- move (the company) out of the US (i.e. to less imposing jurisdictions).
If companies choose the latter, the irony is the resulting reduction in US tax revenue from companies moving out could outweigh the gains in revenue from the $100k H-1B tax, thus resulting in lower US government tax revenues due to the change.
Look if they are willing to do this, what makes you think they will allow them to move abroad without severe penalties? We are in a new era. Think of all the power the US government could bring to bear on a company.
> what makes you think they will allow them to move abroad without severe penalties
To my knowledge, there's no penalty (severe or otherwise) for shutting down a company in the US.
There are probably many more gentle solutions too, like if a multi-national wants an H-1B, but they have offices in other countries, they might simply hire through their offices in other jurisdictions. The employee could even take extended work trips to the US if required (but remain hired through the other country's office).
I think you underestimate the new populist era of state capitalism. The free market no longer reigns supreme. National interest is the guiding light. They will figure out ways to coerce companies to follow their agenda.
Maybe so, but the point is, this whole 'we'll just move abroad and outsource and there will be no consequences' doesn't take into account how the environment has changed. Do tech companies really want to face off against the power of the government? Is that even a fight they could win? The government could sanction them, cut off their access to the US banking system. All sorts of ways to make them hurt.
It doesn't have to be as dramatic as companies loudly announcing they are moving abroad - US is in a different political era indeed. But it sure will affect the decisions on where companies grow their headcount and where they shrink it or keep the same.
Longer term it will affect where companies establish their headquarters too. US used to be the place for entrepreneurs with global ambitions, but if it rejects globalism they will have to look elsewhere
H1Bs are much less of a problem than the offshoring and outsourcing. I’d rather lure top talent to live in the US than ship jobs off to exploited contractors who work for nothing.
I'd rather have neither. I'd rather not import foreign labor to compete with Americans for housing, jobs, wages, healthcare, political power etc. This is a zero-sum game, the nation and its economy exists for the benefit of its citizens not to provide prosperity to people who don't live here.
I think the assumption of it being a zero-sum game is wrong. Almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children [0]. The source is still the American Immigration Council, but even just looking at a specific example can illustrate that it might not be a zero sum game.
Jensen Huang, the co-founder and now CEO of NVIDIA, was an immigrant. NVIDIA is one of the most valuable companies today and has generated thousand of jobs and has helped create the AI revolution happening right now. You can argue that some other American born citizen would have created NVIDIA or found the same success, but that is difficult to prove.
I fundamentally disagree that this is a zero sum game. Many immigrants add to the American experience and many become citizens themselves. The country loses out in ignoring foreign labor, especially if it’s foreigners who are taught in our schools and want to come and work here.
People just wanted cheap goods while not caring how the sausage was made. People didn't care to understand the long term damage just that today's needs should be served. Then companies learned that they can/need recruit 10x cheaper in other countries to make it cheaper that is what they did.
Now the apathy shoe is on the other foot. This government's action have ensured there cannot be any study to show impact of these rules in an impartial manner. Everything has to be for or against these rules. That means people don't care to understand the long term damage just that today's needs should be served.
I don't think the "or their children" means a whole lot here, but the fact that immigrants start a lot of businesses on average than your average US citizen, which is actually important.
What is funny is that the H-1B "scheme" surpassed all expectations by selling the "American Dream" so well to the rest-of-the-world that they all actually lost due to "brain drain". It was a brilliant long-term strategy.
And yet you have people refusing to face the facts and see the data that the US has-been and is the clear winner in all this.
Yea, the United States is the original Meta but instead of having to pay a ton and recruit the best and the brightest, they just came to us. Imagine how much more powerful China and India would be if we didn’t get so many of their smart people.
a lot of international athletes come to the usa on athletic scholarships. Universities are also a gateway for about a million students a year. And then there are about a 100 million tourists a year who can head to a sanctuary city… And a lot of labor just walks over also via a daily limit upto 15k people per day depending on wage inflation. It’s not so much a drain as a centrifuge that concentrates the willing and able from every category.
This is propaganda. CS new grads from Top10 are finding it tough to get jobs. There is lot of supply of smart CS grads within US. No need to hire H1Bs in the current economic situation which is different from late 90s when H1B program started.
> It reports that, in a large national survey, 65 percent of Americans expressed the belief that they are smarter than a typical person.
...
