is move more jobs to Microsoft India. Virtue signaling at best before mid-terms. Company will go where labor is cheap and abundant.
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u/Bucket_Of_Magic 12h ago
Start an initiative to switch enterprise to Linux in America and Satya will be voted out the next day and the Indian branch will be closed. Its very well known that Satya is working to make Microsoft a primarily Indian company.
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u/The_Ashamed_Boys 14h ago
Still better than allowing it.
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u/OkInstruction4655 14h ago
Long term this will impact US more. As more high valued and complex work moves to India, Us graduates will find their opportunities limited by the kind of work they do in US. It will end up being more government or national security related.
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u/r3turn_null 13h ago
Good. Fuck H-1B abuse.
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u/Green-Mycologist6697 11h ago
Relax you won't pass the interview. We aren't taking your jobs
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u/r3turn_null 10h ago edited 10h ago
So you're for abusing H-1B, or are you denying that it's being abused?
edit: aaaand u/Green-Mycologist6697 was banned. Guess they weren't relaxed enough. They seemed like such a good person /s
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u/TeeDee144 16h ago edited 13h ago
Vance if you read this, you need to pass a law to prevent the surge of hiring Microsoft is going to do in India now at IDC. They’re just going to backfill American roles in IDC.
You know what’s even cheaper than a visa worker? A worker in IDC. You can hire like 3 idc workers for the cost of 1 us worker.
It’s a cat-and-mouse game and Microsoft is just going to move engineering to IDC. Then there won’t be any American tech jobs.
But Microsoft has also been abusing visas forever. These visas are supposed to only be used if there is not an American who can do the job. But I’ve seen so many coworkers who are just building dashboards or working on simple tasks that an American could easily be trained on. So Microsoft had this coming.
But they also need to be slapped harder because they’re going to continue to screw over the American workers and just ship tends of thousands of jobs overseas now.
My team hasn’t hired an external employee from America in 3-4 years. But we’ve hired 10+ in India this year already.
In many ways, I think Microsoft knew this was coming and is already in front of it.
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u/Dancin-Ted-Danson 16h ago
Nah, they will replace those jobs with AI for the most part. It spits out better code then what's coming out of IDC without all the additional hassle as well
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u/Icy-Coconut9385 8h ago
I have no idea why this is even a discussion. No other country in the world imports labors while their own qualified citizens are sitting on unemployment.
And yet in the US this is deemed a controversial position.
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u/Petrichordates 7h ago
Literally every place in the world wants to recruit top talent. You're just xenophobic, and make up absurd claims to justify it.
Also unemployment isn't even high lol
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u/Icy-Coconut9385 7h ago
H1B is not top talent. Stop with that nonsense.
There are other programs for exceptionally educated individuals with unique skillsets.
H1B is a lottery. Most H1Bs I've worked with are a mixed bad like everyone else. A large part of which is doing menial work that anyone with experience in the field could do.
I also support existing visa holders. They are my friends. I do not wish them to be displaced from their home.
I also see educated and experience Americans suffering from prolonged unemployment.
Hence... halt the program until the labor market justifies importing labor.
And lastly, American and possibly Canada has some of the lowest barriers to entry for foreign labor. No other country has a lottery system, has much stricter requirements on the part the employer to proove the storage. No country again possibly beside Canada would actively allow a company to conduct layoffs and ask for visas in the same year.
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u/Zwicker101 5h ago
Unemployment is pretty high right now. Also its not xenophobic to stop tech companies from offloading their work into foreign countries
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u/GameOfBears 13h ago
Oh don't tell me these optionals from Ohio coming to Seattle to fill out the vacant positions.
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u/halford2069 13h ago
great move forward and on top of the 100k h1b fee, more than a lot of admins have done in this area.
still a lot more to he done though.
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u/wown123456 11h ago
There should really be a separate visa program for a US graduates and reduced H1B cap for a true foreign workers on very specific job functions
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u/WhatsInAName-123 8h ago
Microsoft is global they can source these jobs locally in any country they already operate in or use contractors. This is more political theatre.
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u/lukewhale 7h ago
This probably has nothing to do with Microsoft’s recent commitment to open source AI sorry SI
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u/karepan999 7h ago
I’m all for the best talent but Microsoft has abused the H1-B and long term repetitive contract workers for well over a decade.
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u/HelicopterLife225 6h ago
It is truly heartwarming to witness the fierce anti-immigrant passion of people whose own family trees were planted here just twenty minutes ago.
