End the H-1B Program
end-h1b.com
end-h1b.com
The stated end-game should be getting the best people in the world to stay in the US and become citizens.
I feel like this could be a bulwark against offshoring, and in the big picture, protect US jobs overall.
I think the system as-is is fundamentally broken. First and foremost, it needs to include equity when comparing the salary to US persons - H-1Bs are supposed to require "equal pay" to US persons, but they only look at base salary.
I also think consultant firms need to be fixed. They need some cap such as "no more than 1 in 10 engineers in your teams may be H-1B. This should include consultants you use - e.x. if a company employs 20 engineers, and they have 10 active consultants, no more than 3 H1-bs across both in-company employees and consultants used.
The consulting farms are the biggest abusers by far, and the low hanging fruit to target and fix. If we can't figure some workable way to fix it, just ban consulting companies from having H-1Bs outright.
The system is also needlessly cruel to applicants. They should have some long buffer, say on the order of a tourist visa (6 months?) if they lose their job so they have time to try and find a new one before losing status. Can you imagine putting your kids in school and buying a house in an at-will state, on an H-1B? Yeesh.
Trump is using the system at levels like no one has seen before, perhaps he could set an example
"Trump Organization requested record number of foreign workers in 2025"
https://thehill.com/business/5603478-trump-organization-fore...
Is it better to scale back hospitals and airports instead of filling those jobs?
Fact is, your kid could start working 40 hours a week at age 18 for the next 50 years, and still not receive a proper pension. The government won't have any money left for them, and even if they did the economy probably wouldn't be ready to pay it back. Their brilliant future is enlistment in a war half a world a way, to bleed on foreign soil and see their government ignore them. Hope they're planning accordingly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/science/nobel-winning-us-...
Here's one on Japan and foreign workers
the current administration and republican party regularly put down the very institutions needed to do what you want
there's a saying about cake that is appropriate here
Yes, and the people saying let them eat cake are the same ones promoting H-1Bs, they will end the same.
does not make it irrelevant, the stance you have is the same they have, while they also have another stance that works directly against it, I don't know your stance on universities
the saying about cake I meant to imply was about getting to have it and eat it too, as applied to the party in power holding views that work against each other
I personally think that nurse practitioners is something to emphasize, maybe more so than doctors, for the non-emergency medical care that underdeliver for in this country while paying twice as much as the next closest country
I'd start with the basics here, reading and math competency levels are largely headed the wrong direction. Mississippi has done wonders for their reading, re: phonics, and I hope other states follow suite
America is not alone in failing to build infrastructure from within their country most just make excuses. All along the way (the last sixty years) many Western countries have deindustrialize themselves which mainly helps the upper income groups, but doesn’t help the average wage earners in any of those countries.
Importing H1B’s does not help the target country in the long term. All it does is postpone building infrastructure, industry within and raising the incomes of people within the destination country, the overall collapse of the target country still happens.
Or, if you are such a pessimist in America's can-do attitude, instead take it from the point of view of market efficiency. If a good cannot be produced cheaply enough for the market to sustain it, the solution is not to modify the social contract and undermine the value of labor for the sake of the good.
We have always solved problems by innovation. The surest way to prevent innovation is to continually provide cheaper and cheaper labor. The Roman empire is an excellent example of this.
Undoubtedly, these issues are more complex. However, this is such a tired old canard. Wages make labor, scarcity makes innovation.
agreed, two points toward this are
1. American agriculture is largely mechanic already, which removes the labor completely
2. food is non-discretionary, caveats about choices of what king of "food" eg. fast vs healthy
Types of food really are discretionary. Beans are an excellent vegetable and can be raised completely without manual labor. Trading salad greens for them would not be an overall nutritional loss. Perhaps the true market price for a head of lettuce should be 1.6x in a properly labor regime.
To draw the distinction more clearly, suppose we had zero illegal immigrants working in the field and someone said “let’s reduce the price of some vegetables by a third and create a permanent underclass”. Does that sound reasonable?
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Partly it is importing H-1B workers to displace US citizens?
H1-B is smokescreen put in front us to “argue” about and pale in comparison to outsourcing which no one talks about (cause companies pay politicians a lot of money to make sure no one talks about it, like ever…)
The big three countries in competition with the United States, China, Korea, Japan. Do sub out some things, but they do not sub out the core critical part of their industries or allow their companies, to do just about anything they want when it comes comes to pursuing cheaper labor overseas to the detriment of their citizens it is largely a western phenomenon, two of those countries even have strong unions similar to Germany. Who are actually taken seriously. (see what the unions were able to do in Korea for their workers in Korea at two of the memory cartel companies).
HN posters when the topic is H1b visas or outsourcing: Meritocracy is horrible and I reject it!