The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified
marginallycompelling.com
marginallycompelling.com
Working in non-FAANG corporate America, these types of roles are the only thing thing I've ever seen H1B hires used for. They've run the gamut from incompetent to quite good, but none have ever been the "best and brightest".
It saddens me that the left no longer seems to care about protecting American workers.
If you try to make some College kid work 10-20 hours of unpaid overtime a week they'll just walk.
The entire point is exploitation and downward wage suppression.
Western college kids are not nearly as subservient and likely to keep their own interests in mind and not offer dog-loyalty to a company that will lay them off at the any sign of turmoil.
We basically do not have a left wing party in this country. We have a center right party with "progressive" social views that has a few economic left-wingers under its tent, and then we have a reactionary right party.
What you are saying is like saying the people feeding the poor during the limited schedule a city allows don't really care about feeding the poor because if they did they would do it at all hours. No, they are putting in the hard frustrating work, even when the limits they have to work withing suck.
What I've seen is a local workforce (typically, then a mix of 1st gen Americans) being asked to train their replacements. Some replacements on Visas and some remote. But what gall to ask you to train your [cheaper] replacements.
>What I've seen is a local workforce (typically, then a mix of 1st gen Americans) being asked to train their replacements. Some replacements on Visas and some remote. But what gall to ask you to train your [cheaper] replacements.
This destroys their entire argument about the necessity of the imports, even if it is relatively rare. (Note that I don't think it's rare to be replaced by foreigners. I think it's rare to be forced or incentivized to train them, especially with knowledge that you will actually be replaced.)
Recently I heard something crazy like 9 of 10 new jobs since the pandemic is held by foreign-born people, even as many US-born are unemployed. 20% of US-born men is unemployed. This is not a primary source but it should get you started if you're interested: https://www.numbersusa.org/blog/nine-out-of-ten-new-jobs-hav...
???
I can’t imagine why this is a left/right issue. Progressive/conservative issue.
It’s an economic issue. It was said in the article, “global enterprises”. It’s MBAs, and not “Medicare for all radicals”.
If the H1B visas were awarded as intended this would be non-issue
You will find that many issues we face as a society are simply this same thing happening in different areas of public service
Well, if that's the case, then meritocracy demands population replacement.
This is an important thing that was recently addressed by the new $100,000 fee to sponsor an H-1B visa. It is especially impacting Indian tech workers in the US [1] since the types of roles that InfoSys and other foreign tech consulting firms are staffing do not meet the bar of "leap forward in capabilities". A US company is welcome to sponsor (and pay for) a visa for a truly exceptional worker. But not just anyone because they're cheap and minimally-capable.
[1] https://thefederal.com/category/news/h1b-visa-indian-tech-wo...
we open a role on linkedin for a data engineer for about 6 hrs and we got 500+ applicants and vast majority were indeed qualifed on paper. I am baffled by employers who cant seem to find anyone in the country that doesnt need work authorization. Love to hear what types of roles and where this is happening.
The US government could disincentivize companies from moving jobs over seas instead of hiring local, but the current administration seems more concerned with corporate profit and stock prices than anything else.
Not that I am calling you a liar, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Though, any evidence would be great... so how do you know that?
Over the last 20 years, I've noticed this is most of political journalism today.
Post a headline refuting the thing, ignore the primary issue from the thing you're refuting. People who don't already deeply understand the issue don't know any better.
Everything can be factually correct. It's all just framing by what you choose to leave out / ignore.
If we pursued the "Most Qualified" in its truest form, then ~95%[1] of the jobs in this country would be handed over to foreigners. In isolation, this would be great for US companies. In reality, 95% of the local population would riot.
If we pursued "only hire Americans", then our growth as a country would be stunted, and we'd lose our global competitive edge.
Somewhere between is a balanced medium.
Side observation: I've noticed tech leaders/CEOs/PG have been choosing (or succumbing) to what the algorithm wants them to say or how phrase. I stopped following all of them because I can feel my emotions being manipulated whenever I read what they have to say.
[1] The USA is less than 5% of the worlds population.
