Wherever their major offices are look for newspapers in the small towns nearby advertising for "Software developers for Oracle" all written in the tiniest print, right next to classified that sell used bikes, car parts and other stuff.
- "Well, Uncle Sam, we looked so hard in US and nobody answered our job posts, we have to go to ... $othercountry to hire, there is no other way"
Just to cut through the headline here. The largest chunk of Oracle layoffs were in India [1]. In comparison, they've barely fired any American workers.
Contrary to popular opinion, IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
America is at near full employment [2]. Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
This is such a deep distraction but a virulent virus of a narrative, surgically designed to needle our reptilian minds.
> IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
You are stating what IT people understand and are blatantly ignoring the realities of many companies. I've been at more than one shop that decided to do layoffs in a 'corporate' way and the people who knew the system were let go, the people who didn't know a class from a function were kept around, and the smart people from other teams have to jump in and pick up the slack.
And that's not event getting into outsourcing/etc, that's just basic corporate stupidity.
> America is at near full employment [2].
Doesn't tell the full story, i.e. under-employment where someone's working at a Walmart with a CS degree; They're still 'employed' but it's not in their field.
> Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
A Single link to a single enforcement action only resulting in < 180K USD for damages is not a great example of enforcement.
Outsourcing companies prey on gaps in US tax code and the like to make it 'look' cheaper to outsource, except for the huge maintenance cost for the trash that comes out.
And, some of that is the fault of the company procuring those services too. They don't give good enough requirements, they take too long to figure stuff out...
And yet I've found a niche specifically around spending half of my day reviewing pull requests from offshore houses where, requirements be damned, it's obvious the contractor is either overworking employees, letting incompetent employees in, or the employees think they can cheat and put code that 'just happens to work under testing' but inevitably will break under any stress.
But at the end of the day you can still do it. WITCH consultancies have seeped into a number of our industries and all the average consumer can do is bitch about how every software product or interaction UX from the providing companies has gotten so much worse.
From your first link, it says 10% of 28k employees in India were cut. I personally know several people who were laid off from Oracle this week (OCI). One person who's still there described it as a "bloodbath across our division" and says he counted 15k. I don't know what exactly he was counting but as we're in North America I am assuming they're all here. Whereas India layoffs were fewer than 3k. So that directly disputes your statement that "they've barely fired any American workers".
Yes 15k is the global number including massive international call centers all becoming obsolete.
This is what a generational specialization swap out looks like.
Oracle is hiring as many people in America as H1B filings this year [1] (though most H1B filings will fail, something the article conveniently leaves out) this is literally the pie growing from all sides but just becoming a blueberry AI pie from an apple pie
Also to cut through the headlines once again. What the article actually says:
> Federal data shows Oracle filed for 2,690 H-1B visas in fiscal year 2025 and 436 so far in fiscal year 2026, totaling over 3,100 visa requests.
There is no proof that these people were also not part of the layoffs. Typically in layoffs, until the day off the announcement, it’s just business as usual. Which means people keep getting hired and H1B petitions being filed. The article doesn’t say they filed these petitions AFTER the layoffs.
Pretty sure that is the U3 rate which only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for a job. The U6 is better and rarely falls below 5%:
Either I'm stupid or [2] doesn't actually say anything at all. It starts with "in 2025..." And later talks about how estimates are expected to rise in 2023 and beyond while referencing data that ended in 1988. What am I missing?
"In 2025, it was estimated that over 163 million Americans were in some form of employment, while 4.16 percent of the total workforce was unemployed. This was the lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s, although these figures are expected to rise in 2023 and beyond."
All these articles talk about how the justice department has a fantastic hit rate in suing these companies to kingdom come. Good. The law is working as intended. That is my point.
I suppose we simply disagree, and that is fine. I think the H-1B should be eliminated in favor of the O-1, the domestic labor exists, corporations would simply prefer "optimize their labor costs" and employ workers with reduced mobility via the H-1B. The data is clear from the salaries paid, which is public data.
As I've commented previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46257889 "I am calling for a temporary moratorium for issuing new worker visas based on the current economic macro and existing immigrant worker base in the US companies can pick from, yes. I support the current $100k H-1B fee, in perpetuity. The domestic workforce exists, it is a choice to not pick from the domestic labor pool. Choices have consequences."
The US has an obligation to its citizens, not corporations, not immigrant labor (already on US soil, or desiring to be on US soil). Shareholder returns go to the top 10% of Americans (who own 90% of US equities), so any argument about prosperity impairment from impaired immigration is going to fall on deaf ears in this context. Again, we may disagree on this, but I think I can find a majority of Americans who do agree with this sentiment (considering the current macro and affordability crisis in the US).
> Shareholder returns go to the top 10% of Americans (who own 90% of US equities), so any argument about prosperity impairment from impaired immigration is going to fall on deaf ears in this context.
"We fail to tax our corporations adequately, so the proceeds of rampant deregulation and profiteering don't benefit the general populace".
I don't necessarily disagree with your stance but this seems like a weak justification (it's pragmatic, to be fair)
Just for reference, if you’re in tech and a senior even in a 2nd tier city, you’re probably not “the little guy”, you’re probably in the top 10% if you make more than around $160K
I have personally been in the room when illegal labor decisions were made around H-1B hiring and immigration law, which I reported to USCIS. But that doesn't scale unless you can get into more places where these decisions are made. So, when all you have is a hammer, you have to hit whatever is within reach of the target outcome.
> you’re probably not “the little guy”, you’re probably in the top 10% if you make more than around $160K
I am closer to a blue collar worker than a CEO or other very wealthy/empowered person driving these anti labor decisions, so your argument is not compelling, I know who these people are behind closed doors. It's always about some combination of wealth, profit, status, power, and/or control.
Without knowing anything about that particular case, I would assume that the person was initially hired as an F-1 student and later changed to OPT status. University IT tends to hire students to entry-level positions all around the world. And now Stanford wants to keep the proven employee instead of going through the uncertainty of hiring a new person.
