US signals intention to rethink job H-1B lottery

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/20/h_1b_job_lottery/

by rntn • 1 year ago

80 121 1 year ago

theregister.com

sownkun3• 1 year ago

The amount of foreign tech workers in the U.S. seems far too high right now given how bad the job market is.

zihotki• 1 year ago

There will always be a shortage of tech workers* in the US

* - low paid skilled workers who don't have right to say no to 60h work weeks.

techpineapple• 1 year ago

You’d have to make it harder to outsource as well, right?

sleepyguy• 1 year ago

Ninety-nine percent of the developers at one of the world's largest transportation companies are from India, with most employed through the H1B visa program. Many of them are aghast at the company's decision to open a new office in India, seeing it as a cost-cutting measure that could put their positions at risk.

rhapsodic• 1 year ago

* >Ninety-nine percent of the developers at one of the world's largest transportation companies are from India*

What company is that?

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2• 1 year ago

Eh, if recent events are any indicators ( going after migrants and not after employers that hire them ), I think most people already know the answer to that question.

anonreeeeplor2• 1 year ago

In my area, there is a Tae Kwon Do school my kids go to. You can see every year the class picture. For the last 10 years it was almost all white kids then it made a dramatic change to almost 100% Indian. We live near Microsoft. Something very obviously is going on with immigration. To say Microsoft has simply been flooding the area with Indians is shown visually.

ivape• 1 year ago

If Microsoft decided to be a fully Indian company, what would change? I'm actually kind of curious. Then they can just stop pretending and have a giant Taj Mahal HQ in India with tons of Indians. Who is going to stop using Microsoft Office in the enterprise? I have no clue what's actually keeping some companies here at all.

sownkun3• 1 year ago

Yep. I live in the same area.

anonreeeeplor2• 1 year ago

I was a self taught software developer that was very advanced. I remember applying to Microsoft dozens of times. Your resume goes right in the trash … unless you are a foreign indentured servant. These companies are not our friends. I was permanently shadow banned and limited on LinkedIn for mentioning this. It’s a racket. Intel laying off 30K people a quarter. Who do they replace them with?

buckle8017• 1 year ago

The answer to why this is happening is also very clear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella

femiagbabiaka3• 1 year ago

A lot of people seem to believe that the path to the next generation of American prosperity is playing a series of zero-sum games through demagoguery. I’m not convinced.

vkou2• 1 year ago

That's not a fair and complete description of their beliefs, they also believe in negative-sum burn-the-furniture-to-stay-warm.

malfist• 1 year ago

Whatever is required to make the next quarter's numbers be higher.

epistasis3• 1 year ago

I'm not even sure that's it's a desire for greater prosperity, honestly. I think it's most about enforcing social hierarchy by race and gender and parentage, though people vary a lot on what they want the hierarchy to be based on. This is a huge change from past visions for America, and will lead to far less prosperity, inevitably. The fight against DEI, policies meant to maximize corporate success by taking the best talent no matter race or gender, is clear indication of that. And there was plenty of indication that companies that used ESG in running their companies overperformed, yet there was a huge revolt against that.

umvi2• 1 year ago

The fight against DEI, policies meant to maximize corporate success by taking the best talent no matter race or gender, is clear indication of that.

That's not how DEI looked to me. In the places I've worked, DEI consisted of policies meant to force organizations to hire underqualified applicants so long as they were members of certain demographics, i.e. a variant of affirmative action.

atoav3• 1 year ago

This is my current thought as well. The neo-fascist movements throughout the west all do not have a positive vision, beyond it being a narrative vehicle to convince the people who bought into the rethoric.

Returning a nation to former greatness is a strong story, especially among those who never benefited from that hypothetical greatness. If you ask those politicans to make their promise of a return to greatness more concrete, they often can't even point at a point in time where the nation was great. And when they do you it usually involves prior atrocities where one class of people was beneath the others.

Excuse me for being vague and open here, but I purposely tried to tell it in a way that works for all countries with whose neo-fascists movements I had experiences with, so Geemany, Austria, Italy, Serbia and now unfortunately also the United States of America.

zdragnar2• 1 year ago

DEI, policies meant to maximize corporate success by taking the best talent no matter race or gender

You're thinking of equality. The Equity of DEI is different from that.

femiagbabiaka3• 1 year ago

Personally I think the DEI push was a mistake, purely because a push for social equity carried out by the private sector was always going to lead to complete disaster. It was another zero sum game, if not in actual application due to legal issues, then in rhetoric.