Suppose you found someone at your competitor who is doing your exact same job (already unlikely - their have a different structure in some way that is important) who is better than you. Would they be willing to move to where you company is? Would your company be willing to pay enough to make them join? Even if the above are true, all those structures your company has that are different mean there will be some time before they are better than you.
Most jobs don't need the best person. Is my doctor the best in the world - probably not - but she is more than good enough for my needs.
Though I have to object to your 95% number. Most people in the world do not have the education that the US provides. Most people are not fluent in English which is almost always a critical part of working for a company in the US. Once you add those requirements, the something closer to 50% of the most qualified people for your job live in the US (now if New Zealand was your country 95% of the most qualified don't live there - and most probably wouldn't want to move even though it is apparently a nice country)
Which is to say even if there was unlimited immigration allowed, your best hire in the US will be an American in most cases.
Though it doesn't matter who is most qualified you need to a plan to mentor and train up the younger generation. (who then grow old and train the next generation)
Even if the above assumptions are true the set of Americans who are qualified will be completely outnumbered by, say, even 2% of qualified people from a huge population like China/India/etc.
As for English, most Americans have English as a first language. Now there are certainly accent differences, but that actually plays in the favor of Americans when you're in the U.S. I can understand someone from Australia. However, they do speak a little different and I have to work a little bit at it. That makes them worse at any communication they would have to do with me. The majority of the world does not speak English as a first language. Some people are better than others, but the vast, vast majority of people I've heard who don't live in America have poor English skills. Sure, in countries like England or New Zealand, they will have great English skills as well, but when you get to Germany, some have great, some can just barely get by, and some, despite years of studying, can't actually speak it. Germans are one of the more likely people to have good English skills. If we were to go to China or India, English gets really really hard to understand. Their grammar is typically very very wrong.
Two billion people between India and China with rough numbers, two percent of that is about the population of the US. You're not looking at overwhelming the number of people in the US with only 2% of your population, at most half, and that is before we get into it, there are a lot of people in India and China who are older and not well educated. By contrast, your older people in the US are still likely to have had a fair amount of school and so be better.
This would be true if you're talking about randomly picking people from around the world to live in the US for their formative years and go through the US education system (at which point they barely count as "foreigners"). This isn't reality, though, and if you're talking about hiring a worker today, a large swath of that 95% won't speak English, or won't be literate, or will have never received a formal education, all of which are disqualifying for pretty much every job in the US.
It is also a fact that "most qualified" is fuzzy. It comes down to something more like, performance per dollar, or "culture fit", or some other thing. Unless you are trying to absolutely have the most advanced shit in the world at any price, "qualifications" or "talent" are not the ultimate factors. Having been in this industry for a while, most foreign workers obviously aren't "the best" like that. They're not even more talented or hard-working than the average American worker. But they usually work for less and the job gets done (roughly speaking), and their mere presence drives down everyone's wages.
But High Tech is different. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US. The US leads the world in tech not because the best ideas were all American but because the best people in the world immigrated to the US. Stopping this will be ruinous to American prosperity.
The seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need") was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration undercut Americans? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, and their innovations create jobs.
There is always an economic argument to be made for importing the cheapest or allegedly "best" labor, but it's mostly about saving money even if it means destroying domestic workers. It sounds better when we're talking about a scientist instead of a construction worker or meat packer, but it's kind of the same problem. There are many cases of American workers being forced to train H1-B replacements, or being blatantly discriminated against for being, shall we say, obviously American.
If foreign researchers are able to prove themselves abroad and contribute as you say, I assume they can continue doing that in most cases without coming to the US to take jobs. If immigrants are such a great resource, why are poor countries not trying harder to keep those people from leaving? Why doesn't China import a bunch of Indians for IT work, or vice versa?
> If foreign researchers are able to prove themselves abroad and contribute as you say, I assume they can continue doing that in most cases without coming to the US to take jobs.
They can't prove themselves abroad. Consider the example of "Attention is all you need" paper. That paper came into existence thanks to talented people from around the world coming together in one place and then collaborating. It would not have happened if the contributors stayed in their own countries.