So maybe the actual question is what kind of a Stanford undergraduate would choose a university IT position in ~2021 instead of aiming for more lucrative tech roles. Perhaps the kind that wants to maximize their chances of getting H-1B.
it could be not blatant violation, but they more like don't track this on their side because don't think it is a big deal, so some individual can act like that.
Blatant violation would be if they do it on many cases and large scale.
What I’m not clear on - how many of these H1B hires are subject to the EO that jacked up the fee to $100k per person? Assuming even just 100 of them were, that’s still ten million USD (assuming I didn’t visualize the zeroes in my head wrong…), and a really large fee to justify to the board if you’re otherwise paying “roughly the same” in salary. Productivity is going to basically break even anyway after a few years.
This is why I’m wondering: did the EO get blocked, paused for judicial review or something? Is it even in effect?
No intention to make this political, I’m legitimately curious about the status of the law and its actual applicability here. Supposed to be such a steep fine they literally couldn’t afford to do this - not with them already going cash flow negative to build out AI datacenters. So either it’s not applying (why?) or somehow they’re justifying one HUGE fee and somebody is floating them one astronomical loan - which again, why? Where’s the profit in taking that big a risk? Seems absolutely unhinged!
Remember that there was a "one-time fee" exception for "favored clients" (read: friends of Trump), who could pay a single lump-sum of something like $1 million, and then apply for unlimited H-1B's at the old fee structure.
I was not aware of this loophole. Thank you. I’ve got some strong opinions but I’m just going to keep those to myself right now. And my dog. She’ll hear me as I scream profanities into the void…
When you are puzzled about something, the first step is to find out why something works like it does. :)
With green cards, the government is concerned about permanent residents being dependent on the state if a company ceases to exist or fails to pay salaries or lays people off.
This worry is largely not present for limited term work visas.
The US only has two political parties and they are both, secretly, pro immigration.
The EU is actually clamping down on it because of populist/far right parties. I know someone who runs a Thai restaurant and he cannot fly in a cook from Asia. He has to find someone from Europe.
I don't understand why American workers would support this program at this scale. Furthermore, I believe universities and other similar researchy/affiliated non-profits are exempt from the hiring caps.
I just cannot imagine executives at tech companies/body shops having any positive ethical motivations. More like "they'll do what we say without complaining or they'll go home". There's no way it's not just a hugely abusive to both pools of workers. The whole thing really feels like another example of the imbalance between labor and capital in the US.
Who originally wanted H-1B/etc? Rich people with money and power? Of course!
To be clear too, this is not capitalism. This is corporatism. Large companies dictating economic companies is anti-innovation. It can only end with disaster and more control/corporatism because lower-productivity workers does not produce higher long-term growth. Temporarily you are able to get your bonus and stock options from the spread between imported and native workers but, eventually, demand and supply stop (and the US reached this point a while ago, which is why central bankers and politicians have had to intervene heavily to keep it going).
The end game for corporatism is shown in Europe where you can see a clear gap between countries that are built on non-zero sum systems which are thriving, everything just works...and then other countries which have been heavily corporatist for multiple decades, everything is collapsing, government function is both non-existent in many areas and reaching new highs of intervention into markets. Unfortunately, the Chinese were right.
Owners are a minority of voters, which raises an obvious question: why does the majority tolerate it?
Every serious attempt to answer that ends up admitting something uncomfortable, that democracy only functions as intended if voters are consistently rational and informed. But that assumption doesn’t hold. It never has. Even the Athenians put Socrates, father of Western civilization, to death.
If society were at all rational, we'd see a lot more people swing from lampposts.
I work in Bellevue, WA, and there are a lot of Indians. How many are on H-1B? I I don't know. Anyway, I am a life long Democrat, but the Democratic Party needs to do something huge for American workers (like single payer healthcare) or we'll have Trump III or its equivalent or worse than that.
I find the topic of the morality or effectiveness of having a H-1B a little bit intractable to reason about rationally. Consider a simplified model of the system.
You have 2 countries, C1 and C2.
Scenario 1:
C1 has enough demand for 100 tech jobs.
C1 only has 50 qualified natives for 100 tech jobs.
The wages of C1 go up because there is more demand than supply.
Scenario 2:
C1 has enough demand for 100 tech jobs.
C1 only has 50 qualified natives for 100 tech jobs.
Now you put in a H1-B visa program that will pay the same as the prevalent wage as a local native.
C2 has enough candidates to fill the other 50 positions.
The wages of C1 will NOT go up because now supply matches demand.
Is Scenario 2 fair? Who gets to decide what fair is? Given the above system, I think I would argue that H1-B visa programs cause wage deflation in C1, even if it is filling jobs that would not be filled and even if the jobs paid the exact same as someone working in the native country.
I am not dogmatic about that though. Willing to hear a counterpoint to scenario 2.
Keep in mind that employers have to pay $100,000 in visa fees (in addition to competitive salaries) for each H-1B visa. Clearly these immigrants are not undercutting US workers. It is $100K cheaper to hire a US worker.
Where did my standard of living go? Couldnt possibly have to do with imported labor working around the clock under the threat of being kicked out of the country
For tech jobs specifically? Compensation has been increasing since the turn of the millennium, what standard of living do you mean? If you mean housing, that's due mainly to NIMBYism from native labor buying and owning houses, especially before the tech boom, not imported labor.
Cheap labour producing goods for the native population at low costs should increase your standard of living, no? It makes the products you buy cheaper.
By your logic, if you were the only person in the country, you'd live like a king.
Companies are importing labor so they can avoid pay competitive wages to native workers. If you need to hire people from other countries they should have the same pay and protections as everyone else.
By your logic, slavery was one of the finest economic policies. Cheap labour, how about free labour? Have we thought of that? Everything would just be free.
