The biggest one is the program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job.
What you’re saying gets repeated a lot, but I’ve never seen it to be true. Every single H1b employee I’ve seen comp for was comparable anyone else on the team at their same level. I just don’t believe that it’s happening on the scale that people make it out to be.
Also, I don’t want to get too into it unless people are interested, but at least at the companies I’ve been at, the way budgeting for new hires and the hiring process works, the people actually deciding who to hire aren’t really incentivized to do that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty wrong with these programs and I’m glad to see reform, but I don’t believe the underpaying thing is happening nearly as much as people claim it does.
You're so close to getting it... keep going...
That’d be a dumb way to run an economy.
At Big Tech almost everyone is normalized into salary bands by level and regardless of what you or your manager does, any discrepancy will eventually decay to level unless you get the formal promotion. They do this very deliberately, because they don't particularly trust their managers and don't want the organization to devolve into sucking up to get a raise. There isn't room for discrimination, and in many cases managers don't know your immigration status anyway (at the one I was at, we weren't supposed to ask, although it often became apparent because employees on visas would have to go home to renew, or they'd have questions about navigating company policies).
Quite honestly I am in amazed at this ingenuity. Art vs artist type of awe
it's been true 100% of the places I've worked. I can't name names on the internet.
Compared to FTE the difference was even larger including benefits and vacation time.
The biggest issue though, is not the local people. The issue is that the local people are there to bridge the timezone and communication gaps so you can have three off-shore people for each on-shore. Offshore people were paid less than a third of on-shore. So the number of American jobs they are displacing, and the wages they were being replaced at, is absolutely staggering.
Maybe in real tech companies its a different story. The one time I did a direct H1-B sponsorship (later, in a much smaller company), we did pay them an equal wage.
I will also add a data point for big tech. I have managed people on h1b, on o1, with green cards, and citizens. I have never even sniffed any sort of disparate treatment across these groups once hired. During hiring the bias was against h1b since it was a huge pain in the ass to arrange everything and their start date could be delayed.
It's much cheaper to setup shop outside US, which almost all companies do, but still they bring in foreign employees on visa just to keep the entire local market salaries to the minimum
Idk if people don't realize you can look this up? Pay doesn't look suppressed to me....
I don't think the solution is just getting rid of them all -- actually a longer grace period (say, a year?) would make it easier to leave abusive employers. But it should include more scrutiny on whether employers really can't find local hires in the first place, or just aren't willing to train them or work with people that have even slightly more bargaining power.
Abuse of the H1-B program is broader than just hiring people for less money right now. It's also about hiring people who won't ask for more money over a longer timeline. It's about having a whole class of workers that is uniquely vulnerable to terrorist bosses, which then gives those employers more leverage over everyone else. And it's about the large-scale market manipulation that comes with having this easily accessible.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The job switching process for foreigners should be easier.
This is exactly the problem. That reasoning alone is what allows companies to outsource to save money if you think on a larger scale. If systematically every company just says, oh we can't get American talent, but doesn't increase wages to incentivize for more local talent and simply hires abroad it stagnates wages for all. There is no incentive to raise effective wages if we can just continue bringing in more people for the same wage.
Let alone the fact that I am not convinced that we don't have enough talent for a good portion of the roles as advertised.
Research grade PhD level candidates doing novel work I can believe, but getting another person who writes more REST API's and dashboards or ETL jobs I refuse to believe.
Are wages too low to incentivize local talent? Tech companies already pay high six figures. What is this "local talent" doing that pays more?
Instead they just throw their hands up and call it quits, hiring elsewhere instead.
(This is not outsourcing. The foreign workers are still on the company's payroll, just in an office where they don't need a visa to work).
Laughs in ESG. Companies stopped reporting this in 2024, but go look at prior year results compared to US demographics.
My $0.02 here is that AAPI and African applicants have crowded out ADOS and Hispanics when you look at corporate demographics.
The only reason I think is because they want the local market dev prices to keep down,so they bring in visa restricted foreigners
where is this data coming from? Engineers frequently move between Amazon/Meta/Google/Microsoft, even on H1B.
MSFT has always been one of the higher paying tech companies out there: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/job-lists/highest-payi...
That isnt true. A SWE engineer working at the same level at Redmond gets paid the same band irrespective of visa status.
Employers benefit from regulations that exist to benefit employers. We should have completely open borders or actually do what's best for citizen workers.
Employers would have to pay more competitive wages if the candidate pool was smaller. Then there is the free legal services given to some workers and not others, that leaves less budget overall for compensation.
Big Tech has hired functionally every domestic worker interested in and capable of doing the job. They pay so much already.
