Also, companies flooding the country with foreign labor is the corruption.

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).

You're so close to getting it... keep going...

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?

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.

For the first time in my life I'm seeing high-income earners as a big drag on society.

You’re talking about an immigrant population that is notably net tax paying, better educated and less unemployed than population.

As for your list: housing is a political choice; residential energy use is increasingly a rounding error; nationally, we’re closing hospitals and schools more than finding them constrained; and we’re a major food (and energy) exporter.

I mean, we don't really need that west coast comp either? If I was pulling my old FAANG comp here in Spain, I'd be in the top 0.1% of earners...

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/05/12/g-s1-12...

I would also argue that "global talent" in practice is just creating ethnic labor castes which I would also argue is a very destabilizing structure. So I would push back on your framing that more "global talent" is always good and actually I don't believe the premise that top talent must be imported.

Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?

I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.

Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.

Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".

Top talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.

The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.

Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.

Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.

the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.

By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!

Ok you said it. Where's your empirical evidence?

I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.

On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.

On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.

Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:

1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.

2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.

I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.

The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.

If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.

Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.

And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.

That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.

My own PERM would have had no chance of passing certification.

Department budget doesn't allow for a new Desktop PC ? Call it a "data collection terminal."

Just change the words to the ones you like, and cash those checks, easy as flying a kite ! :D

For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.

The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.

Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.

I urge you to understand that housing prices in Seattle are largely driven by supply inelasticity, more than anything.

If the premise was true, we'd have seen large drops in rent/home prices after mass layoffs (we didn't).

Also, it would be hard to explain the prices finally falling in Seattle for the last few months, which aligned perfectly with the largest supply since Feb 2014.

And they are good at it.

My question is more on software roles, those CRUD or React component roles, where the work can be done remotely. Instead of Americans filling those positions, companies may/will simply hire those engineers abroad.

But but but I was told that unions will force employers to retrain folks instead of laying them off.

I was specifically responding to the list I quoted, which did not list Microsoft and was mostly Indian consulting firms.

> There's a similar evaluation done for H1B.

If so, they should tighten that up then (if they haven't already) so it can't be gamed, then drop it from the PERM evaluation if it's already been done.

I do not condone abuse of any system, including visa/gc system, it should only go to those that truly are builders and contribute to growth of the overall system and not act as parasites, but that's a trait not exclusive to just the people (some targeting is probably legit) you're targeting.

When I was in the US on one myself, my company kept pushing me to go for a green card, but I never intended to stay permanently, which made things awkward.

Not really, the backlog for a greencard is so huge that no one seriously plans for one when they go for a H1-B. They can hope of course, but the other pathways you mentioned are more likely at this point.

---

H1-B demand will remain high since people here in india that aren't able to land a target job with high salary use US employment as a resume patching tool. It just happens that the masters is the safest path to that employment. And then they return and become an engineering manager at some company here, as an "ex-MTS 3, Nutanix" demanding a salary that they never would have been able to demand with their pre-US resume.

> Down 50%, 70%, 95%....

Many other factors, one of which is that target companies across the comp band now hire much more in india. More quants/big tech, as well as more mid-comp GCCs. For example, walmart's tech team pays 35L INR to my friend in a city where this salary lands an extremely comfy life. This did not exist even 10 years ago and my friend's resume would have necessitated migrating to the US to get the same QoL. Of course, at the extreme top end people keep going e.g bay area founders/AI unicorns. But that was always a minority. So unless you are aiming for and have a good chance at a unicorn/FAANG-level payout, OR on the other of the spectrum you want resume-patching, there is no reason to migrate anymore.

For reference, at 0YE quant TCs reach 2cr in the top colleges, and stripe/databricks almost 1cr. At a tier-2 university, local unicorns like zomato pay 60L. The former is slightly lesser than a bay area salary and the latter two are europe-level salaries even without any PPP adjustment, so you can imagine why there is less migration.

Companies have usually gotten around it saying we r laying off in 1 division but hiring in another. Maybe that hand waving can’t be swept under the rug anymore.

As a foreigner: How does this work and what do they do?

The situation could be easier, make approved I140s portable and issue an EAD, but you aren't trapped with an employer.

Just hire them remote overseas. One of the competitive advantages of hybrid organizations is they natively support international teams.

You can't be saying this in seriousness

If you're EG a PhD+ and working in a frontier AI lab on cutting edge problems, then fair enough. If you're developer x of 100 writing Java CRUD apps in the finance department of some corporate, you are not.

Neoliberalism ignored domestic worker concerns for shareholder returns and corporatism, and an alternative was offered, here we are. It’s a natural experiment we might not otherwise had had the opportunity to run.

No. It’s not.

> other companies that would be suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE.

These companies are D tier talent, at best.

It still matters a bit for architectural direction - but those roles are so few I wouldn’t be concerned as an American.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...

Even if the claim is valid I’m sure the enforcement is targeted.

You think they’d go after palintir or spacex for the same issues?

Citizens United means unlimited money in politics is free speech, they can always give more. Often, non-monetary tributes to king midus, praise or peace prizes, go much further.

The corporate-government corruption is out of hand and I am glad more people are making it a top political issue. I have my doubts this latest from the admin will make a positive difference. It's primarily performative politics for the base with zero consideration for secondary effects or real causes.

They start the most businesses, they staff specialty roles like doctors, nurses, researchers, engineers. They put down roots and innovate. After 2-3 generations of course their kids are the same as every other American.

But first and second generation immigrants are far more driven and that shows up. They'll do the dirty jobs if they don't have an education, and if they do have an education they're going to be going for high impact roles.

Since we're going nativist long term I expect we're going to see innovation and productivity drop. It's not a one year change, but over generations we can expect to see the impact. Additionally immigration has been helping stave off our demographic rollover since our birth rate is relatively low. Without immigration which both increase working age population and tend to have more kids per capita than the native born Americans, we can expect the same demographic problems other countries are already dealing with.

How will we manage our giant deficit as growth slows? What if it stops? We can't rely on international integration that has given our giant companies worldwide profits given the way we've shattered the global order.

There is an ongoing argument in the US that a person was elected, therefore everything they do after that has the blessing of the electorate. Funny thing though, the people don’t really have a crystal ball to see into the future how their elected official will decide betray the country in the name of a “mandate”.

Or the fact that historically speaking, immigrants have always been scapegoated.

Are you willing to at least consider the fact that wages and cost of living might both be headed in the wrong direction due to some other factors beyond immigration such as economic policy or geopolitical conflicts driving up energy costs or changes in market power between labor and capital or general debt levels?

What's racist? All visa programs are racist. Keep the border entirely close or let anyone who is not factually a criminal in.

Quota. It's racism.

We have eligibility even just for tourism based level of income. Some nations are exempt, some are not. That's perhaps even worse than racism. Lazy law enforcement, disguised as border control for safety.

PS. it would be funny if the same "social media management" organization that is hired by one side was also randomly hired by the other :)

Anecdotally from the people I've met, the majority of Europeans are here for academia on F/J/O, entertainment, are spouses of US citizens or get temporary transfer visas like the L1. Those who go to the US because of high salaries can afford to figure out employment based green cards and they don't have multiple year waiting periods. Otherwise it's a huge pain to get permanent residency or even a normal work visa compared to the EU, but qualified Europeans generally don't have much trouble.

What's really interesting to see is your blindness to that self destruction.