H1b visas. Anyone else work in technology and see the issues with this program and outsourcing?

[Anonymous]

If you don't understand the scope of H1B overtaking the U.S. high tech landscape? Take a drive to the Broadlands neighborhood in Ashburn, VA. It is heavily Indian. They are buying new $1M+ houses with all the bells and whistles.

Do you think these H1B immigrants who are buying these homes are underpaid and overworked? Man, do I have a bridge to sell ya.

There are other previous threads that carefully spell out the scam pipeline involving bribery, South Asians responsible for the hiring process, etc. I urge everyone to read them.

This scam pipeline is hurting American workers. I live in Loudoun County and see the surging population of H1B immigrants. My friends and neighbors, brilliant and profoundly qualified, are losing their jobs to these people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you don't understand the scope of H1B overtaking the U.S. high tech landscape? Take a drive to the Broadlands neighborhood in Ashburn, VA. It is heavily Indian. They are buying new $1M+ houses with all the bells and whistles.

Do you think these H1B immigrants who are buying these homes are underpaid and overworked? Man, do I have a bridge to sell ya.

There are other previous threads that carefully spell out the scam pipeline involving bribery, South Asians responsible for the hiring process, etc. I urge everyone to read them.

This scam pipeline is hurting American workers. I live in Loudoun County and see the surging population of H1B immigrants. My friends and neighbors, brilliant and profoundly qualified, are losing their jobs to these people.

I would like to share my personal experience.   I have been developing software since 1982.

In 1980s and 1990s software development was a great career. I was trained in fortran. I was a business major but a company took a chance on me and trained me to do software development. No companies will do that today.

In 1990's I hired many folks with 2 year associate degrees and trained them to be developers.  that is unheard of today.  training budgets have been mostly eliminated for software developers. and the reason is simple, supply and demand.

The 1990 Bush Immigration bill for H1B and the executive order in 2007 for OPT  unleashed a huge migration of cheap temporary "guest" workers. There became a huge supply of cheap disposable workers, and companies took advantage of that.

stop the overwhelming supply and the market will adjust. now tech workers are getting fired , tens of thousands, and we have hundreds of thousands of cheap visas for foreign workers.

call your senators and congressman. repeal or pause the H1B and OPT visas. There is no worker shortage.   this is government manipulation of the labor market to benefit big companies on the backs of US workers. 

the tragedy is that Democrats have been brainwashed. They believe Zuckerberg/Musk etc as gospel. Instead of listening to the youth and other young adults struggling to find good jobs. They should be leading the effort to repeal H-1B, OPT, L1 visa programs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Trump administration is crippling the HB1 visa program by requiring employers to pay a $100,000 fee—most won’t do it. Isn’t that what you want? Fewer HB1 visas to go to foreigners?

H2B visas are another matter…

Yes and no. I suspect it won’t fix the issue as co will offshore more and also hide their hiring behind vendor contracts.

Ex I am not going to hire an employee to do X Y Z in the US. Instead I’ll contract with A company (often an offshore company with a US registered entity) for projects that do XYZ and I can terminate my contract easily.

See how easy it is?

if they could do that they would have done that instead of H1 as that is cheaper. But they need the workers here, and so use H1 if they can't get away with using L visa.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Trump administration is crippling the HB1 visa program by requiring employers to pay a $100,000 fee—most won’t do it. Isn’t that what you want? Fewer HB1 visas to go to foreigners?

H2B visas are another matter…

Yes and no. I suspect it won’t fix the issue as co will offshore more and also hide their hiring behind vendor contracts.

Ex I am not going to hire an employee to do X Y Z in the US. Instead I’ll contract with A company (often an offshore company with a US registered entity) for projects that do XYZ and I can terminate my contract easily.

See how easy it is?

if they could do that they would have done that instead of H1 as that is cheaper. But they need the workers here, and so use H1 if they can't get away with using even cheaper L visa.