But I think you’re right overall, or to put it differently, certain people want to redefine what it means to be American in a way that funny enough, would have excluded large chunks of the Trump administration if applied out when their ancestors got here.

like_any_other3• 1 year ago

This is a huge change from past visions for America

The America that limited citizenship to free White persons, and had an effectively Whites-only immigration policy until 1965 [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...

kubb4• 1 year ago

I got rejected from the lottery once! It was a while ago, at that time I had about 40% chance to "win" it.

I suppose folks from India and China make up the bulk of the applicants, and a high percentage of the people who end up getting the visas.

My life could have been completely different if I did get an H-1B. Oh for the path not taken.

I hope there is someone who received it in my stead, who now is wonderfully happy and successful in the US.

sleepytimetea• 1 year ago

I know someone who didn't get the lottery for 3 consecutive years.

kubb4• 1 year ago

Life is a series of lotteries. Where you're born, how wealthy your parents are, what genetic endowment you receive, what environment you grow up in. You have to win enough times and then you get a shot at a happy life.

Is it fair? Not really. Most people lose. I also lost. But, such is the reality we live in.

TrackerFF3• 1 year ago

Yeah...look at all the top researchers in AI, and count how many of them came here through H-1B. Gotta be something like 70%-80%.

Nothing against "homegrown" talent, but let's be real - US is getting cream of the crop talent from other countries.

(And that's just AI, not do the same for other fields. Many of these people started as regular engineers and devs., and didn't come to the through the EB-1B/Einstein visa. Just a regular H-1B. And many on student visas.)

sownkun3• 1 year ago

H-1B for top talent in fields like AI makes sense. But in most cases it's not being used for that. It's just being used to fill generic software jobs that can be filled by US citizens/residents.

lokar3• 1 year ago

Even more basic IT jobs, no programming at all

dangus8• 1 year ago

Those top tier researchers are the kind of people the program is legitimately meant for, but for every one of those there are probably 10 or 100 H-1B contractors being paid below-market wages resulting in underemployment of US citizens, especially early career graduates.

The program is also used to employ people that won’t quit when they are mistreated because their family’s existence in the country depends on continued employment.

spacemadness• 1 year ago

I’ve worked with a lot of backend and mobile devs that are on H1-B. They were solid for the most part but they aren’t exactly niche skills.

bugbuddy13• 1 year ago

This is complete BS. There are plenty of good candidates all over the world including the US. To make it fair, just put a 1000 limit per country per year.

dangus8• 1 year ago

My understanding is that the specifically set limits per country are actually somewhat unfair in the status quo. It means that applicants from smaller countries are way more likely to get in just based on where they were born rather than based on merit or employers’ talent needs.

andsoitis• 1 year ago

look at all the top researchers in AI, and count how many of them came here through H-1B. Gotta be something like 70%-80%

What’s your source?

rdtsc• 1 year ago

Would you say the bulk of the H-1Bs are cream of the crop?

itg• 1 year ago

The EB1 visa exists for these "top researchers", the H1B is being used to suppress wages by increasing labor supply for basic software engineering roles a fresh college grad can easily complete.

TrackerFF3• 1 year ago

Indeed, but so many in the field of AI have followed this route:

Student -> regular dev/engineer -> promoted to lead/researcher/manager (or jump to another company for those positions).

If they didn't come to the US on a student VISA, or H1-B to begin with, they wouldn't have been able to follow the path they did.

lokar3• 1 year ago

I have worked with many very smart engineers at big tech firms. We were constantly searching, never hitting hiring goals. The H1B people were not displacing anyone and were paid top of market.

labcomputer• 1 year ago

I don't disagree with you, but:

If the supposed benefit of H-1B is getting top researchers from other fields, why do we allow body shops to fill the annual quota with low skill workers?

Like, shouldn't we be in favor of rules will which will shift the balance of H-1B recipients towards the highest skilled (and probably highest paid) workers, instead of a lottery that rewards spamming the system with the greatest number of people who technically have a bachelor's degree?