In the real world, the evidence is obvious: average productivity/wages drop, incentive to invest in labour-saving technology disappears, and you get multiple decades of stagnation. Every country which had unlimited, unfree labour has had decades of slow growth as a result.
Income growth in the working age population in the US since 1990 has been about the same as Japan, a country which is widely regarded as on the verge of economic collapse. US per capita income is probably 20-30% lower than it would be with first-order effects from immigration, likely much more with second order effects. Under any other circumstances with economic policy elsewhere, the US economy would be growing 7%/year now (and ofc, the answer for Japan's ills is apparently, you guessed, lots of immigration).
China is seeing secular reductions in production costs because of capital investment, not low wages. The peculiarly statist notion of American capitalists that the route to economic supremacy was large numbers of illiterate Guatemalans should go down as not only an economic failure but a moral one (equally of H1B).
That's way too naive, prices never go down, the owner pockets the difference, you pay the same, and once they come to your industry you have more competition
What is the difference with new visa applications? H1B are supposed to be temporary when a company can't find employees in the country. Renewals are not meant to be automatic.
> The H1B i140 petition thing requires you to advertise the job before submitting the petition.
You're confusing things. I-140 is a green card application, not H1B.
H1B petition requires the I-129 form and an LCA from the DoL. No advertisement is required, except posting the LCAs in a conspicuous place in the company office.
I disagree, I think the $100k fee was a deliberate move to make sure the yearly allocation is only available to large companies like Oracle and out of reach of smaller startups.
Despite the rhetoric the administration is very friendly to big business and will absolutely help them hire cheaply. Larry Ellison especially.
Then the H-1B wouldn’t make sense. Many holders would have to transfer from one company to another, and if there is a $100,000 requirement, it would just lead to exploitation.
The better solution is just stop H1B lottery from next year.
I would absolutely not expect this, especially as long as Oracle and all the other technofeudalists are properly paying their taxes to the count and king.
Sadly I think you're wrong on this one. Trump's donors benefit from H1B cheap labor. Musk, Elison, etc contributed large sums to Trump's campaign. Just look at Musk's "fuck your own face" tweets from Dec 2024 and you'll see how the people with power feel about this issue. As usual the middle class is being squeezed by the oligarchy.
The 100k fee basically does nothing to curb H1B cheap labor. It's a one-time fee, and when you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job, it's a fee that easily pays for itself. H1B's are paid less for the same job (just google "are H1B's paid less"), and since they can't easily leave, the reduced turnover saves them money as well. If you think that an employee is likely to stay for 4 years, that's only 25k per year and the fact that they are paid about 15%-20% less than an American, the equation still easily comes out in favor of importing the cheap labor.
It was a move crafted to look like it was cracking down on abuse, but not actually cause any real pain to the companies abusing the system. Hence why all these mega corps are still filing for H1B's even while laying off their American citizen workers.
I hate Oracle as much as the next guy, but this seems like a nothingburger.
Oracle didn’t file “thousands of H1Bs”. Oracle filed 2690 applications in FY2025 (Oct-Sep), and so far filed 436 in FY2026, according to the article.
If anything, this would indicate that Oracle slowed down on hiring foreign workforce. Oct-Mar is half of Oracle’s fiscal year, but they only filed 16% of the H1B applications as in 2025? That seems in line with a hiring freeze and subsequent layoff.
These are union jobs where hours worked don't extend beyond 50 hours including overtime and with significantly lower barrier to entry compared to software.
Why should American SWEs earn more than Accountants (around $80k), Teachers (around $70k), or Mechanical Engineers (around $80k)?
It's this kind of attitude that makes non-techies feel schadenfreude.
Techies moan and moan, yet in reality we became the capital elite - a median TC of $190K [0] does make you the capital elite in a country where the median household income is $80k [1]. Even investment bankers have a similar TC to SWEs [2] - especially if you don't work for a Bulge Bracket or Elite Boutique.
If you want to hire an H1B and claim there is no American to do that job, what about the 30k employees you just laid off? None of them can do the software engineering, sales, HR, etc. that a company like Oracle works on 99% of the time? It's quite schizophrenic for basic engineering companies like Oracle, Cisco, eBay, Paypal, etc. to claim there are no Americans to do the software engineering they require after they lay off thousands and there are millions of American software engineers looking for work.
I personally think that doing a layoff of more than 2% of your workforce or 1000 people, whichever is high, should restrict you from filing for a work visa for a period of 3 years.
Or you can buy your way out of that restriction by paying each laid off worker 3 years of wages.
The MAGA crowd will be ecstatic. They get fired while their president's buddy gets to hire new workers that are cheaper and more susceptible to extortion. Be careful what you vote for.
That's MAGA for you. They're not even complaining (very much) about super high gas prices. They absolutely excoriated Biden when the price went up even a nickel. MAGA will sacrifice absolutely anything for their king.
There was no option to vote for which was actually pro-worker. The other side is just as in-favor of these "high skilled" visas, and also even more pro mass-migration of all kinds. The previous admin sued Texas and Arizona to take down their border walls, and sent forklifts to literally open the barbed wire at the border.
There is no evidence that the alternative party would have done anything about this issue.
It is obvious that both parties are completely detached from the interests of their constituents.
You didn't even try to read the comments to get a context.
You assumed you were being attacked and you need to hate immigrants.
You are just being manipulated.
> Federal data shows the tech giant filed for over 3,000 foreign worker visas as it cuts thousands of American jobs.
Just trying to understand what context you feel is relevant here...
Even if Oracle is also firing people in India the idea that no American can do these jobs in the US should be challenged.
Let's assume they do need extremely specialised skills for these roles and are struggling to find those skills in a highly educated country like the US so need to look for employees in countries like India, the question you should then be asking is, well, if they couldn't hire from abroad what would they do instead?
Perhaps they would need to give someone who recently graduated a chance? Perhaps they would try to train people working in adjacent fields at Oracle? Maybe they would increase the salary so American's with these skills employed elsewhere would switch jobs?