[Anonymous]

Yay, our resident Indian from Ashbourn is here. Can you tell me why Indians love new construction? I do too, but I couldn’t afford those closer to DC, and didn’t want a long commute.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People like you OP do not hire for jobs like I do. You could not be more run in terms of skills. I hope and want and wish to fill my jobs with American talent from a culture and language/comms perspective. However I have Russian, Indian, Chinese and ever more frequently Nigerian talent in engineering and software development to choose. You think Americans are studying and getting skilled in engineering and you are wrong. So. Totally. Wrong. Culturally, Americans do best in finance, sales, business, law. They do not do math and tech. Go to high schools and you'll see all the kids playing sports are Americans and all those playing an instrument are either American who have a strong tradition culturally in academic all around excellence or they are typically those with a foreign last name. There's a tradition of studying math, science and STEM that's rooted in tradition v cultural oh I think that might be cool but maybe I'll go where the money is and it's easier attitude among most Americans. Quite honestly the truth is Americans are rockstar sales people. They are not rock star geeks

I hire in biomedical research and what you’re saying is true for us too. Not enough Americans are graduating with Ph.Ds and doing postdocs for the price that republicans are willing to pay via NIH funding. And yet, the work still needs to be done. If not, we will continue to fall further behind the rest of the world.

use your common sense - Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies.

https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhowandwhygovernment.pdf

"Upcoming labor market shortages will devastate Science and Engineering."

This was a mantra heard through much of the 1980s. And yet, the predicted “seller’s market” for talent never materialized as unemployment rates actually spiked for newly minted PhDs in technical fields. In fact, most US economists seemed to think that the very idea of labor market shortages hardly made sense in a market economy since wages could simply rise to attract more entrants. Yet we have had workers visas for over 34 years to alleviate mythical worker shortages.

In the late nineties, in the course of research into immigration, I became convinced that our US high skilled immigration policy simply did not add up intellectually. As I studied the situation, it became increasingly clear that the groups purporting to speak for US scientists in Washington DC (e.g. NSF, NAS, AAU, GUIRR) actually viewed themselves as advocates for employers in a labor dispute with working scientists and were focused on undermining scientists’ economic bargaining power through labor market intervention and manipulation.

Increasingly the research seemed to show that interventions by government, universities and industry in the US labor market for scientists, especially after the University system stopped growing organically in the early 1970s were exceedingly problematic. By 1998, it was becoming obvious that the real problems of high skilled immigration were actually rather well understood by an entire class of policy actors who were not forthcoming about the levers of policy they were using to influence policy. The NSF/NAS/GUIRR complex appeared to be feigning incompetence by issuing labor market studies that blatantly ignored wages and market dynamics and instead focused on demographics alone.

During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.

The title of this study was “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” The study was undated and carried no author’s name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study’s author. After some hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and now disgraced demographic shortfall studies.

The author turned out, again as predicted, not to be a demographer, but a highly competent Ph.D. in economics who was fully aware of the functioning of the wage mechanism. But, as the study makes clear, the problem being solved was not a problem of talent but one of price: scientific employers had become alarmed that they would have to pay competitive market wages to US Ph.D.s with other options.

The study’s aim was not to locate talent but to weaken its ability to bargain with employers by using foreign labor to undermine the ability to negotiate for new Ph.D.s

That study was a key link in a chain of evidence leading to an entirely different view of the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification. In this alternative account, American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market.

The correlate of these objectives were shifts in orientation toward building bridges to Asia and especially China, so that senior scientists, technologists, and educators could capitalize on technological, employment, and business opportunities from Asian (and particularly Chinese) expansion. This, in turn, would give US scientific employers and researchers access to the products of Asian educational systems which stress drill, rote learning, obedience, and test driven competition while giving them relief from US models which comparatively stress greater creativity, questioning, independence, and irreverence for authority.

I wrote this up in a study that the National Bureau of Economic Research published. Until a few weeks ago, it was available on their website. With other studies now appearing that are consonant with my conclusions and the Trump administration studying a possible revision of legislation on visas, I am grateful for INET’s encouragement and willingness to republish my study.

This is amazing. Great job and thank you!

