The program was to address labor shortages, and if we don’t have a labor shortage, then we should be reducing our temporary worker pool, not US citizen pool.
The reality is that businesses hire attorneys to create a legal fiction that I and my peers are unqualified so that businesses that desire it can hire H-1B employees.
Shortages are, always and everywhere, a pricing phenomenon.
Being more senior, my world of coworker and colleagues has been a mix of highly skilled people, largely in the AI/ML space. There are many H1Bs among them, but there has been no difference in the ability of the US citizen subset and the H1B subset in getting jobs.
Even closer to the entry level, the H1B pool all came from very competitive and elite universities, and all of them also had advanced degrees.
I do believe the market for fresh out of college software engineers without much specialization is tight, but I also don't see many H1Bs in that category either (but again, that could just be because of my own cohort I'm surrounded by). A PhD from NYU/Harvard/MIT with an undergrad at a place like IIT or Tsinghua is not in the same talent pool as newly graduated undergrad students from a standard US university.
The h1b candidate pool would be mostly undergrad and masters students.
Let me explain something: When I graduated from High School in Upstate NY in 1991, 3 of my fellow grads got accepted into MIT that year. From that one school! The odds of such an event taking place in the 2020s has to be vanishingly small to impossible. The high-end schools like MIT have not scaled up to match the enormously scaled up demand for education, not to mention how expensive the tuition has become. So it is simply impossible for everyone who wants to be engineers or computer scientists to attend some elite school nowadays. The competition for seats must have increased 100 fold since the early 1990s!
Nowadays, since I'm in my 50s, I'm disqualified from being able to work in tech completely. Mind you, the age discrimination is hidden behind me not being perfectly qualified for whatever role due to not checking some technical skillset. Never mind that I am still sharp, have a great deal of experience, and can do whatever is asked given a decent target to aim for. None of it seems to matter, it's purely ageism eliminating me from getting interviews now.
I do think we here in the US passed some kind of inflection point where the damage done by H1B labor finally killed the tech career path in the sense that all of a sudden, entry level jobs simply vanished, never to return. I'm sure that H1Bs reached some critical mass that triggered that extinction event.
The job market in tech in the US has been absolutely brutal since at least 2023.
Why do you think H1-Bs are to blame over AI hype coupled with Section 174 tax changes[^1]? H1-Bs have been around for a long time, so I doubt it's the culprit for layoffs and lower hiring since 2023.
It would be fair to say that they couldn't find any american talent and thus needed to hire h1b workers, but that wouldn't explain how they got monoculture teams.
I’m not sure that’s what the H-1B program is doing in practice here, it probably is replacing many skilled American born workers. But at least in theory it can both be true that domestic worker unemployment has gone up, but that contracting the program risks the global competitiveness of major US companies that net employ US workers. More analysis is probably warranted.
Now I also spent a long career in regular old enterprise dev before 2020. Definitely any halfway decent framework developer could have done the job as well as the ones who were here on H1B.
I can easily hold multiple thoughts at once.
1. As long as their unemployed qualified Americans for roles, we should reduce the new H1B visa applications dramatically.
2. I don’t begrudge anyone here on H1B and don’t support discriminating against them or cancelling their visa
3. I don’t agree with how once you get let go from a job, the clock starts ticking no matter how much money you have saved. When I was at Amazon and Amazon started Amazoning with me. I didn’t break a sweat when I was on “focus”. I played the game long enough to get through my next vest and then sat around and waited on my “get $40K+ severance offer and leave immediately or prostrate myself for a couple of more months and still be let go with 1/3 the severance amount”.
Of course I took the severance. My coworkers here on H1B were scared shitless and overworked themselves. Then again, it was my 8th job out of now 10 and I was already 49 at the time. I might have acted differently if I were younger.
I’m sorry you didn’t have that experience and I concede that your story might even be the majority based on who is getting these visas. But think the bar isn’t, does there exist any American born citizen who could rise to that role, but do there exist enough, which, at least 10 years ago was no for several kinds of software, and I think it really did serve a valuable purpose beyond just providing cheap labor for American software companies.
I didn't see where that was shown in the chart.
All I see is an assertion that "often at the expense of recent American CS grads.", and while I do believe I saw reporting that new grads are facing higher unemployment, I didn't see anything related specifically to CS grads, and, further, I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs. At least my experience has been that H1B are often in more senior roles and entry level jobs that require advanced degrees.
I'm not saying that it's not the case that there is a misalignment with the number of H1Bs and the current employment situation, but there doesn't seem to be enough data here to fully flesh out this argument without some fairly major assumptions being applied.
> By comparison, the unemployment rate for art history majors was 3%, and for nutritional sciences, the unemployment rate was just 0.4%, the New York Fed found. The New York Fed’s report was based on Census data from 2023 and unemployment rates of recent college graduates.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/college-majors-with-the-best...
> I haven't seen any data pointing out that H1Bs are taking entry level jobs
Foreign new grads start their career on the OTP visa, which allows them to work for 2 years after they graduate. So you are correct, foreign students use OTP, not h1b to apply for entry level jobs.
This is blindingly obvious if you look at the share of h1b visas that indians account for (a vast majority).
It's un-american and again - strikingly disgusting
This is bound to happen as you run out of people in the US. I don't think it's useful to prove a problem unless top US graduates start losing jobs to immigrants that outcompete them for lower salaries that they can live on because of lower educational debt.