It seems like a rules change could actually increase the number of very highly qualified people coming to America.

akaksk2• 1 year ago

By and large the majority of our H1Bs are from India. Why isn’t China fighting tooth and nail for these hires if they’re so valuable? Additionally, why isn’t India fighting tooth and nail to keep them home and help their own country? Last I checked, Modi is working to facilitate these hires.

TrackerFF3• 1 year ago

Higher comp in the US, because that's where the capital is. More freedom, too. Especially if you're religious (compared to China).

Indians are already very integrated in tech, so networking benefits. If Indians prefer to hire Indians, makes sense that more Indians want to give it a shot.

master_crab4• 1 year ago

If they truly have extraordinary talent in AI, there is the O1 visa. Bigger hurdle, but considering how Zuck is paying 100mil for some of these people, a low bar relatively.

like_any_other3• 1 year ago

Yeah...look at all the top researchers in AI, and count how many of them came here through H-1B. Gotta be something like 70%-80%.

It's funny how easily the argument flips between that and "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.", so long as it leads to the desired conclusion.

bradlys2• 1 year ago

Can anyone who is from India or China explain why the type of person who goes to SV and works in tech from these two countries is so wildly different than the type who goes to NYC and is from those two countries?

It’s a massive cultural difference. I’ve much preferred the individuals who chose to live in NYC as they seem to be a much more outgoing, social, welcoming, and open type of person. The type of individuals that go to SV and are from these two countries seem the complete opposite.

siliconc0w• 1 year ago

Replace the lottery with a compensation auction until it reaches 90th percentile for the area and ban any companies with layoffs in the last three years. Anything else, like making it "skills based" will be gamed.

dangus8• 1 year ago

Of course, layoffs themselves can be gamed. You can do things like RTO, cutting intangible benefits, and other social engineering to make people quit.

shagie6• 1 year ago

This appears to assume that the only worthwhile H-1B visas are those for highly compensated positions.

How about a French language teacher? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french&city=&year=202...

betaby• 1 year ago

How about a French language teacher?

Pay more? Even on language learning sites there is variability on language and location. So if french language is that important so should the compensation be. You US will end up like Quebec https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/23-quebec-business-o...

bugbuddy13• 1 year ago

The only people that matters to Indian tech managers in the US is being able to hire more Indian H1Bs. It’s not their money. It’s the company and shareholders’ money so they can pay whatever amount the government dictates.

airstrike11• 1 year ago

I think it's important to note that not all H-1B jobs are the same. There are many companies that abuse the system, and this is one of main reasons to revamp it.

But there are also companies that are just looking for talent that they can't easily find in the US. I had an H-1B working in Investment Banking and was paid a high salary after business school. Most of my classmates did not want to go into banking. I was ranked a top performer year after year, put in hundred-hour weeks and provided actual value to the bank, clients, and the US economy.

Economies generally want high-skilled, high-salary immigrants. The H-1B can and should be a program for that. Literally everyone benefits.

It should also enable a path to citizenship. Right now, those high-skilled workers get a lottery with ~30% odds, another try at 40% odds if they have a graduate degree, and then six years working for Uncle Sam before they're kicked out of the country.

There's no path to a green card unless your employer chooses to sponsor you, at which point you are even more at their whims than during your H-1B stint and obviously there's a massive imbalance in that relationship.

And because I believe offering solutions is more valuable than just criticizing, here's my relative non-controversial suggestion for the program:

• Country quotas

• Minimum salary of [$175-200k/year] (pick your number)

• H-1B workers should be allowed to easily switch jobs, so long as the job is still above the minimum salary. (Giving workers flexibility reduces the possibility of abuse. Currently you have 30-days to find a job or you have to leave the country.)

• Spouses of H-1B workers (H-4 visas) should get a work permit with no minimum salary (They're currently not allowed to work at all. They don't need a salary minimum because their visa is tethered to the H-1B already, and it's better (for everyone) to have them work some job rather than no job.)

• H-1B can self-petition a green card after X years working in the US (personally I'd say 3 years, but 5 may be more palatable to the general public)

• H-1B visas should be good for 5 years instead of the current 3. They should also be allowed to extend for another 5 years, so 5+5 instead of 3+3.

shagie6• 1 year ago

• Minimum salary of [$175-200k/year] (pick your number)

How would this impact... say... Foreign Language Instructors? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=foreign+language+inst... or school teachers? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=teacher&city=&year=20...

airstrike11• 1 year ago

I don't think school teachers need an H-1B. Plenty of people in the US willing to do that job. If anything, we need to restrict the supply of school teacher labor so that there's an upward pressure in salary.