[Anonymous]

This is probably the best overview of how special interests affected the political process. How they scammed Democrats I still do not understand.

This time, the push to expand the H-1B would be primarily driven by the IT industry, rather than the broader business community that supported the original push for the visa. Along with Harris Miller, software giant Microsoft and semiconductor firm Intel emerged as major players in policy advocacy. Jennifer Eisen, who led American Business for Legal Immigration (ABLI), served as Intel’s public policy advocacy director from 1996 to 2010.

Michael Teitelbaum, Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (also known as the Jordan Commission, from its chair, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan), described Intel’s lobbyist as “the most stridently opposed to our reform ideas when we met with high-tech lobbyists.”15 These tech firms not only advocated for H-1B visas but also funded several satellite advocacy organizations to fight on their behalf. ABLI, for example, “came mainly from Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, and other IT companies.”16 Additionally, there was support from within the government, particularly from Senate Immigration Subcommittee Chair, Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham, who focused exclusively on the H-1B visa issue. These industry advocates would exert pressure on Congress, both externally and internally.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-h-1b-visa/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you don't understand the scope of H1B overtaking the U.S. high tech landscape? Take a drive to the Broadlands neighborhood in Ashburn, VA. It is heavily Indian. They are buying new $1M+ houses with all the bells and whistles.

Do you think these H1B immigrants who are buying these homes are underpaid and overworked? Man, do I have a bridge to sell ya.

There are other previous threads that carefully spell out the scam pipeline involving bribery, South Asians responsible for the hiring process, etc. I urge everyone to read them.

This scam pipeline is hurting American workers. I live in Loudoun County and see the surging population of H1B immigrants. My friends and neighbors, brilliant and profoundly qualified, are losing their jobs to these people.

That includes my white husband. Add to the fact that most of the recruiters are not looking to hire white men

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People like you OP do not hire for jobs like I do. You could not be more run in terms of skills. I hope and want and wish to fill my jobs with American talent from a culture and language/comms perspective. However I have Russian, Indian, Chinese and ever more frequently Nigerian talent in engineering and software development to choose. You think Americans are studying and getting skilled in engineering and you are wrong. So. Totally. Wrong. Culturally, Americans do best in finance, sales, business, law. They do not do math and tech. Go to high schools and you'll see all the kids playing sports are Americans and all those playing an instrument are either American who have a strong tradition culturally in academic all around excellence or they are typically those with a foreign last name. There's a tradition of studying math, science and STEM that's rooted in tradition v cultural oh I think that might be cool but maybe I'll go where the money is and it's easier attitude among most Americans. Quite honestly the truth is Americans are rockstar sales people. They are not rock star geeks

I hire in biomedical research and what you’re saying is true for us too. Not enough Americans are graduating with Ph.Ds and doing postdocs for the price that republicans are willing to pay via NIH funding. And yet, the work still needs to be done. If not, we will continue to fall further behind the rest of the world.

use your common sense - Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies.

https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhowandwhygovernment.pdf

"Upcoming labor market shortages will devastate Science and Engineering."

This was a mantra heard through much of the 1980s. And yet, the predicted “seller’s market” for talent never materialized as unemployment rates actually spiked for newly minted PhDs in technical fields. In fact, most US economists seemed to think that the very idea of labor market shortages hardly made sense in a market economy since wages could simply rise to attract more entrants. Yet we have had workers visas for over 34 years to alleviate mythical worker shortages.

In the late nineties, in the course of research into immigration, I became convinced that our US high skilled immigration policy simply did not add up intellectually. As I studied the situation, it became increasingly clear that the groups purporting to speak for US scientists in Washington DC (e.g. NSF, NAS, AAU, GUIRR) actually viewed themselves as advocates for employers in a labor dispute with working scientists and were focused on undermining scientists’ economic bargaining power through labor market intervention and manipulation.

