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Comment by ryaniscool | Hacker News Reader

Skilled immigrants being important to the country and the H1B visa program being abused by large employers can both be true at the same time. From my own personal experience, most H1B visa holders are competent but not uniquely skilled.

This would be stupid five or ten years ago. Right now however, we have enough tech people in the country for the current job market.

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Not sure why you're down voted. But given the state of the tech job market it is unjustifiable to admit more H1Bs.

Now the flip side of it is - how will they control the outsourcing that typically comes with the H1B restriction? Every enterprise these days has an India development center (banks, telcos, pharma, big-tech, manufacturing, etc.). If they've had the money, they have established it. They can just scale up the hiring there. On second thoughts that's what they were all doing anyway and saying it was AI.

They could have scaled up offshore hiring at any time. If it was actually cheaper for the same quality, they would have.

11% unemployment for CS majors. Absolute insanity to be admitting H1Bs for the tech sector right now.

Agree, for ordinary CS jobs, there's plenty of workers available right now, thanks to AI. But for highly specialized jobs including AI research, you still need to be able to hire immigrant talent.

There's the O-1 for that.

O-1 is not enough. For jobs requiring bachelors degree, there is currently plenty of US-born workers looking for jobs. For jobs requiring masters and PhD there is still a need for H-1B visas, and O-1 is too high a bar.

Fine, so there are some that fall below the O-1 bar. Nonetheless, those are a drop in the ocean compared to the regular $150k jobs being lost to H1Bs.

We don’t.

I feel like this $100k fee is specifically for this type of uniquely skilled worker. If they are that in demand, then $100k is not a significant amount of money. There was recently an article in the New York Times about AI experts getting more than star athletes.

Immigration benefits capital and hurts labor, but big business has hypnotized the left into supporting it.

The new H1B fee effectively puts a cap on software engineer pay. I can hire an immigrant on H1B for $150k/year ($50k salary + $100k fee). So local hires better be cheaper than that.

Why do you think the H1B will work for 50k/year? Where are you located?

Wouldn't it be more clear to say that for hiring approach, now the unexpected burden of tagging on a new 100k fee works as a negative coloring (as it I think intends (ostensibly)) to these candidates then? How was the 100k already priced in?

I'm not following. So you're saying the cap on engineers' salaries follows a rule of H1B visa fee + $50k? Doesn't that mean that cap has increased?

they are saying that a H1B worker is in practice gonna get paid 100k less, cost 100k more to the employer, or something in between.

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