So can you steal-man why I should be in favour of companies hiring abroad given there are clearly smart and educated people in the US who are looking for work or might be tempted to work for Oracle if they offered better salaries or training?
Can you explain the advantage to the US workers in allowing this?
They have many departments, and are probably reducing some of them while increasing the workforce in others. The idea that they hire 'those damn foreigners' to push down wages is probably true to some degree, but not the whole story. I also don't believe the majority of these H1B are directly hired in other countries for which there is now a $100k fee, but rather people who studied in the US under F1 visa who are exempt from this rule.
What magical skills do the "damn foreigners" have that none of those 30,000 laid off employees don't have? What was the intent of the H1B? To find skills that don't exist in this country. What is H1B actually used for? Labor arbitrage, nepotism, kickbacks. There's really no excuse for defending it anymore.
H-1B exists to make unfathomably rich corporations and people even more unfathomably rich. That's the only reason. That's why we don't have single payer. How can corporations function if employees don't equate job loss with total economic and social ruin?
Not necessarily.
Many of the technological revolution started with refugees and immigrants before, during and after ww2. And technically you should even count the NZ that were brought to create the rocket programs
Anyway, I feel that you need read this guy comment
I appreciate the information. However, labor Arbitrage affects millions of American workers. It probably affects tens of millions. I just cannot fathom that companies today have any positive ethical reasons for wanting to participate. It gives them another stick to use against both groups of workers. Also, H-1B was started in 1990, so well after World War II.
Wherever their major offices are look for newspapers in the small towns nearby advertising for "Software developers for Oracle" all written in the tiniest print, right next to classified that sell used bikes, car parts and other stuff.
- "Well, Uncle Sam, we looked so hard in US and nobody answered our job posts, we have to go to ... $othercountry to hire, there is no other way"
Just to cut through the headline here. The largest chunk of Oracle layoffs were in India [1]. In comparison, they've barely fired any American workers.
Contrary to popular opinion, IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
America is at near full employment [2]. Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
This is such a deep distraction but a virulent virus of a narrative, surgically designed to needle our reptilian minds.
[1]: https://www.goodreturns.in/news/tech-layoffs-2025-oracle-cut...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...
[3]: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2, https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20180501-2
... Uhhhhh....
> IT workers aren't interchangeable and there exist a large swath of jobs that very few people qualify for (HN should know this) because of the specialization required.
You are stating what IT people understand and are blatantly ignoring the realities of many companies. I've been at more than one shop that decided to do layoffs in a 'corporate' way and the people who knew the system were let go, the people who didn't know a class from a function were kept around, and the smart people from other teams have to jump in and pick up the slack.
And that's not event getting into outsourcing/etc, that's just basic corporate stupidity.
> America is at near full employment [2].
Doesn't tell the full story, i.e. under-employment where someone's working at a Walmart with a CS degree; They're still 'employed' but it's not in their field.
> Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
A Single link to a single enforcement action only resulting in < 180K USD for damages is not a great example of enforcement.
Outsourcing companies prey on gaps in US tax code and the like to make it 'look' cheaper to outsource, except for the huge maintenance cost for the trash that comes out.
And, some of that is the fault of the company procuring those services too. They don't give good enough requirements, they take too long to figure stuff out...
And yet I've found a niche specifically around spending half of my day reviewing pull requests from offshore houses where, requirements be damned, it's obvious the contractor is either overworking employees, letting incompetent employees in, or the employees think they can cheat and put code that 'just happens to work under testing' but inevitably will break under any stress.
But at the end of the day you can still do it. WITCH consultancies have seeped into a number of our industries and all the average consumer can do is bitch about how every software product or interaction UX from the providing companies has gotten so much worse.
From your first link, it says 10% of 28k employees in India were cut. I personally know several people who were laid off from Oracle this week (OCI). One person who's still there described it as a "bloodbath across our division" and says he counted 15k. I don't know what exactly he was counting but as we're in North America I am assuming they're all here. Whereas India layoffs were fewer than 3k. So that directly disputes your statement that "they've barely fired any American workers".
Yes 15k is the global number including massive international call centers all becoming obsolete.
This is what a generational specialization swap out looks like.
Oracle is hiring as many people in America as H1B filings this year [1] (though most H1B filings will fail, something the article conveniently leaves out) this is literally the pie growing from all sides but just becoming a blueberry AI pie from an apple pie
[1] https://careers.oracle.com/en/sites/jobsearch/jobs?location=...
Also to cut through the headlines once again. What the article actually says:
> Federal data shows Oracle filed for 2,690 H-1B visas in fiscal year 2025 and 436 so far in fiscal year 2026, totaling over 3,100 visa requests.
There is no proof that these people were also not part of the layoffs. Typically in layoffs, until the day off the announcement, it’s just business as usual. Which means people keep getting hired and H1B petitions being filed. The article doesn’t say they filed these petitions AFTER the layoffs.
> America is at near full employment [2]
That can’t be further from the truth
> America is at near full employment
What America is full of is fake employment statistics that are artificially inflated by young people hiding out in school to avoid the bad job market.
> America is at near full employment
Pretty sure that is the U3 rate which only counts people as unemployed if they are actively looking for a job. The U6 is better and rarely falls below 5%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE
Either I'm stupid or [2] doesn't actually say anything at all. It starts with "in 2025..." And later talks about how estimates are expected to rise in 2023 and beyond while referencing data that ended in 1988. What am I missing?
"In 2025, it was estimated that over 163 million Americans were in some form of employment, while 4.16 percent of the total workforce was unemployed. This was the lowest unemployment rate since the 1950s, although these figures are expected to rise in 2023 and beyond."
Unemployment rate is tricky because there’s a lot of related statuses a person could have. So the Fed has 7 different rates U1 through U7.
Here is U6 which is a better reflection imo:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE
<< HN should know this
HN does know. Some of us question whether brave and courageous leadership knows.