Increasingly the research seemed to show that interventions by government, universities and industry in the US labor market for scientists, especially after the University system stopped growing organically in the early 1970s were exceedingly problematic. By 1998, it was becoming obvious that the real problems of high skilled immigration were actually rather well understood by an entire class of policy actors who were not forthcoming about the levers of policy they were using to influence policy. The NSF/NAS/GUIRR complex appeared to be feigning incompetence by issuing labor market studies that blatantly ignored wages and market dynamics and instead focused on demographics alone.

During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.

The title of this study was “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” The study was undated and carried no author’s name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study’s author. After some hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and now disgraced demographic shortfall studies.

The author turned out, again as predicted, not to be a demographer, but a highly competent Ph.D. in economics who was fully aware of the functioning of the wage mechanism. But, as the study makes clear, the problem being solved was not a problem of talent but one of price: scientific employers had become alarmed that they would have to pay competitive market wages to US Ph.D.s with other options.

The study’s aim was not to locate talent but to weaken its ability to bargain with employers by using foreign labor to undermine the ability to negotiate for new Ph.D.s

That study was a key link in a chain of evidence leading to an entirely different view of the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification. In this alternative account, American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market.

The correlate of these objectives were shifts in orientation toward building bridges to Asia and especially China, so that senior scientists, technologists, and educators could capitalize on technological, employment, and business opportunities from Asian (and particularly Chinese) expansion. This, in turn, would give US scientific employers and researchers access to the products of Asian educational systems which stress drill, rote learning, obedience, and test driven competition while giving them relief from US models which comparatively stress greater creativity, questioning, independence, and irreverence for authority.

I wrote this up in a study that the National Bureau of Economic Research published. Until a few weeks ago, it was available on their website. With other studies now appearing that are consonant with my conclusions and the Trump administration studying a possible revision of legislation on visas, I am grateful for INET’s encouragement and willingness to republish my study.

This is amazing. Great job and thank you!

What's frustrating is just how embedded this in our government. Numerous agencies are involved, DOL, DHS (USCIS), scientific agencies, DOJ(looking the other way giving Apple/Meta) slaps on the wrists, Department of Education, scientific agencies HHS.

Who needs a government like that? This really needs to be purged from the system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is probably the best overview of how special interests affected the political process. How they scammed Democrats I still do not understand.

This time, the push to expand the H-1B would be primarily driven by the IT industry, rather than the broader business community that supported the original push for the visa. Along with Harris Miller, software giant Microsoft and semiconductor firm Intel emerged as major players in policy advocacy. Jennifer Eisen, who led American Business for Legal Immigration (ABLI), served as Intel’s public policy advocacy director from 1996 to 2010.

Michael Teitelbaum, Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (also known as the Jordan Commission, from its chair, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan), described Intel’s lobbyist as “the most stridently opposed to our reform ideas when we met with high-tech lobbyists.”15 These tech firms not only advocated for H-1B visas but also funded several satellite advocacy organizations to fight on their behalf. ABLI, for example, “came mainly from Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, and other IT companies.”16 Additionally, there was support from within the government, particularly from Senate Immigration Subcommittee Chair, Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham, who focused exclusively on the H-1B visa issue. These industry advocates would exert pressure on Congress, both externally and internally.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-h-1b-visa/

Did they scam them or were they paid for their help? Congress gets VERY rich, very suddenly after being elected.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a lot of qualified American tech workers struggling to find work right now.

H1-B and offshoring has been massively abused by US tech companies to undercut and screw over our own homegrown talent.

It needs to end.

follow @chrisbrunet on Twitter. Great examples of how H1B is used to replace US citizens.

Especially how ...
- US universities claim they can't find "skilled" labor
- US universities train our children for "skilled" labor but apparently fail.
- Democrats sue to keep US universities ability to replace US citizens and continue to "fail" at producing skilled labor.

It would be comical if it was not so damaging. and somehow liberals believe this nonsense.

Texas A&M University just hired an H-1B "Operations Research and Reporting Analyst"

Salary: $57,262

The TAMU employee in charge of facilitating this hire was Sahar Zubairy, Senior Immigration Coordinator

You see, H-1B is for "skilled" labor that US universities are unable to produce ...