> Looking at education level, 73 percent of people with college degrees asserted they were more intelligent than average.
> “Given that the average college graduate has an IQ of approximately 13 to 15 points above the population mean,” the researchers write, “college graduates in our sample actually slightly underestimated their relative intelligence,”
Is it really that shocking of a result that 15% of people below average intelligence would overestimate their ability? However, as the research you linked points out the ones most likely to underestimate are college graduates. Which includes the American CS graduates we're talking about in this thread.
Maybe, just maybe! It could be the American CS Grads we're being told are "overestimating" their skills are actually underestimating them. As this research implies.
I won't bother wasting a lot of words on how people perceive americans, nor about how obviously not all americans are "trump & co."
Hopefully, I'm not overestimating my reading comprehension ;-)
> Hopefully, I'm not overestimating my reading comprehension ;-)
I am afraid you have :-) Where did you get your 15%? It is actually 65% of the population that overestimates itself.
If you wanted to talk actual numbers you would have read the study referred to in the article. Here it is; 65% of Americans believe they are above average in intelligence: Results of two nationally representative surveys - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... In particular; read carefully the section "Education: Are beliefs calibrated?" since that clarifies your misunderstanding.
Like all statistical studies there can be discussions on sampling/methodology/distributions/etc. but the overall conclusion seems definite viz. last para;
Despite these limitations, we conclude that Americans’ self-flattering beliefs about intelligence are alive and well several decades after their discovery was first reported. Our results update the textbook phenomenon of intelligence overconfidence by (1) replicating the effect using large, representative, contemporary samples and two distinct survey methods, (2) demonstrating a degree of calibration across levels of education, and (3) showing moderation based on sex and age. The endurance of the smarter-than-average effect is consistent with the possibility that a tendency to overrate one’s own abilities is a stable feature of human psychology.
And i might add, more pronounced in the American Culture than others. For more understanding on this see Richard Nisbett's The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Thought
It's not an opinion piece but a data-based summary. The sources are listed in the "Endnotes" section (listing 56 notes!) of the paper which you are free to study.
The American economy is for the benefit of Americans. Period. We don't care what foreigners think about domestic policies of Americans and their elected leaders. This is something that should have been done a while ago. There are plenty of Americans that can fill these jobs. We have industries issuing layoffs while simultaneously requesting foreign labor. It's time to end this nonsense.
Agreed. And if there aren't enough Americans or if our culture does not value academics then the solution is not more H1B's but to fix the culture. Higher tariffs on foreign labor and products will reduce the debt. The money that would have gone towards debt interest could be spent on domestic needs, including cultural programs.
According to many economists, the presence of immigrant workers in the United States creates new job opportunities for native-born workers. This occurs in five ways. First, immigrant workers and native-born workers often have different skill sets, meaning that they fill different types of jobs. As a result, they complement each other in the labor market rather than competing for the exact same jobs. Second, immigrant workers spend and invest their wages in the U.S. economy, which increases consumer demand and creates new jobs. Third, businesses respond to the presence of immigrant workers and consumers by expanding their operations in the United States rather than searching for new opportunities overseas. Fourth, immigrants themselves frequently create new businesses, thereby expanding the U.S. labor market. Fifth, the new ideas and innovations developed by immigrants fuel economic growth.
Similarly, a recent study found that, between 2005 and 2018, an increase in the share of workers within a particular occupation who were H-1B visa holders was associated with a decrease in the unemployment rate within that occupation. Another recent study found that restrictions on H-1B visas (such as rising denial rates) motivate U.S.-based multinational corporations to decrease the number of jobs they offer in this country. Instead, the corporations increase employment at their existing foreign affiliates or open new foreign affiliates—particularly in India, China, and Canada. A study conducted in 2019 revealed that higher rates of successful H-1B applications were positively correlated with an increased number of patents filed and patent citations. Moreover, such startups were more inclined to secure venture capital funding and achieve successful IPOs or acquisitions.
The available data also indicate that H-1B workers do not earn low wages or drag down the wages of other workers. In 2021, the median wage of an H-1B worker was $108,000, compared to $45,760 for U.S. workers in general. Moreover, between 2003 and 2021, the median wage of H-1B workers grew by 52 percent. During the same period, the median wage of all U.S. workers increased by 39 percent. In FY 2019, 78 percent of all employers who hired H-1B workers offered wages to H-1B visa holders that were higher than what the Department of Labor had determined to be the “prevailing wage” for a particular kind of job.