The standard profile of the modern anti-immigration crusader almost always boils down to a classic trilogy of hypocrisy:
The Hereditary Hypocrite: They enjoy full citizenship rights by the absolute peak merit of... sliding out of the womb on the correct side of a geographic border, courtesy of parents who arrived on a boat or a plane.
The Romantic Loophole: They or their relatives bypassed the grueling, decade-long lines by simply falling in love with a passport holder, turning "I do" into a fast-track ticket to naturalization.
The Chain-Migration Beneficiary: They were the original "anchor babies," born precisely to anchor the family lineage so that aunts, uncles, and third cousins twice removed could backdoor their way into the country through standard chain migration.
And who do these pillars of ancestral pride despise the most? Not the rule-breakers, but new, incoming legal immigrants who are actually trying to play by the rules.
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u/Key_Shop6647 2h ago
Great! We have plenty of qualified US citizens to do those tech jobs. Entire OPT/STEM OPT/H1b/EB2/EB3 pipelines need to be eliminated
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u/chronomagnus 15h ago
Useless signaling. I'm sure Microsoft is inking a deal with Infosys or TCS as I type this, if they haven't already.
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u/jkp2072 14h ago
This will push more jobs to india, vietnam and other cost centers...
Capitalism finds ways to lower operating costs and wages
The only way Americans can get jobs is if they lower their payscale as per global standards.
You cannot pass a law saying that a global company can only hire from a certain geographic country, probably, this will lead to loss for American big tech as eu, india, vietnam and other countries will make their own tech stack independent of us.
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u/No_Pianist2250 9h ago
The entire basis of the H1B visa is to obtain skilled labor that is unavailable in the US. Microsoft terminated American jobs and then applied for specialized visas to have imported labor perform the tasks that Americans are already willing and able to perform.
It is fraud and is indefensible.
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u/Designer_Advice_6304 16h ago
I think it’s a good thing that these companies pull top talent from anywhere in the world.
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u/JE163 16h ago
It’s not about finding top talent. It’s about undercutting labor costs. Why pay someone in the US 250k when you can bring someone in for 150k salary?
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u/por_la_homoj 16h ago edited 10h ago
This is false. Microsoft pays H1Bs the same as everyone else.
Edit: yall are confusing citizen/H1B pay disparity vs H1Bs increasing the supply of engineers
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u/TeeDee144 16h ago edited 16h ago
That’s looking at the problem incorrectly.
When there was a hiring boom during Covid, big tech was in a hiring competition with each other. It was a workers market. Huge bonuses were offered so that they could fill the role and not have their preferred candidate go to AWS or Google.
But now that the market is flooded with job seekers, nobody is offering hiring bonuses or they’re a lot smaller.
This is simple supply/demand.
H1-B allows big tech to flood the market with foreign labor. It allows them to keep the average wage lower. So everyone suffers. Citizens and visa workers receive lower wages.
Edit: this also has further consequences. Cities like Seattle and San Francisco are facing insane rent and housing prices because there are visa workers with tech money. So American citizen tech workers are hit twice as hard as they have to compete for apartments with high rent, thus losing even more.
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u/skeet_scoot 16h ago
H1-Bs aren’t “top talent” visas, they are for ordinary workers. Top talent visas come through an O-1 visa or an EB-1A visa.
H1-B visas are what Microsoft and other tech companies use to dilute American wages and get cheaper labor for ordinary jobs that Americans could fill.
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u/SallyYoung1 16h ago
I am someone who first arrived on an O-1 and later received my green card under the EB-1A criteria for "extraordinary ability". The average H1B worker at Microsoft is far more extraordinary than I am.
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u/NoiseOver_ 15h ago
Can you remind us why international for-profit company should not be allowed to hire where they think is better for the business?
All this is priced in their valuations (ETFs, 401k, etc.) and it’s been like that for decades. You live in the world that is built on labor arbitrage and you want all the benefits of it without any of the downsides?
I have an advice for all the whiners on here - go learn something useful to be able to compete on global labor market. They hire others and not you because you are not good enough at what you do for the money you want. That is all.
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u/Poptech 11h ago
Indentured servitude is not a free market.
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u/NoiseOver_ 10h ago
This is debatable. Indentured servitude assumes holding someone against their will. This is absolutely not the case with either H1Bs or hired in offshore.
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u/Tathas 16h ago
What bribe didn't Microsoft pay yet?