But a contributing fact is flooding the tech market with H-1B visas spikes labor supply, kills workers' leverage and lets companies cheap out on salaries instead of bidding them up.
The imported worker, on the other hand, is a more efficient and compliant machine. Maybe if we make those youths as poor as the workers we import, they'll eventually learn some gratitude.
There's another option: without a sufficient workforce, the projects just happen somewhere else. Then the local market stagnates, and you end up with very little competition between employers. And the salaries go down to match.
This is not a conjecture. The European tech sector is experiencing exactly this phenomenon. Even in large tech companies, the salaries for the same positions are about 50-100% higher in the US.
Tech companies do not generally do this for their product teams, but may do it for their internal IT and reporting systems.
Bingo.
This is a pre-midterm messaging move aimed at shoring up support with young men who voted for Trump in ‘24. The chances that the policy even lasts more than a few months is slim.
And this only got _worse_ as more and more advanced STEM degrees in the US go to foreigners.
Agree. Isn’t it odd that the H1B and offshoring aren’t being touched? Just green cards? The kind that gives employees leverage with employers?
This is a messaging move. We need immigration reform and a pro-labor movement in America. This is crumbs to peasants.
Couldn't agree more. I can see the admin flailing in trying this, the fact they didn't go farther just means there's an opportunity for the midterms.
That was my thought as well, especially with this weird "brown people at the Texas football game, are they or aren't they American" thing that Republicans are suddenly grinding their axe on.
Also why are you singling out Indians? Are you racist against other nations?
I've never had to worry about visas, so this is just stuff I'm getting from visa-holding friends, but that always seemed a bit scary.
why is it racist to find workers willing to accept a lower wage to do the same quality work?
Now is the answer to make things worse, as they’ve been doing (removing the 60 day grace period after losing a job)? Or is it to liberalize the program. Maybe increase standards but make it easier for workers to move jobs?
Employers who really need employees for high-skilled work would thus get visas. Employers who want to underpay their foreign labor will not.
Other uses of the H-1B (e.g. French teacher https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+teacher&city=&... ) wouldn't be able to compete. There are also places in rural America where the only way to get doctors and nurses ( https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=nurse+practitioner&ci... ) is to hire them from abroad (the other option is to close the facility as insurance reimbursements aren't high enough to pay more).
Auctions are bad because need is not entirely measured in money. Highest bidders win is not egalitarian. Sometimes we do want to subsidize rocket surgeons visas for disadvantaged parts of the country.
We keep saying H-1B. There used to also be a H-1A visa and an H-1C visa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1A_visa
What if, instead of trying to solve the H-1B visa problem from companies that have gone through the roof for visa applications ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Top_H-1B_employers_b... ), instead split off all the jobs that are classified by the BLS as 15-0000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes150000.htm ) and move them to a new section ... Lets call it H-1D.
Within the H-1D which is for tech jobs (just like H-1A and H-1C were for healthcare while they were active), it can have a different pool size and requirements and for that one could require a certain base pay and have an auction on top of that.
https://www.uscis.gov/archive/h-1c-registered-nurse-working-...
This could allow for regulating tech job immigration differently while minimizing the impact to French teachers or medical professionals in rural America that have no way to compete with Big Tech salaries.
The reason I think this is more likely doable is that it works the same way that the H-1A and H-1C visas did before to address one section of the skilled labor visa applications.
is it because you personally would benefit from having tech jobs visas regulated so that your own wages don't get pushed down?
I think skilled labour import is, on the whole, beneficial. The bigger issue isn't this, but that they're legally bound only to that single company (and would need to reapply for the visa when they would change jobs).
If this condition could be changed, then it fix the issue.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/a314508.html or https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-11-26.pdf
Most employers that submitted petitions to Homeland Security were
approved, and most were approved for one H-1B worker, but a small
percent of employers garnered over one-quarter of all H-1B approvals
between fiscal year 2000 and fiscal year 2009. Over the 10-year
period, about 94 percent of all submitted petitions (initial and
extensions) were approved, with a high of 97 percent in fiscal year
2006 and a low of 84 percent in fiscal year 2009.[Footnote 33] With
respect to the number of approved workers per employer, 68 percent of
employers were approved for 1 H-1B worker and about 99 percent of all
employers with approved petitions (627,922) were approved for 100 or
fewer workers. However, over the decade, less than 1 percent of all
employers with approved petitions were approved to hire almost 30
percent of all H-1B workers.
During FY2022-FY2024, approximately 13% of employers
indicated on their LCA filings that they were either H-1B
dependent or were willful violators. However, most of these
employers planned to hire only exempt H-1B workers. Less
than 1% of employers filing LCAs indicated that they were
required to comply with the additional attestation
requirements.