This wouldn't be happening if the tech companies hadn't shut out so many college grads from entry level jobs. The tech industry had the power to curb h1b abuse but they didn't. This is the consequence.
In the 90s, the Tech Industry in the US grew at such a pace that you simply did not have enough supply of domestic college grads. It was the H-1Bs who saved and cemented the US's dominance in the Tech Industry.
Not the point. The rest of the world (specifically EU and China) has played catch-up and if the US wants to maintain its Tech dominance, you still need H-1Bs to maintain your momentum.
I think the combination of birth rates in China and Russia banging on the door of the EU is going to help the US more than H1Bs for the US. With current demographics, the US is slated to be more populous than China at the turn of the next century.
Doesn't matter if you guys shun out the immigrant population and let ignoramuses multiply, while forcing American universities to toe the federal government's line for federal funding.
In China's case, the population decrease is actually a positive for them since they are primarily an exports-driven economy. A lower population means investing into automation at an extensive degree to retain the same production levels, without the need to feed that much of a population. And if China really needs an extra labour pool, they have no qualms doing the Middle Eastern playbook and bringing in tons of workers from low-wage countries to do the dirty jobs - in fact, they already do that with Africans.
Russia is in trouble though, but given that their industries are slowly being eaten by Chinese conglomerates, they are a has-been now.
Ok. I think you drink the coolaid of China far too much. The problem with Chinas production has much more to do with the fact it has a substantial imbalance in consumption and production. This is what is at the root of why the involution crackdown has by in large failed to yield results (.4% contraction CPI; 2.9% PPI); countries are increasingly shutting out the state sponsored production endorsed by the CPC in favor of domestic or better balanced trade partners.
Without the large population not to perform "dirty jobs" but to participate in Chinese society to generate domestic demand, it is unlikely that China will continue to require ongoing stimulus just to keep the economic model functioning. See this (https://www.omfif.org/2025/03/china-has-just-raised-its-debt...) regarding the increase in debt held by China and its localities.
This need for "permastimulus" just to keep the economic model working is the problem: China needs to be rebalancing its economy away from production and into consumption. Unfortunately, a declining population also has declining consumption.
>The available data also indicate that H-1B workers do not earn low wages or drag down the wages of other workers. In 2021, the median wage of an H-1B worker was $108,000, compared to $45,760 for U.S. workers in general.
You can't compare tech salaries to general salaries. The entire thing seems disingenous.
It's common sense that when your immigration status is tied to your job performance you will skip out on other things in your life.
You've never been that in that position but I have been there. I was super-productive but catastrophically stressed as well. It's not a way to live life for more than 6 months.
> You've never been that in that position but I have been there.
I lived in the US for a decade-and-half transitioning from H-1B to "Green Card holder". It is another matter that i gave up all and returned back a decade ago.
“Manufacturing consent” should be required reading for all Americans.
These economists expressed the correct viewpoint that benefits the capital class so their viewpoint and credentials are validated and legitimized. “Right-thinking economists” are promoted while economists that have views that dont benefit multinational corporate interest are pushed to the fringes.
This is extremely well documented and when you see it spelled out in the book you will not be able to see the world in the same way.
Lex Friedman was nobody until he published a study that self driving cars were safe while Elon musk was in the midst of legal battles for his cars killing people. Lex Friedman is a “right thinking” academic so next thing you know Elon musk is talking on his podcast calling Lex “the smartest person in the world” despite having almost no credentials.
“The individual who burns with desire for action but does not know what to do is a common type in our society. He wants to act for the sake of justice, peace, progress, but does not know how. If propaganda can show him this ‘how’ then it has won the game; action will surely follow.”
> A democrat should've been there so we flip a coin and decide the gender of your kid.
Nice strawman.
> The democrats went too far left which is why they lost.
The democrats lost because they underestimated the stupidity and overestimated the decency of the American public. They are so bad at politics that they couldn't even prevent half the country to stop supporting a pedophile - you included.
- stomach the cost increase,
- reduce the number of H-1Bs they hire,
- move (the company) out of the US (i.e. to less imposing jurisdictions).
If companies choose the latter, the irony is the resulting reduction in US tax revenue from companies moving out could outweigh the gains in revenue from the $100k H-1B tax, thus resulting in lower US government tax revenues due to the change.