Oracle laid off 491 people in Seattle this week.
Your [3] shows that the government enforces paying H1-Bs competitive salaries, not that it cares about the Americans they replaced.
How does indian software indus try handle the llm wave?
It is not illegal to lay off Americans and expand offices overseas. I’m not saying that’s what Oracle is doing.
> America is at near full employment [2]. Replacing American workers with lower paid foreign workers is already illegal and frequently enforced[3].
Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223719 - September 2025 (526 comments)
Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Americans Can Apply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321 - August 2025 (108 comments)
H-1B Middlemen Bring Cheap Labor to Citi, Capital One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398978 - June 2025 (4 comments)
Jury finds Cognizant discriminated against US workers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385000 - December 2024 (65 comments)
How middlemen are gaming the H-1B program - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123945 - July 2024 (57 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454509 (additional citations)
All these articles talk about how the justice department has a fantastic hit rate in suing these companies to kingdom come. Good. The law is working as intended. That is my point.
I suppose we simply disagree, and that is fine. I think the H-1B should be eliminated in favor of the O-1, the domestic labor exists, corporations would simply prefer "optimize their labor costs" and employ workers with reduced mobility via the H-1B. The data is clear from the salaries paid, which is public data.
As I've commented previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46257889 "I am calling for a temporary moratorium for issuing new worker visas based on the current economic macro and existing immigrant worker base in the US companies can pick from, yes. I support the current $100k H-1B fee, in perpetuity. The domestic workforce exists, it is a choice to not pick from the domestic labor pool. Choices have consequences."
The US has an obligation to its citizens, not corporations, not immigrant labor (already on US soil, or desiring to be on US soil). Shareholder returns go to the top 10% of Americans (who own 90% of US equities), so any argument about prosperity impairment from impaired immigration is going to fall on deaf ears in this context. Again, we may disagree on this, but I think I can find a majority of Americans who do agree with this sentiment (considering the current macro and affordability crisis in the US).
> Shareholder returns go to the top 10% of Americans (who own 90% of US equities), so any argument about prosperity impairment from impaired immigration is going to fall on deaf ears in this context.
"We fail to tax our corporations adequately, so the proceeds of rampant deregulation and profiteering don't benefit the general populace".
I don't necessarily disagree with your stance but this seems like a weak justification (it's pragmatic, to be fair)
> it's pragmatic, to be fair
Highest praise. This is what I optimize for in a dynamic, imperfect, and more often than not, unjust world. Move fast, break systems.
Just for reference, if you’re in tech and a senior even in a 2nd tier city, you’re probably not “the little guy”, you’re probably in the top 10% if you make more than around $160K
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
I have personally been in the room when illegal labor decisions were made around H-1B hiring and immigration law, which I reported to USCIS. But that doesn't scale unless you can get into more places where these decisions are made. So, when all you have is a hammer, you have to hit whatever is within reach of the target outcome.
> you’re probably not “the little guy”, you’re probably in the top 10% if you make more than around $160K
I am closer to a blue collar worker than a CEO or other very wealthy/empowered person driving these anti labor decisions, so your argument is not compelling, I know who these people are behind closed doors. It's always about some combination of wealth, profit, status, power, and/or control.
> The US has an obligation to its citizens
In an ideal world the US _is_ it's citizens. Importing thousands of "guest" workers on h1b visas who never end up leaving seems borderline seditious.
> America is at near full employment
Then why does it take months and months for even experienced devs to land a job?
If America is at near full employment why don't I have a job after looking for 6 months. This is a load of nonsense.
Have you been down to Amazon. Not Amazon corporate, Amazon Warehouse or Amazon flex delivery.
With the gig economy as long as you can make 50$ a day via Uber Eats , you might be considered “employed”.
For the days I need to be in the office, my commute is well over 2 hours each way. Pay cuts, horrible commutes.
Because the employment is full, sorry, no more jobs available /s.
(Im in the same boat, but much longer than 6 months)
Stanford also filed an H1B this year to hire an IT person.
https://x.com/chrisbrunet/status/2037376353461567734
Apparently, no citizen wants to do this job? Why do we allow things like this?
Without knowing anything about that particular case, I would assume that the person was initially hired as an F-1 student and later changed to OPT status. University IT tends to hire students to entry-level positions all around the world. And now Stanford wants to keep the proven employee instead of going through the uncertainty of hiring a new person.
So maybe the actual question is what kind of a Stanford undergraduate would choose a university IT position in ~2021 instead of aiming for more lucrative tech roles. Perhaps the kind that wants to maximize their chances of getting H-1B.
"we" don't allow, but also don't enforce (violators are rarely punished).
I feel like this is legal i.e. we allow it.
Stanford wouldn't blatantly violate laws like this.
it could be not blatant violation, but they more like don't track this on their side because don't think it is a big deal, so some individual can act like that.
Blatant violation would be if they do it on many cases and large scale.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44880832
https://www.jobs.now/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892321
I remember seeing it on HN but didn't know if would still be up. Glad it's still going. Thanks!
What I’m not clear on - how many of these H1B hires are subject to the EO that jacked up the fee to $100k per person? Assuming even just 100 of them were, that’s still ten million USD (assuming I didn’t visualize the zeroes in my head wrong…), and a really large fee to justify to the board if you’re otherwise paying “roughly the same” in salary. Productivity is going to basically break even anyway after a few years.
This is why I’m wondering: did the EO get blocked, paused for judicial review or something? Is it even in effect?
No intention to make this political, I’m legitimately curious about the status of the law and its actual applicability here. Supposed to be such a steep fine they literally couldn’t afford to do this - not with them already going cash flow negative to build out AI datacenters. So either it’s not applying (why?) or somehow they’re justifying one HUGE fee and somebody is floating them one astronomical loan - which again, why? Where’s the profit in taking that big a risk? Seems absolutely unhinged!
We’re missing something here. Or, at least, I am.
