Yet another Hacker News

New $100K H-1B Visa Fee Pushes Tech Jobs Offshore

81 points rbanffy 1 hour ago 86 comments

bearjaws 55 minutes ago | parent

Not surprising, H1B for my entire career was a cost cutting measure.

Every time we had a layoff some portion would be replaced with H1B.

Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.

I know its anecdotal but sharing to see if anyone has seen similar.

foxtrot8672 52 minutes ago | parent

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.

toomuchtodo 26 minutes ago | parent

Call your congressional rep.

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...

throwawalien 19 minutes ago | parent

is 25% enough to move the needle?

toomuchtodo 18 minutes ago | parent

I don't know. Have to implement to find out and iterate. The number can go up until the preferred amount of offshoring has been drained from the system.

techpression 11 minutes ago | parent

Also curious about loopholes, could said company start another company out of state that was the outsourcing entity and then the parent company paid that company. You're theoretically hiring from within the US, because I assume said policy doesn't go all the way to sub-contractors etc?

tuesdaynight 15 minutes ago | parent

If you open an office in another country and hire people there, is that outsourcing? If so, would big tech have to close their "international" offices if they don't want to pay the 25% tax? I ask that because I'm seeing these offices opening a lot in the last 3 years

vidarh 11 minutes ago | parent

So you'd move companies overseas and buy services instead of outsourcing work.

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.

toomuchtodo 9 minutes ago | parent

We can tariff those out of country services if needed. The business can be built and operated in the US. An example of this today is SaaS taxes. Please provide a non US service as an example. Out of country services can be cloned with LLMs if needed.

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.

gamessucknow 4 minutes ago | parent

> This is what laws are for. "You can just do things."

“China” “National Security”

And with that, you’re argument is dead in the water.

cogman10 16 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, I'm generally pretty pro-immigration and I'm very anti-H1B.

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.

emodendroket 3 minutes ago | parent

They’re doing the opposite and floating the idea of making the program more coercive by ending the grace period to find a new job. This is because “protecting workers” is a pretext and not their actual goal.

ben_w 15 minutes ago | parent

Rest of us really ought to put tariffs on US software.

Not to bring in jobs or money (tariffs don't do that); just to push us away from your companies.

alistairSH 12 minutes ago | parent

How do you determine the "correct" location of a job?

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.

throwawalien 3 minutes ago | parent

devil's advocate - if they are HQ'd in the US, is hiring US citizens that big of an ask? why do they need cheap overseas labor?

adrr 17 minutes ago | parent

H1B should have never been a lottery. It should be a stack rank by salary to deal with the over subscription.

cogman10 14 minutes ago | parent

Oh that's a really good way to handle it that would actually follow the intent of the program.

You can't find someone to do a job? Then you need to compete on wage with other companies to bring someone in. Or, you know, raise your salary for local employees.

lokar 10 minutes ago | parent

A simple stack rank and cut has the problem of where to draw the line.

Also, how to value pre-ipo stock

There are other good options as well (an auction, etc). They all have problems, but there are mitigations. It could be vastly improved even if it’s not perfect.

It’s just the will to do it.

lokar 7 minutes ago | parent

Another problem: different industries and roles natohace different pay ranges.

If you decide on a single pay cutoff software engineers will starve everyone else out. And there are of course great, well paid people in other hard to hire industries.

triceratops 5 minutes ago | parent

Maybe that's ok? It would raise pay in other industries.

lokar 3 minutes ago | parent

I doubt it. Most are limited by the economics. They just don’t make as much per employee as software.

schnitzelstoat 4 minutes ago | parent

But at the moment there are quotas right? So it's basically the same - there are N visas to give out so you rank by salary and pick the top N.

winstonp 8 minutes ago | parent

the salary weighted lottery today is a good step in the right direction IMO.

rayiner 8 minutes ago | parent

That would make sense if the purpose of the program was to get the most valuable top talent. How do we decide who is the most valuable? We let the market decide. But that would cause upward wage pressure, which would undermine the real purpose of the program.

shagie 6 minutes ago | parent

H1B also includes things like high school foreign language teachers.

