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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

> An H-1B hire should not simply be marginally better than an American counterpart. They should provide such a leap forward in capabilities such that the rest of the company is elevated in their own knowledge and expertise.

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...

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Seems more likely to just lead to larger offices in India, reducing high earners here in America (even if only temporary) and reducing the amount of money that is recycled through American cities.

this seems like common retort. hire h1b or else....

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.

Have you interviewed any of these candidates yet? I doubt that you have 500+ real candidates. My experience in the past 12 months of hiring is that you'll have maybe 10 "qualified on paper" candidates, and 490 AI-generated profiles.

Hard to be too mad at the applicants when a similar percentage of the roles might also be fake.

That might be true if you're applying for a megacorp like AWS or something but hard to feel like that's a valid argument when you're applying to a company with 2 open roles.

Small companies I've worked for are "always hiring". They leave job descriptions posted in case they get some miracle applicant.

you only got 10 qualified applicants to a generic software engineer position? i am having hard time beliving that sorry.

Its not that they can't find them. It's that if they can't exert the same control that they have over H1B visa holders, they would rather pay a lower salary (overseas).

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.

>if they can't exert the same control that they have over H1B visa holders, they would rather pay a lower salary (overseas)

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?

It also reduces the number of Indian people who physically reside in the US and can influence the American political system.

They can't vote.

Economic growth is not valued universally as we are seeing very clearly. There are more anti-growth people that you think.

What good is "economic growth" if the citizen/voter does not think it benefits them?

More people frequenting local business and spending the income in the local economy is generally viewed as a good thing.

It's usually about how much weight is placed on perceived negative externalities.

Also, if you go by the Lisep TRU article (whose premise I mildly disagree with) over 20% of Americans are “functionally unemployed” then that says American employers are screwing their compatriots by bringing in lower wage substitutes and moreover they bring them in not because we don’t have people, rather we/they don’t want to pay the going rate.

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