Remember that there was a "one-time fee" exception for "favored clients" (read: friends of Trump), who could pay a single lump-sum of something like $1 million, and then apply for unlimited H-1B's at the old fee structure.
I was not aware of this loophole. Thank you. I’ve got some strong opinions but I’m just going to keep those to myself right now. And my dog. She’ll hear me as I scream profanities into the void…
It's always puzzled me that layoffs don't result in a temporary bar from using the H1B system like it does for filing PERMs with the DoL.
The H1B has “speciality” categories. You can lay off in one “speciality” while hiring for others. It’s silly but that’s how it’s setup at the moment.
I agree with you. The category list in H1B needs to be trimmed. So that companies have less wiggle room for things like this.
The layoffs were also worldwide. Not sure what the impact to US workers was. India was hit hard.
When you are puzzled about something, the first step is to find out why something works like it does. :)
With green cards, the government is concerned about permanent residents being dependent on the state if a company ceases to exist or fails to pay salaries or lays people off.
This worry is largely not present for limited term work visas.
They should also trigger holds on bunch of other operations, like stock buyouts or sales by people with active or recent relationship to the company
The US only has two political parties and they are both, secretly, pro immigration.
The EU is actually clamping down on it because of populist/far right parties. I know someone who runs a Thai restaurant and he cannot fly in a cook from Asia. He has to find someone from Europe.
To be fair the US is pro-immigration and that’s no secret. H1-B is a guest worker visa. Those jobs could equally go to immigrants.
The title is extremely deceitful. They filed H1Bs for 2025 and 2026, but not after or during the layoffs from last week.
That’s like saying “Oracle hires tens of thousands and mass layoffs” (* hired during the pandemic)
To all the folks here complaining that there is plenty of talent in the US to fill those roles:
Honestly tell me: Would you ever apply to Oracle for a job?
I don't understand why American workers would support this program at this scale. Furthermore, I believe universities and other similar researchy/affiliated non-profits are exempt from the hiring caps.
I just cannot imagine executives at tech companies/body shops having any positive ethical motivations. More like "they'll do what we say without complaining or they'll go home". There's no way it's not just a hugely abusive to both pools of workers. The whole thing really feels like another example of the imbalance between labor and capital in the US.
Who originally wanted H-1B/etc? Rich people with money and power? Of course!
Because our government is not run for the workers but the owners. Full stop.
To be clear too, this is not capitalism. This is corporatism. Large companies dictating economic companies is anti-innovation. It can only end with disaster and more control/corporatism because lower-productivity workers does not produce higher long-term growth. Temporarily you are able to get your bonus and stock options from the spread between imported and native workers but, eventually, demand and supply stop (and the US reached this point a while ago, which is why central bankers and politicians have had to intervene heavily to keep it going).
The end game for corporatism is shown in Europe where you can see a clear gap between countries that are built on non-zero sum systems which are thriving, everything just works...and then other countries which have been heavily corporatist for multiple decades, everything is collapsing, government function is both non-existent in many areas and reaching new highs of intervention into markets. Unfortunately, the Chinese were right.
There are days I think what we need is a slightly bigger font for heavily upvoted comments.
Owners are a minority of voters, which raises an obvious question: why does the majority tolerate it?
Every serious attempt to answer that ends up admitting something uncomfortable, that democracy only functions as intended if voters are consistently rational and informed. But that assumption doesn’t hold. It never has. Even the Athenians put Socrates, father of Western civilization, to death.
If society were at all rational, we'd see a lot more people swing from lampposts.
Wealth can be spent on influence. That includes news converage / ads / or donations.
There's not much preventing you from starting a company and not hiring immigrants.
This is something I'd encourage everyone with strong opinions about work visas to try and accomplish.
You don't change a system by crying about it on anonymous internet forums, you do it by competing against it and making it redundant.
It was really easy to support when tech jobs were plentiful, well compensated, and fun.
workers dont. but dont speak against it either because they are scared of losing heir jobs from accusations of racism.
I work in Bellevue, WA, and there are a lot of Indians. How many are on H-1B? I I don't know. Anyway, I am a life long Democrat, but the Democratic Party needs to do something huge for American workers (like single payer healthcare) or we'll have Trump III or its equivalent or worse than that.
I find the topic of the morality or effectiveness of having a H-1B a little bit intractable to reason about rationally. Consider a simplified model of the system.
You have 2 countries, C1 and C2.
Scenario 1: C1 has enough demand for 100 tech jobs. C1 only has 50 qualified natives for 100 tech jobs.
The wages of C1 go up because there is more demand than supply.
Scenario 2: C1 has enough demand for 100 tech jobs. C1 only has 50 qualified natives for 100 tech jobs.
Now you put in a H1-B visa program that will pay the same as the prevalent wage as a local native. C2 has enough candidates to fill the other 50 positions.
The wages of C1 will NOT go up because now supply matches demand.
Is Scenario 2 fair? Who gets to decide what fair is? Given the above system, I think I would argue that H1-B visa programs cause wage deflation in C1, even if it is filling jobs that would not be filled and even if the jobs paid the exact same as someone working in the native country.
I am not dogmatic about that though. Willing to hear a counterpoint to scenario 2.
No. Abso-f'ing-lutely not, no way, no how. You cannot force me to believe that the talent they're looking for isn't available here already.
Keep in mind that employers have to pay $100,000 in visa fees (in addition to competitive salaries) for each H-1B visa. Clearly these immigrants are not undercutting US workers. It is $100K cheaper to hire a US worker.
to clear up confusion, this 100k applies to brand new h1b petitions outside the country.
if you are already in the US it currently does not apply to you, or if you are transferring jobs with an existing h1b, or renewing your h1b.
source: former h1b
side note: as of february it’s estimated only 85 h1b petitions paid the 100k fee. the rest did not fall under the qualification.
https://www.staffingindustry.com/news/global-daily-news/1000...
Unless they get waivers, which I'm sure Larry has worked out with his buddy.