As for Foreign Language Instructors, I would argue that should be a different visa category altogether. Probably an O-1C type visa (which doesn't exist today). Someone with a specific skill set that is unavailable in the US by definition.

But IANAL.

buzer• 1 year ago

If US army truly needs to hire some foreigners I don't think they would have issues either modifying H1B rules so they are exempt or getting their own visa category for their own needs. I don't think either party would truly be against that even if Congress needed to pass the law since DOD is asking it.

Of course they could also just hire them with higher wage and tell Congress that they have option to make a small dent in the defense budget by passing that law.

bugbuddy13• 1 year ago

So your position is: make it an even juicier deal for Indian H1Bs and screw the unemployed and underemployed Americans.

airstrike11• 1 year ago

How is that what you read from my suggestion? Do you really think putting a salary floor will make companies pay H-1B workers _more_ and not consider US applicants? That's literally the opposite of what would happen.

Did you also ignore the country quotas bullet?

lokar3• 1 year ago

The point is to set the min pay to be top of market for the field. If there really are plenty of Americans available they should get hired first

e1g2• 1 year ago

Here's a bulletproof working visa policy: automatically approve everyone who will be in income tax (state and federal) more than the median gross income (~$60k). Sort of minimum-income-tax personal guarantee, which all highly-skilled migrants for in-demand occupations will easily match (OTE >$200k). Alternatively, earning 2x of the median income in their profession, with a national floor of $200k pa.

It won't solve all immigration woes, but it will do a great deal to keep the country competitive.

atoav3• 1 year ago

Yes, only that it leaves vast parts of the US economy without workers, since not only skilled labour is sought after. Farm work would be one popular example. So unlike you somehow explain to Americans why foreigners get the good jobs while they now have to work the fields, a kins of labour that has been beneath them for decades, that won't even remotely fly (at least not without other major restructuring).

e1g2• 1 year ago

As an immigrant, I understand the deal (for a working visa): I must bring valuable and scarce skills that this economy lacks (as demonstrated by the premium it is willing to pay). "Total Compensation" is an imperfect-but-good-enough proxy for how valuable and scarce my skills are. This does nothing to address other issues in immigration or labour forces, but if your goal is to attract global professionals with valuable and scarce skills, you need a working visa based on the total compensation this economy offers for those skills (i.e., Total Compensation).

ffitch• 1 year ago

I’m curious what the policy with the highest long-term benefit would be. The country needs external talent, but would skewing H-1B towards high skill be good? The economy seems to need unskilled labor for the jobs Americans are not interested in. Should the government try to curb hi-tech outsourcing instead, to create more jobs in the States, both for the citizens and the skilled immigrant workers? But that would be protectionism, and protectionism rarely play out well economically.

bugbuddy13• 1 year ago

Ask the countless unemployed and underemployed CS and CE and EE grads. They have a simple answer: give them a job first.

Until local grads are fully employed, H1B should be limited to a fixed and equal amount per country per year. That’s fair. No more Indian managers hiring only Indian H1Bs. If they need the foreign talents so much let them hire some Irish or South Korean H1Bs.

hash8726• 1 year ago

Basically all of the problems with the H1-B system could be fixed overnight by simply banning visa holders from working for consulting companies. 'No visa holder may be employed by a company whose main business is consulting for other firms, or staffing'. We'd keep the highly skilled folks who are going to the FAANGs, and at least letting the midmarket companies bid for everyone else. But there's no compelling national or economic interest in importing a class of Accenture/Cognizant/Wipro/Infosys workers who work on 6 month contracts at Wells Fargo or whatever.

