yep. I see the same thing. Trump isn't wrong to hike fees for H1-B. For companies that shift development overseas they should face tariffs as well.
It's very abusive to the workers hired as H1-B and it's designed for wage suppression. You can stay an H1-B for years. If you lose your job, you'll face deportation. It gives your employer a VERY large amount of leverage over your life.
It's supposed to be about bringing expertise when local expertise isn't available, but in practice it's companies saying "Oh, we can't find someone who will work for $50k as a software dev so we need to hire H1-Bs."
Either the program needs to end or the minimum salary needs to be raised to something like $300k to compensate for the leverage the employer has.
It doesn't totally fix them, but it does make it so the applicant is more fairly compensated for accepting a more abusive work environment. It also stops companies from using H1-Bs as a mechanism to reduce overhead.
> I think the best way to solve it is to remove or reduce the restrictions on staying in the country after they have worked here for some number of years.
I'd be for that as well. If someone comes in on a work visa I want them to either have full access to the labor market with all the freedoms any american citizen has, or I want their compensation to be high enough to justify locking them to a company and out of the general labor market.
How so? It increases the cost to the employer to hire an H1B employee, so they might hire less of them. But it could also mean they pay the employee less to compensate for the higher cost of bringing them in to the country.
The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 - September 2025
Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/297...
It's really hard to do this in a way that won't be trivial to work around, and often in ways where you're likely to like the work around even less.
This is what laws are for. "You can just do things."
> It's really hard to do this in a way that won't be trivial to work around, and often in ways where you're likely to like the work around even less.
So is collecting taxes, you just have a government funded entity grind tirelessly to keep closing the gaps. You make it economically burdensome to attempt to workaround. There will always be some leakage. "Work is hard." We know the labor exists in the US. We know offshoring is used to improve profit margins and to disempower workers to get more out of them. It is worth the effort, imho, if you want to keep the capital in the US versus sending it overseas and prioritize domestic workers over someone else's profits.
[1] https://stripe.com/guides/introduction-to-saas-taxability-in...
“China” “National Security”
And with that, you’re argument is dead in the water.
> Out of country services can be cloned with LLMs if needed.
Good luck cloning services whose endpoints are unavailable and documentation non-existent and that there would be no customers for, as they're built as a means of working around taxation of outsourcing.
What services can only be procured from offshore businesses and service providers that aren't for cutting costs? Honestly, what can be provided by someone in the UK, Europe, or LATAM that cannot be done by one of 100M people in the US labor force? I am genuinely interested, both as a scholar and as market opportunity.
The point is not that they couldn't, but that a company moving proprietary "services" offshore as a means to cut costs aren't interested in whether the services can be provided locally, but whether they can cut costs by moving them offshore.
If you tax renting labour, then companies seeking to do this will just enter into long enough service contracts to have the outsourcing agency custom-build a SaaS just for you instead.
The market opportunity here is simply to be an outsourced body shop.
My employer sells software internationally - are you claiming any international job should be subject to some sort of fine simply because the company is HQed in the US?
I suppose we could try slicing revenue or profit by sales region and comparing against headcount expense per region? But with salaries abroad being a fraction of in the US, that math might still work out in favor of keeping international employees.
EDIT - I dislike the H1B system overall. Just not sure "fine companies that operate overseas" is something we should consider as a replacement.
We should find way to improve the system.
Local SMEs (regulatory requirements), sales, local implementation teams, HR / legal (to support the previous employees). And engineers.
Sales and implementation could maybe be US-based, but then we're flying them around the globe. Not sure that makes sense vs hiring locals.
SMEs, similar story - not always available in the US.
The engineers are the only ones that could realistically be co-located in the US. But, a good chunk of those were acqui-hired, so now you're asking them all to relocate to the US? Not sure that's viable in the best of times, and definitely not in today's ass-backwards political climate.
If H1Bs are dropped or Indian workers are tariffed I believe you will start seeing a reciprocal tariffs, fines or calls for domestication.
H1B started off with the right idea, but has essentially become gamed to hell. It has created a new white collar slave class that companies exploit.
Not to bring in jobs or money (tariffs don't do that); just to push us away from your companies.