Again from the GAO:
Restricted agency oversight and statutory changes weaken protections
for U.S. workers: Elements of the H-1B program that could serve as
worker protections-—such as the requirement to pay prevailing wages,
the visa’s temporary status, and the cap itself—-are weakened by
several factors. First, program oversight is fragmented and
restricted. For example, the Department of Labor’s review of H-1B
applications from employers is cursory and limited by law to only
looking for missing information and obvious inaccuracies. Yet a recent
Department of Homeland Security study reported that 21 percent of the
H-1B petitions they examined involved fraud or technical violations.
Strengthening those abilities for BLS classification 15-0000 jobs rather than trying to rewrite H-1B for everyone is likely easier to accomplish.
Video of him saying that: https://youtu.be/BVdIWy9bCEA
The employer knows full well that they can pay workers on a visa for less and they have them on a metaphorical leash (in the UK it was 5 years before they could apply for permanent residency).
I've seen this happen personally, I've seen an English engineering manager keep the Indian employees behind by telling them they couldn't leave and he wouldn't have dared said the same thing to me and didn't.
One of the Indians (who I think lived in the UK for a while) said to me in the morning after the incident while we were grabbing a morning coffee "You can see now why the British had India for so long", I took that to mean that he thought that Indians are more placid. I have no idea if that is the case generally, but he certainly thought so.
He was fed up and he went to a meeting and he had to hear "what are you going to do about it?" Manager knew his wife was pregnant and wanted to use it, or I suppose it was it. He told he would pack his stuff and leave. So he did. He packed his stuff, shared the news and another senior manager rushed after him to bring him back to his team with the raise.
I left the company few years ago but now and then I think about it. How someone can be so opportunistic with to the point of trying to abuse someone about to be a father for few thousands of dollars that do not even belong to him. And EVEN if he got a bonus or something it would have been much much less than that to the point that, if it was me, I would be so ashamed to admit that.
Possibly he would have done that with anyone in a special situation. And I am sure this is more common than not, but how f'up it is to hide behind "it is just business" cover to act like this.
Some people just identify with the company and/or like the power they get through the position.
Because of this, H1B workers have no choice but to accept bad pay and working conditions.
So, yeah, it is not about race, but is very much discrimination that should be illegal.
yes it is right? am i mistaken here?
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? It is not true. Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Meta etc. do not do this and they have no need to. They just need the top employees, and lots of them.
You want to know who does this? Companies like Disney and other IT type jobs who hire H-1B workers then lay off citizens and have those citizens train the immigrant workers. There is no reason for H-1B workers in IT departments. But there absolutely is a need for immigrant workers in high tech companies. How else do you ensure your employees are the best in the world?
The chances that this lasts for even a few months beyond the midterms is zero.
And when trump does something which clearly hurts himself, you have to remember that he is fantastically stupid, undisciplined, and insane.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/26/trump-microsoft-lis...
https://h1bgrader.com/compare/infosys-limited-vs-microsoft-c...
There's some real ways in which it's unfair. As a software engineer in Seattle I've quite possibly lost $100-300K to the H1B program over the past 10 years. It's not a problem though, I don't need anyone's protection from Microsoft.
I don't even really need protection from Infosys, but I do think that if Trump were serious about protecting me he would start with large companies where the median H1B salary is under six figures. Not making an example of a company that may objectively not even be a bad actor when you look at their salary ranges.
Enforcing existing regulations and supplying the resources for the agency to effectively audit the already existing category of H-1B-dependent employers (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer ) could be an approach taken.
Can you explain how its racist?
I know people that work for FAANG as immigrants in the US, and I myself worked for one.
They made as much as anyone else there.
(In the economical sense, not in the political sense)
This is not racism, it is abuse of the visa system. It can happen to any race.
Every company is doing what Microsoft pioneered years ago. Yet only MS is facing the consequences.
Oracle. Apple. Any Fortune 500 company. They have the same playbook.
Where is the proof of this? I constantly see comments like this with no proof. The h1b process requires the foreign worker to receive the prevailing wage.
Nationality != Race
Connect some dots for me here, where is the racism you claim?
Even if they are paying foreign workers less, which isn't substantiated here by data, that is someone willing to do the same job for less money and doesn't clearly have anything to do with race. The job market is a market, markets aren't equal for all participants or its racism.
I don't know how to best word this in a sensitive, nuanced discussion, but it goes both ways too.
I've noticed that a lot of Indian management are blatantly nepotistic (not sure if that's the word) about hiring and promoting Indians, giving them unfair treatment above American workers. Unless those Indians are from lower castes, in which case they're treated like shit.