Did oracle manage to circumvent 100k payment per H1B applicant?
Also, why they need to do H1B instead of just outsourcing abroad?
Where did my standard of living go? Couldnt possibly have to do with imported labor working around the clock under the threat of being kicked out of the country
For tech jobs specifically? Compensation has been increasing since the turn of the millennium, what standard of living do you mean? If you mean housing, that's due mainly to NIMBYism from native labor buying and owning houses, especially before the tech boom, not imported labor.
Cheap labour producing goods for the native population at low costs should increase your standard of living, no? It makes the products you buy cheaper.
By your logic, if you were the only person in the country, you'd live like a king.
Companies are importing labor so they can avoid pay competitive wages to native workers. If you need to hire people from other countries they should have the same pay and protections as everyone else.
By your logic, slavery was one of the finest economic policies. Cheap labour, how about free labour? Have we thought of that? Everything would just be free.
In the real world, the evidence is obvious: average productivity/wages drop, incentive to invest in labour-saving technology disappears, and you get multiple decades of stagnation. Every country which had unlimited, unfree labour has had decades of slow growth as a result.
Income growth in the working age population in the US since 1990 has been about the same as Japan, a country which is widely regarded as on the verge of economic collapse. US per capita income is probably 20-30% lower than it would be with first-order effects from immigration, likely much more with second order effects. Under any other circumstances with economic policy elsewhere, the US economy would be growing 7%/year now (and ofc, the answer for Japan's ills is apparently, you guessed, lots of immigration).
China is seeing secular reductions in production costs because of capital investment, not low wages. The peculiarly statist notion of American capitalists that the route to economic supremacy was large numbers of illiterate Guatemalans should go down as not only an economic failure but a moral one (equally of H1B).
That's way too naive, prices never go down, the owner pockets the difference, you pay the same, and once they come to your industry you have more competition
Most of these would just be visa renewals. Though it wouldn’t be click bait enough to mention in article title
What is the difference with new visa applications? H1B are supposed to be temporary when a company can't find employees in the country. Renewals are not meant to be automatic.
This whole H1B debacle tells me that people don't like it when employees are not fungible but this sentiment only exists selectively.
The H1B i140 petition thing requires you to advertise the job before submitting the petition. How does this work if the employee is not fungible?
You don't know what you are talking about. I-140 is not for H1B.
It is very easy to fulfill the "muh we tried to hire! Nobody wants to work!" fake criteria to be able to apply for an H1B.
You advertise in small circulation newspapers, I thought this was well known.
Another trick I've seen on LinkedIn is job applications open from 12:00 am to 12:01 am.
The employer can legally say they advertized the job and had no applicants and need an H1B employee.
> The H1B i140 petition thing requires you to advertise the job before submitting the petition.
You're confusing things. I-140 is a green card application, not H1B.
H1B petition requires the I-129 form and an LCA from the DoL. No advertisement is required, except posting the LCAs in a conspicuous place in the company office.
Oracle is a large company. Many of those laid off were outside the US. This is a non-story.
Not sure this is truly the “Oracle VP of Workforce Economics” posting on X, but it makes a good thread:
https://x.com/gothburz/status/2040142920674656482?s=46
I would expect further H1B crackdowns coming. The $100k fee was just the start.
I disagree, I think the $100k fee was a deliberate move to make sure the yearly allocation is only available to large companies like Oracle and out of reach of smaller startups.
Despite the rhetoric the administration is very friendly to big business and will absolutely help them hire cheaply. Larry Ellison especially.
USCIS says they competed the 2027 quota. Is there any evidence all enrolled paid $100k this year ?
I would assume many were change-of-status from F-1 / OPT etc.
The giant gaping loophole they left in place. Renewals and COS (change of status) does not incur the $100k fee.
Then the H-1B wouldn’t make sense. Many holders would have to transfer from one company to another, and if there is a $100,000 requirement, it would just lead to exploitation.
The better solution is just stop H1B lottery from next year.
Isn’t Larry friends with the administration?
I would absolutely not expect this, especially as long as Oracle and all the other technofeudalists are properly paying their taxes to the count and king.
By taxes, do you mean buying Trump's crypto?
Good. Call your reps and ask for more action.
Sadly I think you're wrong on this one. Trump's donors benefit from H1B cheap labor. Musk, Elison, etc contributed large sums to Trump's campaign. Just look at Musk's "fuck your own face" tweets from Dec 2024 and you'll see how the people with power feel about this issue. As usual the middle class is being squeezed by the oligarchy.
The 100k fee basically does nothing to curb H1B cheap labor. It's a one-time fee, and when you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job, it's a fee that easily pays for itself. H1B's are paid less for the same job (just google "are H1B's paid less"), and since they can't easily leave, the reduced turnover saves them money as well. If you think that an employee is likely to stay for 4 years, that's only 25k per year and the fact that they are paid about 15%-20% less than an American, the equation still easily comes out in favor of importing the cheap labor.
It was a move crafted to look like it was cracking down on abuse, but not actually cause any real pain to the companies abusing the system. Hence why all these mega corps are still filing for H1B's even while laying off their American citizen workers.
All of these companies are hiring constantly even as they do layoffs so this is an easy story to write every time there are layoffs.
America has an H1b invasion problem
This article is deliberately written in a way to aggravate people who do not understand how the visa process works.
I hate Oracle as much as the next guy, but this seems like a nothingburger.
Oracle didn’t file “thousands of H1Bs”. Oracle filed 2690 applications in FY2025 (Oct-Sep), and so far filed 436 in FY2026, according to the article.
If anything, this would indicate that Oracle slowed down on hiring foreign workforce. Oct-Mar is half of Oracle’s fiscal year, but they only filed 16% of the H1B applications as in 2025? That seems in line with a hiring freeze and subsequent layoff.
Meanwhile this March we saw 15k manufacturing jobs, 26k construction jobs, and 91k healthcare and education jobs added [0].