I'd actually support more skilled immigration if we could get rid of the consulting firms

Edit to clarify slightly: if your concern is 'skilled immigration', I would like to gently but firmly state that most of the developers that work for the consulting firms are just not very good. Sorry. If you're in a hiring capacity at a tech company at all, everyone knows that the Wipro guys who work on 6 month contracts doing Java at Fortune 100 companies cannot pass even the simplest tech screen. Yes it makes me sound like a jerk to say this, but they're not 'highly skilled'

bradlys2• 1 year ago

The culture that is brought over is definitely very prevalent in faang.

snozolli• 1 year ago

I would also suggest not tying the visa to a particular employer. The current system makes H1Bs easier to exploit.

hash8726• 1 year ago

They're not tied to a particular employer, this is a myth that will seemingly never die. H1-Bs are transferrable between employers. I know multiple people in both my professional & personal life who have done so easily

https://immigrationhelpla.com/h1b-visa-transfer/

OptionOfT• 1 year ago

I think you're mixing in H-1B with L-1A/B. They're tied to a single employer.

more_corn2• 1 year ago

Seriously. It’s slavery. I’ve seen people stay at staggeringly toxic environments because their visa was tied to a narcissist.

shagie6• 1 year ago

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

An eligible H-1B worker can change employers as soon as the new employer’s nonfrivolous H-1B petition is properly filed with USCIS.

master_crab4• 1 year ago

I agree on the principle but that condition would be specific enough to invite abuse.

Using pay as the article is mentioning would force a natural market clearing mechanism into the system (if you really want that person you may not get them if another company is willing to pay more for the H1B slot).

hash8726• 1 year ago

But most H1-Bs are brand new grads, so their salary is just not very high. You'd be kicking out every 22 year old graduate of Stanford, Harvard etc. if you enforced a pay scale. The US has had a public policy since the 60s of making it easy for foreign grads of our elite colleges to stay here, I wouldn't mess with that

daft_pink• 1 year ago

I think they shouldn’t be indentured servants and they should just charge a huge fee, discount it for US grads and then don’t allow someone here to easily switch so they can’t maintian a pay disparity.

supportengineer• 1 year ago

In my position I directly deal with the consequences of others design choices.

There is one type of software engineer who creates software to keep running without any maintenance. Or with a very small number of people. They create software that operates logically and is essentially self documenting.

There’s another group of people who create software with no regard to the amount of mindless busy work that is required to maintain it. It seems like their primary goal is to create more work, not to actually solve the problem.

From years of direct observation and experience, people in the first group are those who are not concerned about being deported.

The ones in the second group are people who will do absolutely anything to stay in this country.

bugbuddy13• 1 year ago

It’s not just because of being afraid of losing H1B. Even the Indian developers in India behave the exact same way. They are extremely envious of their foreign counterparts and often sabotage the project through passive aggressive ways. They are even more envious of other Indians that have better jobs in India. They will often try to overcompensate by astronautic architecture designs.

almostgotcaught• 1 year ago

lolol yc/hn/sv is in for a wakeup call when all the cheap, extremely competent, highly motivated talent dries up. i'm not saying labor exploitation is to be celebrated but it's also very clear to anyone who works at a FAANG that their success is highly coupled to how many immigrants work very long hours.

sxp• 1 year ago

He also proposes that USCIS should replace the random selection of H-1B visas with a system that prioritizes highest wages....

This change is so obvious that's it's incredible that it hasn't been implemented yet. Auction off the H1-B visas based on how much federal income tax the role will pay and let the market sort it out.

hash8726• 1 year ago

The problem with this argument is that most non-spouse H1-Bs are granted to new college grads who just graduated from a US college. Brand new engineers do not have very high salaries, so if you insisted on a 'highest wages' system you'd be sending virtually every new grad from say Stanford back to their home country the second they graduate. US public policy since the 60s has been to welcome foreigners who graduate from our elite colleges.

As I say above- just get rid of visas for consulting companies instead, and everything else fixes itself

airstrike11• 1 year ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "spouse H-1B" as that doesn't really exist.

slipnslider• 1 year ago

new college grads

So? The point of h1-b isn't to hire new grads. It's to find the already educated, industry proven, experienced top talent that exists in the world. How would a new grad fit that description?

srameshc• 1 year ago

H-1B visas have significantly benefited many non-profit science labs, attracting talented researchers who often earn less than those in the technology sector. Therefore, using salary as the sole criterion for H-1B eligibility would be bad idea. A careful approach is needed, as many H-1B talents, though perhaps not immediately impressive on paper by certain metrics, consistently add immense value.

more_corn2• 1 year ago

Good riddance. Theres a place for skilled worker visas. This implementation is garbage and deserves to be burned to the ground. I literally cannot think of a worse system if I tried.

US signals intention to rethink job H-1B lottery

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