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+language+immer...

A stack rank by salary would mean "H1B is big tech employees" rather than "these are professionals who have skills."

cromka 16 minutes ago | parent

Same experience. NYC location of a high street investment bank.

heywintermute 16 minutes ago | parent

Been pretty much my exact experience

ransom1538 13 minutes ago | parent

Wait? People do not know this? This war was lost a decade ago. Google employs more than 4,100 H-1B visa holders.

kccqzy 6 minutes ago | parent

Google doesn’t underpay H-1B holders. In my experience any difference in actual pay is more likely caused by the H-1B people having worse salary negotiation skills than native born people.

lokar 12 minutes ago | parent

Not my experience in big tech and HFT.

We spent a ton of time and effort trying to find anyone to our standards, never able to find enough. H1B (and other work visas) were generally better and more Sr compared to locals we found. They got paid as much or more than everyone else.

When we had great people we could not get here we would instead build a team overseas, taking a bunch of other jobs with them.

andrewla 8 minutes ago | parent

I can't speak to your particular situation, but in my experience this has been two factors; one is location -- it is sometimes hard in some locations to find senior talent whereas H1Bs are (naturally) more amenable to moving. The other is pricing, which is echoing the GP's point. Senior talent is expensive and you can get it at (apparently) considerably lower cost by looking for H1B applicants.

spicyusername 8 minutes ago | parent

This has definitely not been my experience.

jvanderbot 6 minutes ago | parent

Both can be true.

Finding the top 1% gets better results if you have a wider net.

Finding the cheapest 20% does too...

lokar 5 minutes ago | parent

There is absolutely a ton of abuse. It actually hurts efforts to get the best people. They end up getting put in overseas offices.

paulddraper 7 minutes ago | parent

> Not surprising, H1B for my entire career was a cost cutting measure.

> Every H1B that shared their salary with me has been underpaid.

Yes.

bunderbunder 2 minutes ago | parent

Same. But I don't believe that further tightening H1-B restrictions will have the intended effect. My previous employer went with layoffs in the US together with transferring projects and ramping up hiring overseas.

I think that Americans would do well to forget where everyone was born for a moment to have a think about which country's economy they would rather have people participate in.

unified101 21 minutes ago | parent

I think this will go hand in hand with tech compensation and jobs falling off a cliff. In the AI world too, we can't have our cake and eat it.

jvanderbot 3 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, fine. Honestly I think most of us have been overpaid our entire career. But I'm not sure I see it necessarily. Take these stats, which can cut either way on this topic:

In USA there are more software engineers than all other engineers combined.

There are 10x more software engineers than the next highest engineering discipline.

If you could subdivide s/w engs into 10 equal categories, each of those would be the top engineering employment category.

nekusar 21 minutes ago | parent

I'd be happier if H1B's (read: employment slavery) was completely redone and not tied to a single sponsor company, or gotten rid of completely.

I know so many IT folks who are unemployed. And compounding that is unmitigated slop machines for both generating resumes and filtering them.

Its fraud all the way down every where I look.

rfgplk 16 minutes ago | parent

Yep. Taking advantage of desperate people from developing countries who think a $90k salary is something extravagant.

r_lee 11 minutes ago | parent

> who think a $90k salary is something extravagant

I guess Europe is then part of these "developing countries"

ben_w 10 minutes ago | parent

Everywhere else but the USA (and possibly Luxembourg), $90k will buy you a fantastic quality of life.

If you really want to make $90k seem as bad to the rest of us as it feels to you, you need to get the exchange rates changed, have USD devalued compared to other currencies until they're at purchasing power parity.

Of course, doing this would mean forcing yourselves to accept that China's got the biggest economy and the USA is only a little ahead of the EU, instead of thinking China and the EU are about the same as each other and significantly behind the USA.

chopete3 12 minutes ago | parent

The USA is the capitalist economy. The businesses do get protection and advantages.

micromacrofoot 17 minutes ago | parent

but no, you can't work remotely

superjose 16 minutes ago | parent

Wow. This will affect universities and negatively impact the US in the coming years.

