Any suggestion that the program is dragging wages down instead of dragging wages up is not just misleading but factually wrong.
It did seem in the past that there was much more of an all-hands-on-deck attitude towards education throughout US corporate activities, more broadly focused on the general fields the various companies valued the most. I suspect this fall off is very real, but don't actually know if that is just my impression or if there is a concrete effect from modern economic structures.
It's an important enough question it should definitely be studied and taken into account in policy.
However I can't agree with your conclusion that "Immigration helps the countries [sic] top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country". That requires meta studies that I have never seen to prove it is so. I could cautiously accept that "some types of immigration rarely help corresponding sections of the local population" much more than such a blanket judgement. Overall, it is just not true that economics is zero sum. It doesn't have to be. An entire people can in fact flourish.
You can't really expect a company hiring PhD's in a niche field to show that they couldn't have spent 7 years training an American for the work.
What study does one "have to do" to support _this_ claim?
The admin has been cutting billions in funding to universities which makes this argument easier.
Need an expert in arithmetic combinatorics? Well Terry Tao lost his grants so now you've got to look elsewhere.
An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.
Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.
> you'd have to do a study to show that the talent couldn't have been trained in the US, and that an increased supply of workers didn't drag down salaries, either short or long-term.
If the median H1B for software is exactly the same as the overall median, it makes you wonder if the median would be different if the H1B was not an option available to employers.
> Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.
So, it seems that if we remove H1b workers and assume that the demand would have stayed the same, then domestic salaries should have been higher. Assuming, of course, that companies won’t simply offshore.
Maybe at FAANGs what you say is true. But at every place I've been when H1Bs ended up added (normally via consultancy or outsourcing) it was always to cut costs. And the only costs we were cutting was staff.
Then that $120,000 salary median can still represent a 50% undercut of similar Urban salaries for a profession.
I'm going to contend that that is the case. But I don't have time to chase down the statistics
This program was meant to allow talent that is not available in the US, so that gaps could be filled with experts from overseas.
Base salary, not total comp, the first year
Once you are breaking the $100k mark and want to only save costs, you are better off opening a GCC in Eastern Europe, Israel, or India, which is what most companies started doing once remote work became normalized in the early 2020s.
All this did is make a free "Thousand Talents" program for India, especially in chemical, petroleum, biopharma, and biochemical engineering - industries where the delta between US and India salaries aren't significant but the talent gap in the US is real.
There are much smarter ways to crack down on H1B abuse by consultancies - this ain't it.
Edit: can't reply, but here's why this is dumb
Assuming I am in Dallas (a fairly prominent domestic IT services hub) and hiring an H1B employee.
In Dallas, a wage around $95k base is fairly standard based on JPMC, DXC, and C1's salaries in the area.
That $95k an employee is has an additional 18% in employer required taxes and withholdings. Add to that an additional 5-10% for retirement account and insurance plans. That $95k employee became around $115k-125k.
Once salaries start breaking into the 6 figure mark, that 23-35% in overhead starts adding up very fast. On top of that visa processing before this rule costed around $15-20k in additional legal fees on the employer's side.
If I'm at the point where I'm paying a low six figure salary, I'm better off opening an office in Warsaw or Praha or Hyderabad where I can safely pay $50k-60k in base to get top 10% talent while getting a $10k-20k per head tax credit over a 3-5 year period depending on the amount I invest building a GCC because my after tax cost at that point becomes $50-60k per employee. These credits tend to require a $1M investment, and with the proposed H1B fee, this made that kind of FDI much easier to justify than it was before.
At least with the current status quo, if I was hiring an ML Engineer at MS or an SRE at Google (a large number of whom are H1Bs as well), I could justify hiring within the US, but adding an additional $100K filing fee just gives me no incentive at all to expand headcount domestically.
You don't use the stick if you also don't have the carrot.
> You are not taking into account section 174, It takes you 15 years to depreciate foreign salary vs first year
That's a rounding error now that it costs $100K to renew or apply for an H1B visa. And for larger organizations breaking the mid-8 figures in revenue mark, section 174 changes never had an impact one way or the other - it was mostly local dev shops and MSPs that faced the brunt of the section 174 onslaught.