> If immigrants are such a great resource, why are poor countries not trying harder to keep those people from leaving?
They are. See here: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-restricts-o...
> Why doesn't China import a bunch of Indians for IT work, or vice versa?
They are trying. See here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/world/asia/china-stem-vis...
I think this is a stretch, especially now that we have the internet. I also wouldn't be opposed to non-immigrant research visas, perhaps a specialized type of H1-B visa (since most of these people are not independently wealthy). But what I don't want is any random foreigner who has their name on some academic papers to be considered top talent. There are paper mills that crank these people out (putting their names on papers without any involvement), and besides that most research is just not that good. Why would we want a bunch of mediocre foreign researchers to come and take jobs away from mediocre American researchers? As we know, getting jobs in academia is very difficult as-is.
You got me on China trying to stop talent from leaving. It's an authoritarian country though. You can't even travel around freely inside the country lol! I threw China in there because a lot of H1-Bs and students are actually Chinese, but China is not where most of them come from.
You also got me on China allegedly trying to get talent to move to China. Their people seem to have had a predictable reaction. That's really something, considering that they can get in trouble for criticizing their government. I guess they thought it was worth the risk, because doing nothing would screw them even harder.
We disagree on your first paragraph, agree on the rest.
1. Foreign researchers can communicate with colleagues fairly well over the internet (in real time, even). Physical presence is not required to do academic research, at least in mathematics or CS.
2. Degree mills, fake credentials, paper mills, etc. exist to get names on stuff for a fee. This is used to game the immigration system.
3. Many US degree programs are used as a vector for immigration more than education, and people who immigrate this way usually try to meet the minimum requirements to stay in the US and do little beyond that.
4. Even when it comes to research, most research just isn't that good and doesn't contribute that much to society.
5. Getting jobs in academia is difficult.
6. Immigration lowers wages due to the basic laws of economics.
7. Given the fact that we have mediocre researchers in abundance, such that they can't find work in academia, there is negligible societal benefit to importing mediocre foreign researchers en masse. Additionally, this is devastating to the local labor market.
8. All other things equal (to the extent it is reasonable to determine), a country should try to ensure that native citizens get priority in hiring, rather than importing replacements.
If you disagree with #8, perhaps you should consider who is going to be willing to spill their blood and give up their treasure to defend a country that undermines them at every turn.
The H1B exists to find laborers in areas where we have a shortage of qualified people in US. Given the fact that in many fields we have lots of American graduates that struggle to get jobs, H1B currently has no legitimate purpose in America. It should be abolished entirely.
Everything else is downstream of that.
So even though O-1 is intended for extra ordinary abilities, it's far from one.
Is this true? I thought the the "O" visa accomplished this. H-1B is for specific worker shortages. Of course, a "shortage" from a company's perspective is "no Americans are applying for my position", which isn't necessarily because there are no qualified Americans to hire...
Exactly - we are in agreement
Of course, at times, yes. Not at this time in American history, clearly.
> When their business is crucial to society and can't function without the workers at the given price
Yes, absolutely, if by "given price" you mean "the price Americans should reasonably be paid". But this particular combination of two things is probably nonexistent.
> a business should fail because of a politically imposed scarcity of labor?
Again, probably not what would actually happen. If businesses are forced to hire Americans, they would not "fail". Rather, investors/leadership may choose to go do some other more-profitable business, but not because the business can't survive. We are talking about the lack of socially normal humans in US leadership, not economic constraints. I.e. the kind of person you have to compel to be a non-negative force in society via legislation. Not every country, now or in history, has to deal with this problem. It's definitely a weird one. But it's what we're dealing with right now. Yes, there have always been unscrupulous Scrooges among those running things, but often their goals happen to benefit society as a whole enough that we don't have to step in this dramatically.
>Yes, absolutely, if by "given price" you mean "the price Americans should reasonably be paid". But this particular combination of two things is probably nonexistent.