How many of the talent from frontier labs is immigrant?

tonyhart7 14 minutes ago | parent

I think its more of equal counter force

as other commenter pointing out, those visas is for high skill job that lacks candidate on US soil

but company uses that for hiring Immigrant so they can underpaid them effectively reduce US born origin competitiveness

tquinn35 12 minutes ago | parent

It won’t because universities, national labs and non profits are exempt from the fee.

Under the proposed rule, the additional fee would not apply to H-1B petitions that are not subject to the cap, such as petitions filed by certain nonprofit research organizations, governmental research organizations, and institutions of higher education. https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-proposes-ad...

rayiner 10 minutes ago | parent

That's an insufficiently granular question. How much of the talent in frontier labs has an H1B rather than an O visa? Out of the people who have an H1B, how many employers would be willing to eat the $100k fee because those employees are so valuable?

mvdwoord 16 minutes ago | parent

So it was never about the talent, but just about cost?

stego-tech 15 minutes ago | parent

Seems like, if the $100k fee is too high a barrier to clear for talent they claim they cannot find domestically.

toomuchtodo 15 minutes ago | parent

First time? meme here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49540700 (citations)

(was always about cost, the US produces ~2M more college graduates per year than it needs, the system wants a labor surplus to contain labor costs)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378010 (citations)

binlog 15 minutes ago | parent

The H1B problem could be fixed overnight if the government handed them out by a simple test of ability rather than an idiotic lottery. Having world class researchers and engineers who command million dollar salaries enter the same line as a $60K worker at a slop factory like Infosys or TCS is beyond idiotic. And a high visa fee ultimately hurts more than it helps because it drives away both groups, and US tech needs the top talent from across the world to continue to remain dominant.

lokar 9 minutes ago | parent

The government can’t measure ability

binlog 6 minutes ago | parent

So then why do they hand out visas that require “extraordinary ability”?

xur17 7 minutes ago | parent

> And a high visa fee ultimately hurts more than it helps because it drives away both groups

Does it though? It seems like it would drive away the $60k worker, and the companies hiring the million dollar worker would pay it without second thought.

throwaway7783 5 minutes ago | parent

Cap the number, sort by salaries

andy99 4 minutes ago | parent

I’m not super familiar with the options, but isn’t there O-1 for anyone who’s world class commanding a million dollar salary? The impression I have (mostly from online discussion) is that H-1B is basically only for (comparatively) low skill workers to come work for lower salaries. Are there cases where globally competitive people would come on a H-1B?

rayiner 13 minutes ago | parent

The H1B debate has a lot of factions, but one thing is clear: AI is going to be replacing some to a lot of entry level knowledge jobs. Even if it doesn't get any better than what we have now, it'll create a pipeline problem where senior engineers are more valuable than ever and we'll have to figure out how to make room for junior engineers so that eventually they can become senior engineers. Given that, it seems prudent to pump the brakes on H1B--which has become a way to get bodies for entry level work (while top talent has shifted to O visas and the like).

stego-tech 13 minutes ago | parent

Almost like if the $100k fee is the sticking point, then maybe the talent being brought in isn’t world class talent we can’t find domestically so much as easily exploitable manpower that can be replaced with another H-1B if they start asking for reasonable treatment or higher wages.

Sorry IEEE, but offshoring happens regardless of the H-1B fee. I’m a pretty flexible dinosaur but you’re never going to get me to feel sympathy for employers leveraging a visa that’s tantamount to employment slavery in its onerous restrictions and lack of direct pathway to citizenship.

Sol- 12 minutes ago | parent

It's funny how quickly tech employees turn MAGA when it comes to qualified immigration. Bad zero-sum intuitions about work abound across all strata of society, it seems.

tekla 10 minutes ago | parent

It is pretty interesting to watch. "I'm pro immigration EXCEPT specifically the kind that directly affects me"

MrBuddyCasino 7 minutes ago | parent

If you believe that the market sets prices via supply and demand in general, do you believe this is true for the labor market as well? If not, why?

sunshowers 5 minutes ago | parent

Unlike offshoring, immigration increases supply and demand at the same time.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

cogman10 6 minutes ago | parent

This isn't a MAGA thing. H1-B is a bad program.