The University of Denver (@UofDenver) just posted notices of intent to hire two H-1B workers

Assistant Director of Student Affairs - salary: $59,386
IT Network Analyst - salary: $62,941

link -> https://www.du.edu/human-resources/jobs-at-du/internal-notice-filing-labor-condition-application

IMO this is a clear problem of self-interest. The people that are supposed to be training us the Universities are more interested in hiring H-1B. The very professors that are supposed to be teaching us are only able to get green cards if they can prove there are no skilled professionals but wait how can that be possible haven't, they taught here for years.

Doesn't make any sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:H1B has NOTHING to do with filling skilled labor.

2 questions I challenge folks to answer ...

1. how could we have a skills shortage for over 36 years?

H1B was created by Bush Immigration act 1990 to address a mythical skills shortage, but that was the propaganda, it really was created to reduce salaries for US workers with Masters and PHds.

see -> https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhowandwhygovernment.pdf

2. why are H1B visas allocated randomly, why not allocate visas based on salary, since the higher salary would be for the most desired skills?

this was recommended and almost implemented in 2021 but the industry roared about this, and it was ignored by Biden/Harris. The law needs to require that aliens be paid 150% of the normal wage for any of these jobs.

Repeating my post:

1. I've worked in the tech sector in SV for 20 years. In the 90s, there was absolutely a shortage of IT workers. I was able to get a job in IT even without formal training (but I picked it up reallly quickly) because companies were so desperate to find IT workers back then. My salary doubled in 2 years from $45K to 95K (again, back in the 90s). That's how desperate companies were to keep IT talent.

2. Today, the landscape is totally different. We are more global; remote work is a lot easier; these foreign countries like India, Poland, Philippines now have a more educated workforce even as their col is still pretty low. The US now has more IT workers, probably a glut of them.

so, yea, we don't need H1 workers as much today but they are cheaper, and companies seek profit and lower expenses. They don't care about American workers. Trump raising feels will reduce some visa workers but it will just hasten offshoring, not to mention that he will approve the thousands of visas for his tech financiers like Bezos and Ellison.

The U.S. tech sector keeps insisting it cannot find talent, but the data shows the opposite. The United States is producing more STEM graduates than the industry is willing to hire. The National Science Foundation reports that only about half of U.S. STEM graduates work in STEM fields. The Economic Policy Institute has repeatedly found no evidence of a broad tech labor shortage, and wages for many software roles have been flat or declining after inflation. If there were a real shortage, wages would be rising, not falling.

At the same time, the number of H1B applications has exploded. USCIS data shows that petitions jumped from 200,000 in 2019 to more than 750,000 in 2023. That is not a sign of a shortage. It is a sign of companies chasing cheaper and more easily controlled labor. Multiple studies, including research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, have documented that firms use visa programs to reduce labor costs and weaken worker bargaining power.

This has real consequences for the United States. American tech workers face longer job searches, more layoffs, and fewer entry‑level opportunities. Students see this and adjust. Computer science enrollment growth has slowed at several universities, and surveys from the Computing Research Association show declining confidence among U.S. students about long‑term career stability in tech. When young Americans decide that STEM is not worth the risk, the country loses future engineers, researchers, and innovators.

There is also a growing disconnect between the U.S. education system and the tech industry. Universities invest heavily in training domestic students, but companies increasingly bypass them in favor of offshore teams or temporary visa labor. This breaks the pipeline between American institutions and American industry. It also undermines the long‑term national interest. A country cannot maintain technological leadership if its own citizens are discouraged from entering the field.

Dialing back H1B abuse and offshoring is not about shutting out global talent. It is about restoring balance. The United States needs a tech labor market that rewards domestic training, encourages students to pursue STEM, and ensures that companies invest in the workforce of the country they operate in. Without that, the U.S. risks hollowing out its own talent base while pretending the problem does not exist.

[Anonymous]

We don't need them

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We don't need them

Apparently Trump doesn’t agree with you. He’s had over a year to fix this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We don't need them

Apparently Trump doesn’t agree with you. He’s had over a year to fix this.

The bar so low that he's still the best for the job though.