H-1B Reform Bill
Thoughts on the impact of the proposed $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas + increased salary floor of $150k in finance, tech, and broader job market?
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Program needed massive reforms.
Not sure about 100k. A 50k number seems like a more reasonable balance between talent acquisition and resident job protection. Maybe the 100k is just an opening.
Maybe some discounted rate if the applicant has a valid US degree.
It is meant to be punitive. It is meant to cut the knees out from under the underpayment problem that was going on with H1-Bs. Make the cost to the employer above market.
Undoubtedly. I would prefer ~50k/year spots and the cost is determined with a bidded auction. Make revenue on this. Cut out the undergrad replacement.
Hard pass on treating one set of foreign workers differently just because they had the experience of partying for 4 years in the US, and hard pass on degrees being the barometer of value-add to our economy.
I'd say just make it a high fee (agree with you $100k too high and $50k probably more reasonable) and then let supply & demand sort the rest out.
It needs a range, adjustable to sponsor size. Not just a flat fee. The program has been exploited for so many years now it's time to reform. 40k-100k seems reasonable. Low end 40k for startups and high end 100k for something like BB IB or FAANG.
I like a high floor (like you said 40K), as it prevents circumventing recent American undergrad. Using an H1B for standard IT work is atrocious.
I dont see why startups should get a break. I know why a lot of biased people who profit off the startup "ecosystem" would insist on giving them a break.
But to me the H1B fee is about compensating for the fact that displacing US workers creates a liability for our economy. If that's the thinking then I think it suggests same fee for each worker.
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Overkill on the fee for sure. Directionally the change is 100% correct. Low-to-mid-skilled labor should not be imported, it should be cultivated domestically. The only people who should be getting an H1B are the ones so valuable that an extra $50k+ fee would be inconsequential to their comp/value they provide. If the talent is "critical" and difficult to find among the American population then $100k should be a drop in the bucket.
The folks who will vocally disagree of course with this will be Euro/Asian/Indian/Arab students who would need to get an H1B upon graduation to go work for an entry-level role at Big 4/some other consulting/tech firm or liberals who are against any policy about limiting/exercising discretion or preference with respect to immigration and would rather see completely open borders like what was seen during the Biden admin.
"The only people who should be getting an H1B are the ones so valuable that an extra $50k+ fee would be inconsequential to their comp/value they provide."
Exactly right. More people need to understand this is the reason why it's a blanket fee without all kinds of other considerations. Let the economy figure out the rest.
I am wondering how many jobs there are left at all, regardless of who wants to apply for it.
Generally, in difficult employment markets this step would be the right direction to take.
But a huge amount of H1b's go towards tech firms and consultancies, which will see the biggest impact.
100,000 $US sounds high, it's not like it was easy to get an H1b sponsorship before, they will surely not sponsor a regular candidate now. Only the best in their areas (and with more seniority) will get the H1b.
Biggest impact:
.
This just seems like a poor way to actually implement reform. Why not simply target the H1B IT body shops, it could be as simple as only allowing a certain percentage of workforce on an FTE basis to be on an H1B. There are skilled positions like nursing where it’s very difficult to rapidly increase the number of individuals, in addition $100,000 is a lot even for an obviously skilled position, think about it this way, even if somebody had a top 1% wage ~500k this is still a huge cost and let’s not pretend that somebody making 250 K per year isn’t highly skilled.
Because the goal is to shift existing positions to USCs and LPRs only.
I am pretty sure the number of firms willing to pay 100K for a single candidate is less than 1%.
This will eliminate any and all candidates who don't live in the US legally already.
If you want to force US companies to exclusively hire local candidates, you have to hit them where it hurts the most - their financial bottom line.
But since we aren't reporting on a quarterly basis going forward, maybe nobody will care.
Consider the nurse situation, there’s no meaningful way to increase the number in the short or intermediate term. Consider FMG physicians, many are non citizens and not on J1s. These are people we need here. Again the abuse isn’t this and there are not enough Americans. Even if we opened more med schools it takes roughly a decade to have them graduate their first class (5 years to open and then 4 years to a degree) and this ignores that there are limits to how many more teaching hospitals there are.
Recent graduate unemployment and underemployment are at recent history highs, and you’re out here cucking for big tech, IT consultancies and BB banks so that they can hire barely competent Indians and Chinese. These firms can figure out how to hire and train American grads, sorry if it’s more costly and takes more time.
And if they ship jobs overseas that’s still a better outcome vs having tens of thousands of Indians (and their families) clogging up housing, infrastructure, medical care, etc in urban areas such as Dallas, SF and DC. It’s become ridiculous
Did any of you stop to think that the point of this might be to deter international students from coming in the first place?
I am all for people seeking opportunity, but top universities in the US have been prioritizing international students over citizens for decades now.
In the last academic year there were more than 1.1M intl. students in the US. And a large amount of them were planning on staying in the US permanently. If you accumulate this, the partners they may marry abroad, the kids they will have.. .even in just a decade it could easily reach 15M additional residents in the US.