That isn't really what I meant. It is conceivable that there could be a critical business for which there are simply not enough workers to meet demand at the price customers can afford. I think there is an underlying assumption that if the money is there, the workers will be too. Generally, that is how things work in the long run, but in the case of skilled vocations there can be a long lag before qualified people step in.
What I'm describing here is just acknowledging the demand curve for labor and its implications. It's very basic economics. If the input costs for a product go up too high, it will necessarily reduce the consumption regardless of how badly wanted the product happens to be. I don't think it is tenable in the long term to have have a majority of people in society clamoring for something that is too expensive because of labor, especially to the benefit of a cartel of workers who these people also regard as overpaid. I think the immigration of medical doctors is one of these in the extreme. Most people think doctors are paid well, and do not care if doctors don't like immigration because they perceive the prices to be too high. There may be many reasons that healthcare is expensive, but a tight supply of qualified labor is obviously one of these.
>> [Who's to say that] a business should fail because of a politically imposed scarcity of labor?
>Again, probably not what would actually happen. If businesses are forced to hire Americans, they would not "fail". Rather, investors/leadership may choose to go do some other more-profitable business, but not because the business can't survive.
I think you are forgetting that businesses can and do lose money all the time. Most businesses fail, in fact. The point of investing is to make a profit. If that cannot be attained after a reasonable ramp up period, then investors will eat their losses and go away. That is the definition of a business not surviving. If you can't show that your expenses (including labor) will eventually result in a profit, then you don't have a viable business idea and no investor would sink money into it.
The classic case of this happening is all the factories that closed due to competition in China and elsewhere. Those factories indeed had to hire Americans for their physical proximity, if nothing else, and at that price point they could not sustain themselves. Even having higher quality did not save most of them. Consumers didn't care enough about quality or patriotism to sustain those factories.
>We are talking about the lack of socially normal humans in US leadership, not economic constraints. I.e. the kind of person you have to compel to be a non-negative force in society via legislation.
It is totally an economic problem: oversupply of labor driven by market dynamics. The solution that helps American workers is to slow down immigration by a lot. It has knock-on effects though, such as higher prices and potentially lower quality for a lot of things. It would also shift people around within the domestic economy.
>Yes, there have always been unscrupulous Scrooges among those running things, but often their goals happen to benefit society as a whole enough that we don't have to step in this dramatically.
Profit-seeking behavior lowers prices for everyone in the long run. If I were to summarize the problem I would say: Extreme exchange ratios and rapid/easy movement of resources internationally are causing threats to certain sectors of the workforce, including national security threats and impoverishment of skilled workers in wealthy nations (especially the US).
"There is plenty of international talent that can and should be leveraged in the appropriate places and the proper ways. There are many instances where you’re going to want to hire a leading expert in a technical field. But most jobs, the qualifications are a core technical and subject competency combined with diligence and a willingness to learn. [..]
We need to encourage a corporate mindset that believes in the importance of building up the American talent pool to tackle not only the challenge in front of them but the array of challenges that the future will bring."
Related earlier post by Mark Atwood: https://markatwood.substack.com/p/america-is-an-idea-not-an-...
> We need to encourage a corporate mindset that believes in the importance of building up the American talent pool to tackle not only the challenge in front of them but the array of challenges that the future will bring.
It's tough to square this noble thought with what's actually happening in corporate America. The culture of investing in training and mentoring to foster employee growth has been eroding for the past 40 years (if not more), to where it only seems to exist in limited capacity in legacy institutions and is completely absent in new (tech) firms. How does one convince business leaders to bring it back?
With engineers in the big tech companies mostly only staying for maybe 1-2 years I can understand employers not being very interested in training and mentoring to foster employee growth.
40 years ago engineers frequently stayed at companies like DEC, IBM, and HP for 10 to 20+ years.
This is an effect, not a cause. People started voting with their feet when companies stopped investing in them.
There are precisely 1.0 ways to do that: make all of the alternatives more expensive.
That's it. Nothing else will move the needle.
I don't believe it is possible: every policy one can imagine, short of establishing a GULAG system to compel compliance, has powerful opposing interests, including workers themselves. It would require the sort of comprehensive and sustained focus that a nation aspiring to nearly suicidal liberalism can not deliver.
