Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs

HN does know. Some of us question whether brave and courageous leadership knows.

Then why does it take months and months for even experienced devs to land a job?

Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 - September 2025 (526 comments)

Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments)

H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments)

Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 - December 2024 (65 comments)

How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional citations)

> Federal data shows Oracle filed for 2,690 H-1B visas in fiscal year 2025 and 436 so far in fiscal year 2026, totaling over 3,100 visa requests.

There is no proof that these people were also not part of the layoffs. Typically in layoffs, until the day off the announcement, it’s just business as usual. Which means people keep getting hired and H1B petitions being filed. The article doesn’t say they filed these petitions AFTER the layoffs.

"In 2025, it was estimated that over 163 million Americans were in some form of employment, while 4.16 percent of the total workforce was unemployed. This was the lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s, although these figures are expected to rise in 2023 and beyond."

Pretty sure that is the U3 rate which only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for a job. The U6 is better and rarely falls below 5%:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE

That can’t be further from the truth

What America is full of is fake employment statistics that are artificially inflated by young people hiding out in school to avoid the bad job market.

> IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.

You are stating what IT people understand and are blatantly ignoring the realities of many companies. I've been at more than one shop that decided to do layoffs in a 'corporate' way and the people who knew the system were let go, the people who didn't know a class from a function were kept around, and the smart people from other teams have to jump in and pick up the slack.

And that's not event getting into outsourcing/etc, that's just basic corporate stupidity.

> America is at near full employment [2].

Doesn't tell the full story, i.e. under-employment where someone's working at a Walmart with a CS degree; They're still 'employed' but it's not in their field.

> Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].

A Single link to a single enforcement action only resulting in < 180K USD for damages is not a great example of enforcement.

Outsourcing companies prey on gaps in US tax code and the like to make it 'look' cheaper to outsource, except for the huge maintenance cost for the trash that comes out.

And, some of that is the fault of the company procuring those services too. They don't give good enough requirements, they take too long to figure stuff out...

And yet I've found a niche specifically around spending half of my day reviewing pull requests from offshore houses where, requirements be damned, it's obvious the contractor is either overworking employees, letting incompetent employees in, or the employees think they can cheat and put code that 'just happens to work under testing' but inevitably will break under any stress.

But at the end of the day you can still do it. WITCH consultancies have seeped into a number of our industries and all the average consumer can do is bitch about how every software product or interaction UX from the providing companies has gotten so much worse.

Hope you're not saying this at social gatherings.

What the newspapers(economists | politicians) say, is not reality for most people.

So maybe the actual question is what kind of a Stanford undergraduate would choose a university IT position in ~2021 instead of aiming for more lucrative tech roles. Perhaps the kind that wants to maximize their chances of getting H-1B.

Think of someone from a place that isn't nice enough, but well above the threshold of absolute shitshow with genocidal aftertaste that allows protection. Such people, by virtue of claiming to require asylum get temporary protection and right to residence and then clog the system by appealing everything ten times with the obviously foreseeable result of not being granted anything. The current idea that is supposed to solve everything is hosting the immigration ghettos offshore (surprise surprise) to not upset the local population until the positive decision is made.

Right populists are mostly riding the racist feeling and the idea that the actual legitimate asylum seekers are undesirable, because they are Muslim, because immigrants leech on the system and all that, plus the actually observable existence of ethnic (organized) crime.

All at the same time, the tech immigration is very easy as long as you get an offer. No quotas, no 100k shakedown, not even a degree requirement or a language test, just someone willing to fill the form and pay like 500 bucks in processing fees and pay you the above media salary. Family immigration isn't restricted either and partners of citizens and immigrants get right to work (because what else they would do here, lol).

But the actual non-fancy low-skilled low-paid immigrants are either EU citizens from less affluent side of the continent or the (former) asylum status holders (which is straight path to citizenship most of the time). Packages have to sorted, garbage trucks have to be driven and cheaply. But sure, anti-immigration attitudes we have.

So yeah, the only sure way to fly in a Thai cook is to marry her or give her husband a tech job.

Every serious attempt to answer that ends up admitting something uncomfortable, that democracy only functions as intended if voters are consistently rational and informed. But that assumption doesn’t hold. It never has. Even the Athenians put Socrates, father of Western civilization, to death.

If society were at all rational, we'd see a lot more people swing from lampposts.

The end game for corporatism is shown in Europe where you can see a clear gap between countries that are built on non-zero sum systems which are thriving, everything just works...and then other countries which have been heavily corporatist for multiple decades, everything is collapsing, government function is both non-existent in many areas and reaching new highs of intervention into markets. Unfortunately, the Chinese were right.

Ultimately, companies who use H1B visas will outcompete companies who don't because the H1B system gives them cheaper labor costs. The solution has to come at the regulatory level.

150 years ago, if you told someone "oh if you want safer factories just build one yourself," that business would never survive because they'd get outcompeted by the less scrupulous factory owners who were happy to mangle their employees and just replace them with more desperate workers.

The H-1B visa program is simply another element of the system that capital uses to abuse labor in the United States. It's not enough that healthcare (if you are even lucky enough to get any) is tied to employment. The low bar for bringing in foreign workers is used as a negotiating tactic by employers. There is no equivalent leverage for workers, absent economic ruin. This problem affects tens of millions of Americans and that's not normal and it's not okay. Maybe the law should allow H-1B visa, but also charge an absolutely huge premium (> $250k) that the company commits to worker healthcare or something. If the positions are so essential then $250k is still an incredibly good deal.

America has to start addressing the imbalance of power between capital and labor. It's gotten bad enough that one could easily argue that it's becoming a potent anti-democratic force in the US. And, I'm sorry, but Americans should not have to cede their desire for equal economic footing because people like you want intimate that it's about "not hiring immigrants".

In the real world, the evidence is obvious: average productivity/wages drop, incentive to invest in labour-saving technology disappears, and you get multiple decades of stagnation. Every country which had unlimited, unfree labour has had decades of slow growth as a result.

Income growth in the working age population in the US since 1990 has been about the same as Japan, a country which is widely regarded as on the verge of economic collapse. US per capita income is probably 20-30% lower than it would be with first-order effects from immigration, likely much more with second order effects. Under any other circumstances with economic policy elsewhere, the US economy would be growing 7%/year now (and ofc, the answer for Japan's ills is apparently, you guessed, lots of immigration).

China is seeing secular reductions in production costs because of capital investment, not low wages. The peculiarly statist notion of American capitalists that the route to economic supremacy was large numbers of illiterate Guatemalans should go down as not only an economic failure but a moral one (equally of H1B).

Also, h1-b is limited to 6 years (one renewal) unless I-140 (green card) has been filed for the employee. In which case, renewals become unlimited until green card is granted.

For Indians the GC queue is nearly infinite, hence too many renewals.

The employer can legally say they advertized the job and had no applicants and need an H1B employee.

Union jobs with set hours and lower barriers to entry than software while offering middle class salaries? It's so horrible /s.

It's this attitude that makes people who don't have stakes in the software industry feel schadenfreude.