I have no problem with someone getting a green card, citizenship, TPS, etc in the US. I think there should be a lot faster routes for that. Let the software devs come in and become citizens or permanent residents, I don't care about that.

What I do care about is the fact that H1-B locks immigrants to a company and tie their residence in the us to their employment. That means they'll accept lower wages and worse working conditions as they can't simply quit and switch jobs. The entire thing is designed to suppress wages in general.

superxpro12 3 minutes ago | parent

I remember when twitter was sold and Elon "Nazi" Musk fired like 4/5 of the staff, all that remained were H1B's

sunshowers 6 minutes ago | parent

all H1B posts turn into Klan rallies.

tokai 5 minutes ago | parent

So if you're not pro social dumping you're anti immigration? Weird when both are about chauvinism against foreigners.

bix6 10 minutes ago | parent

India has become super popular for US VCs. Why not invest domestically? Cost and control I guess.

Hippocrates 9 minutes ago | parent

I'm seeing a lot of "offshoring" and go to Canada at the moment in my co.

aluminussoma 9 minutes ago | parent

On the whole, this is a good thing. There are policy responses that can be enacted as needed, in an easier and more humane way. The goal of the US government should be to protect the interests of the American citizen, as much as the goals of India or China should be to protect their own interests.

afavour 9 minutes ago | parent

I'm a former H1B visa holder and I feel very conflicted. My experience was a great one: I was hired by a startup on an H1B, successfully transferred to a different startup, then eventually went to work for a bigger company that sponsored my green card. I wasn't underpaid by those startups and I know this $100k fee means a similar company will never hire someone like me again.

But over the years I got to know many people on H1Bs who were indentured servants to their employers: once their green card application was in they were stuck. And if you're from a country like India that can take a decade or more. The whole thing feels like a scam and the $100k fee isn't going to deter those companies from doing it, it's still well worth the money to them. I wish we saw sensible, well thought out reform here. Instead we get the Trump administration.

calvinmorrison 7 minutes ago | parent

I worked at a company that depended heavily on one of the major 4 Indian suppliers. Their employees were treated like garbage. they would bring them here for months at a time. It was like indentured servitude. they lived in a bunk house and worked all day and slept and a bus picked them up and they worked. 6 days a week. If they fucked up, they were gone the next day. All for the chance to make it here.

Once we added a resource and had a sham hiring process in which the supplier supplied an expert with no less than 10 pages of experience in our niche project. To his credit, he did not lie to me, and told me he could try to figure it out but had not worked on the product, but that he needed to do well. We were forced to hire him

Later our team slated to replaced by that firm to maintain a major product while we went to green field stuff. I resigned and my team flew the coup over the next year or

Disgusting

we should have a tax or tariff on "W2" employees or firms outsourcing labor. Minimally a tax that helps pay for our social safety net. We depend on new employed young people and sending that work afar does not help us.

bijowo1676 5 minutes ago | parent

Canada is jumping on this opportunity to invite the US tech workers who are frustrated with US H1B visa restrictions and GC backlog by offering an express permanent residency in 10 days

https://canadabychoice.com/services/move-to-canada/usa/occup...

Canada also floating idea of alliance with Europe for travel and job opportunities

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-european-union-eu-me...

orangedog 2 minutes ago | parent

Does Canada not already have an issue with not enough jobs available?

emodendroket 4 minutes ago | parent

Nobody is willing to state this but it’s pretty clear if you look at the way officials behind the policy talk: they’re OK with this. They don’t mind economic harm. The purpose has nothing to do with protecting workers and everything to do with creating a more ethnically homogenous country.

giantg2 3 minutes ago | parent

Bringing new labor into the market isn't an optimal solution in the current market either. If it's a problem, simply tax offshore labor.

OutOfHere 2 minutes ago | parent

There is indeed no need for office jobs to be done in the US, and that's the hard truth.