I think in the ideal world 30-60% of the people who retire from your company should have started there just out of school. Much less than that and you don't get the value of experience built up over time. Much more and you miss out of good ideas others are doing. However there are many ways the world will never be ideal...
Because it is advantageous to be the only one who doesn’t invest in it while reaping the benefits from those who do. So very few do.
YC partner Ankit Gupta: hiring Americans first is DEI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467325 - August 2026 (2 comments)
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments)
India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43088906 - February 2025 (59 comments)
How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments) [https://github.com/BloombergGraphics/2024-h1b-immigration-da...]
The Secret Way Silicon Valley Uses the H-1B Program - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/silicon-v... | https://archive.today/qffNT - June 2017
Ergo, laws will be required to "encourage" the corporate paperclip maximizer apparatus. When did asking nicely ever work? "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising the lawnmower."
It's a sign of a well informed person. Keep it up!
Objective data, evidence, and facts are important as a shared foundation to discuss upon.
How's that possible? Any tricks you can share?
A country also needs to keep up and learn from other countries. That means working with and integrating technologies, ideas and, yes, personnel from other countries.
It's a balance thing and Anduril has a hard job in trying to strike the balance, but they have to do it. The defense industry is not simply a number-goes-up operation.
You can see it here: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37 - just 6% of US school graduates go to study engineering (there are almost no foreign-born students doing bachelors in the US).
This has been the case since forever. So more than half of the STEM graduates of the _US_ universities are foreigners: https://www.ets.org/grad-school-journey/international-studen...
And if anything, the adult daycare (aka "school") situation has been getting worse for quite a while.
Strict qualification can only be measured in a extreme niche cases. You founded an area of research, so you're the most qualified to work on that at Google. You have a massive Linux project, then maybe Torvalds or his core maintainers are the only ones who fit.
But outside of that, people become qualified because of what they do, and before they did it, they were unqualified.
As an example, I'm sure there are many people at OAI and Ant who are today world experts at research and training and infra. But they became that by just doing the job. Take their same resume from 5 years ago and they may not even reach the interview if they applied for the same role. The what does qualified mean, how do you measure and define it?
Countries need to develop their own talent and individuals need to develop themselves.
Is it in terms of collective taxes paid? Does that include or exclude family? Or is it in terms of money spent in the local economy? Or in terms of money sent abroad to other economies? Maybe it's in more direct terms of contributing to the next generation of talent, like volunteering, coaching, or hosting scholastic events for the community? Or maybe it's an entirely other class of event, like a club exclusively for specific races/citizens of a specific country?
Almost all of my co-workers who were educated in the US but came from abroad send their earnings abroad, were part of 'X Country Citizens' clubs in college, and don't socialize too much outside of their native language. I don't think that's a problem, and it's just anecdotal, but it's certainly not the 'same way as John from Chicago'.
> don't socialize too much outside of their native language
If lack of socializing is an important factor, one should stop hiring introverts as well.
These are multinational companies - not American companies.
No one complained when Google and their like moved hiring from the Bay Area and New York to North Carolina despite both having diametrically opposing politics.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
It's absolutely bullshit that H1B and O1 visas can come here and take routine CS jobs that US citizens are more-than-qualified for. The narrative of the need for these visas is pure corporate-shill speak.
So, ironically, Paul Graham supports the right wing position and Luckey the left-center if you frame it that way!
The most qualified for physical jobs are the healthiest. By allowing unlimited immigration, you literally let in the healthiest and most persistent to the detriment of less healthy locals. Eugenics? You can frame it that way, too.
Being born in a desirable country has disadvantages now. People from all over the world buy property and drive up prices, people from all over the world compete for local jobs, take university places (almost free in the EU). That is locust capitalism and the distinction between the von Brauns and the regular H1Bs that the article makes is sensible.
- PG wants cheap labor so that we can get cheap/hard working employees for startups with a fear of deportation - Palmer cannot hire people on visas because they cannot easily clear security clearance that is required to work in Defense sector. Its better to align with current Government to get contracts.