Those are the voters that matter (unionized, geographically spread out, didn't price everyone else out via remote work) - not SWEs.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/82c1795b-704a-4da3-82ec-2f9cd52de...
construction, hospital nurses and daycare workers are the avialble jobs? so depressing and scary
Yeah you don’t want to work 60+ hours a week to be even remotely close to what you were making before?
> Yeah you don’t want to work 60+ hours a week
These are union jobs where hours worked don't extend beyond 50 hours including overtime and with significantly lower barrier to entry compared to software.
Why should American SWEs earn more than Accountants (around $80k), Teachers (around $70k), or Mechanical Engineers (around $80k)?
It's this kind of attitude that makes non-techies feel schadenfreude.
Techies moan and moan, yet in reality we became the capital elite - a median TC of $190K [0] does make you the capital elite in a country where the median household income is $80k [1]. Even investment bankers have a similar TC to SWEs [2] - especially if you don't work for a Bulge Bracket or Elite Boutique.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/united-...
[1] - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/investment-banker?countryId=254&cou...
Just because someone has it worse doesn't mean you should accept bad things happening.
> so depressing and scary
Union jobs with set hours and lower barriers to entry than software while offering middle class salaries? It's so horrible /s.
It's this attitude that makes people who don't have stakes in the software industry feel schadenfreude.
The vast majority of those people are not union.
If you want to hire an H1B and claim there is no American to do that job, what about the 30k employees you just laid off? None of them can do the software engineering, sales, HR, etc. that a company like Oracle works on 99% of the time? It's quite schizophrenic for basic engineering companies like Oracle, Cisco, eBay, Paypal, etc. to claim there are no Americans to do the software engineering they require after they lay off thousands and there are millions of American software engineers looking for work.
Schizophrenic?
lots ppl are confused in this comment section. h1b doesnt not require looking for a local first.
Sorry what? Yes, they do. Second-hand knowledge, though.
Read this guy comment before taking it to this level
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pj_mukh
He’s a shill.
H1B is generally a giant scam of Labor Arbitrage
I personally think that doing a layoff of more than 2% of your workforce or 1000 people, whichever is high, should restrict you from filing for a work visa for a period of 3 years.
Or you can buy your way out of that restriction by paying each laid off worker 3 years of wages.
Pick one.
Don't worry, Trump is in Ellison's pocket so this will go through.
The MAGA crowd will be ecstatic. They get fired while their president's buddy gets to hire new workers that are cheaper and more susceptible to extortion. Be careful what you vote for.
Well... If they fact check stuff... The layoffs didn't happen in America
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pj_mukh
3,000 Indians were laid off out of 15,000.
That's MAGA for you. They're not even complaining (very much) about super high gas prices. They absolutely excoriated Biden when the price went up even a nickel. MAGA will sacrifice absolutely anything for their king.
There was no option to vote for which was actually pro-worker. The other side is just as in-favor of these "high skilled" visas, and also even more pro mass-migration of all kinds. The previous admin sued Texas and Arizona to take down their border walls, and sent forklifts to literally open the barbed wire at the border.
There is no evidence that the alternative party would have done anything about this issue.
It is obvious that both parties are completely detached from the interests of their constituents.
You're definitely not wrong but I still voted for Kamala because I didn't want Trump to burn the country down.
Turns out it was true all the layoffs were because of AI (actual indians).
Everyone that supports the H1-B program because they “can’t find talent” is my enemy.
And every employer that says they can't find talent fits in the same bucket for me.
There is no issue finding talent. There is only an issue finding talent that is willing to work for the too-low pay you're willing to pay.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pj_mukh
You didn't even try to read the comments to get a context. You assumed you were being attacked and you need to hate immigrants. You are just being manipulated.
> you need to hate immigrants
Oracle is immigrants?
> Federal data shows the tech giant filed for over 3,000 foreign worker visas as it cuts thousands of American jobs.
Just trying to understand what context you feel is relevant here...
Even if Oracle is also firing people in India the idea that no American can do these jobs in the US should be challenged.
Let's assume they do need extremely specialised skills for these roles and are struggling to find those skills in a highly educated country like the US so need to look for employees in countries like India, the question you should then be asking is, well, if they couldn't hire from abroad what would they do instead?
Perhaps they would need to give someone who recently graduated a chance? Perhaps they would try to train people working in adjacent fields at Oracle? Maybe they would increase the salary so American's with these skills employed elsewhere would switch jobs?
So can you steal-man why I should be in favour of companies hiring abroad given there are clearly smart and educated people in the US who are looking for work or might be tempted to work for Oracle if they offered better salaries or training?
Can you explain the advantage to the US workers in allowing this?
They have many departments, and are probably reducing some of them while increasing the workforce in others. The idea that they hire 'those damn foreigners' to push down wages is probably true to some degree, but not the whole story. I also don't believe the majority of these H1B are directly hired in other countries for which there is now a $100k fee, but rather people who studied in the US under F1 visa who are exempt from this rule.
What magical skills do the "damn foreigners" have that none of those 30,000 laid off employees don't have? What was the intent of the H1B? To find skills that don't exist in this country. What is H1B actually used for? Labor arbitrage, nepotism, kickbacks. There's really no excuse for defending it anymore.
H-1B exists to make unfathomably rich corporations and people even more unfathomably rich. That's the only reason. That's why we don't have single payer. How can corporations function if employees don't equate job loss with total economic and social ruin?
Not necessarily. Many of the technological revolution started with refugees and immigrants before, during and after ww2. And technically you should even count the NZ that were brought to create the rocket programs
Anyway, I feel that you need read this guy comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pj_mukh
I appreciate the information. However, labor Arbitrage affects millions of American workers. It probably affects tens of millions. I just cannot fathom that companies today have any positive ethical reasons for wanting to participate. It gives them another stick to use against both groups of workers. Also, H-1B was started in 1990, so well after World War II.