While I truly believe that these students are bright, hard-working people, I don't believe that we would ever create that many jobs. Not with all the lay-offs, with AI, with struggling industries in general.
that's right, those students don't come to work in manufacturing, woodwork, etc., everyone is aiming for the fancy office jobs which is just part of the "bullshit" jobs economy and just depress wages for local candidates aiming for those jobs who are also educated + local
As an international student you have to sign a affidavit that you are not planning to stay long term. So technically the government could deport all of them who stay after graduation.
The situation is tough, but the government needs to prioritize the needs of citizens first.
Or, put differently, international students subsidize the tuition of American kids. Sounds a lot less pejorative when you say it that way.
And you don't seem to be "all for people seeking opportunity" at all, since your opinion is that foreigners should stay out. I can only read between the lines and assume that whoever your ancestors are, are the "good" foreigners, the kind who built America, and anyone who came after is trying to ruin it.
International students do not subsidize the tuition paid by Americans. They subsidize the paychecks for useless administrators. There is a functional difference. The tuition paid is defacto set by the federal governments grant system.
Considering that 20%+ of university study programs probably shouldn't even exist considering the non-existent value they provide in exchange for loading students up w/ government-subsidized debt, this would seem like a prudent way to speed up the collapse of subpar degree programs and hasten the development of cost-effective industry-specific training programs. Sounds like a win to me.
I'm not sure how this particular policy addresses this.
First off, it's not a very free market approach to tell students what courses are and aren't valuable (and this is the obligatory moment where I remind you and everyone else that college isn't and never has been a vocational school). I do not have data on this and would welcome some that contradicts my view, but my experience in college and in visiting college campuses since has been that international students are not the issue in the context you're discussing. Most of them are taking degrees that you'd probably consider to be of value, and most of them aren't attending diploma mill schools which are the primary programs loading students down with lots of debt and a useless degree. I don't think a lot of HB-1 students are matriculating from DeVry University or the University of Phoenix or SNHU.
Impact on finance is pretty negligible, 99+% of the (realistic) competition is Americans. In finance there is a strong preference to hire Americans because it's not rocket science and cultural fit matters more
Mostly will impact Tech
This will undoubtably make banks actually try to automate the BO instead of paying salaries so low to Indians on visas that there is not incentive to actually automate
The idea of H1B visas was that it was supposed to be for high-skilled, difficult (if not impossible) to acquire domestic talent. If that's the case, then the H1B program has been completely corrupted and needs reform. Seems like a good step forward.
I added this comment as a reply, I'm adding it here for others to read as well.
The one aspect that I dislike is the blind and idiotic approach taken by the administration. Does the H1B process needed reform? Obviously. Is adding a blanket fee irrespective of domestic talent gaps or the nuanced industry capabilities to afford talent or the 1.2M students paying $200k USD the best approach? No. It's the dumbest approach ever created.
Ironically, for all the administration's bashing of immigrants and international talent that actively contribute to the GDP and have created billion dollar companies, they're allowing the world's richest to buy their way into the US. So the benefactors will be the ultra-wealthy and their immediate families who can just buy their green cards (or gold cards) and the ones most affected will be students who studied for four years and took on astronomical debt hoping to develop their skills and build a life like many predecessors before then.
The hypocrisy is what baffles me. If the administration or the US is against immigration, then deport Baron Trump. If the US doesn't want criminals in the country, then impeach a known felon who's had documented cases of financial fraud and misogyny not even mentioning the damage caused to the public within the White House. If the US really hates immigrants that much, then stop using the solutions those immigrants built (such as YouTube) and build your own platforms. This weird vague hatred for a minority group for perceived damage whilst being willfully ignorant or complicit of actual criminals is so quintessentially US.
The H1B process could have been reformed by a system that imposed penalties on the field and size of the firm. For consulting firms or professional services, $15-50k/yr. For startups/small tech, $5-15k / yr, and a cap that's adjusted for the growth or job forecasts in each subfield to adjust to where domestic talent could be more favourable. That would result in a better outcome as the penalty would be something companies could stomach. But some companies wouldn't even pay $10k in relocation costs for lodging, flights, administration fees on top of the H1B filing fees and this approach just makes it horrible.
And once again, if local talent is struggling to compete with an international student who's not born in the US, has to convince employers to put up the money and committment for the H1B, and bears out others for the most coveted jobs, then the local talent just sucks. In a pure meritocracy with the added costs already in place, local talent is losing which means you need to reassess the cultivation of talent and the disaggregated concentration of visas within the market, not create a blanket policy with so little forethought, the administration confused their own allies (big tech) who may just get an exception by bribing the administration with another brick of gold.
"A blanket fee irrespective of domestic talent gaps or the nuanced industry capabilities".
I would argue the precise opposite. A blanket fee is exactly what allows all of those considerations to naturally fall into place . . just charge a fee and the areas of highest need/value will overcome that fee. It's like a hurdle rate.
Attempting to put a finger on the scale by charging different fees for different things, in an attempt to manage outcomes top-down, is where we always screw up.
Exactly. The idea of a "mercantalist" approach to this is kind of silly. If there is dire need, then pay the wages required to get the talent domestically.
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