> Honestly, even Germany is probably better bang-for-the-buck than Hyderabad
Germany needs to severely reduce employer contributions and taxes to become cost competitive against Warsaw, Praha, or Hyd for software and chip design jobs.
That said, this is a net positive for Germany's biotech, mechanical, biopharma, and other engineering industries that aren't software or chip design related.
This is a pet peeve of mine, but there is an english name for that city and it's Prague.
There is no point in using the local spelling because it adds no clarity, is less obvious to pronounce for any reader and the locals are not really gonna thank you for doing this either. Just seems like a form of light cultural white-knighting to me.
You are not even consistent because Warsaw is not how locals spell that.
Honestly, even Germany is probably better bang-for-the-buck than Hyderabad, but Hyderabad has the volume and the offices.
Funny things is the agencies/consultancies/outsource companies all solds us on it would cut costs when the only thing changed was labor. But apparently they could cut costs without cutting labor costs? How does that work?
H1B holders are paid less for the same job, keeping wages down.
Cap-exempt H1B holders working for universities are restricted to switching only to other cap-exempt employers, but even then I never felt I had to work 60+ hours a week.
This compares medians across to huge populations. I have seen many H1Bs making less and working more.
Level 1 Wage:$65.24 / Hour - $135,699 / Year Level 2 Wage:$77.71 / Hour - $161,637 / Year Level 3 Wage:$90.18 / Hour - $187,574 / Year Level 4 Wage:$102.65 / Hour - $213,512 / Year
(Compared to the all levels $175k occupational median vs the $74k all occupation median.)
Software Developer (15-1252). Eau Claire County. Bachelors degree. 0 experience.
The prevailing wage is Level 1 Wage:$36.54 / Hour - $76,003 / Year
Change it to San Francisco County.
Level 1 Wage:$65.24 / Hour - $135,699 / Year
And so, as noted... it is location dependent.
The stats you provide here don't support your claim.
H1B visa holders can be paid more on average while still having a downward effect on wages...
Imagine that some car model costs $200,000 to buy in the US. However, an entrepreneur realises they can can import the same car from a poorer country for just $100,000 then sell it in the US for less than the manufacturer themselves. The manufacturer finds out about this and says, "hey! you're selling my car for less", but the importer says, "no, actually, you'll find the median car in the US is $50,000 so I'm technically increasing car prices".
So what you're saying could be wrong in two ways... One you could be wrong in the sense that even if it does increase median wages, that doesn't mean it necessary increases the median wage of US citizens if now a significant percentage the best employment opportunities are going to H1B visa holders instead of citizens.
But secondly, and the point I was trying to make with the car analogy, is that you could be wrong about the average wages going up too if H1B visa holders are taking jobs which would pay even more were it not for HB1 visas. So if the average wage of a SWE in the US is say $150k, but the average H1B visa holder is being paid $120k, H1Bs are clearly not "dragging wages up".
And realistically it's far more likely H1B visa holders suppress wages given how relatively high US wages are.
I'll end this comment by saying that personally I think this idea that giving the best opportunities to immigrants is probably directly wrong for many reasons. Of course, allowing in businesses and individuals who will create jobs makes a lot of sense, but what you really want is the best opportunities going to your own citizens, then to bring in cheap labour to fill the crappy jobs citizens don't really want to do, but are now increasingly doing when they leave university like working in a bar or becoming a barista. If there's a great job a company can't fill with the domestic workforce perhaps they should train someone for that role or take a risk on a recent graduate like in the old days?
But also, the H1b median salary for a software engineer is ~$120k, which is almost identical to that of the US median overall - so all of this hullabaloo seems pretty groundless.
First, I would like you to reconsider 'high income' and putting $120k in that category. It was a good chunk of change. In this year of our lord 2025, it is not. It is, for my region anyway, barely acceptable middle class income.
H1B visa abuse by consultancies and mass recruiters is a real issue, but this now incentivized companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Pfizer, Cheveron etc to expand their Indian offices.
Edit: can't reply
> Was there any reason for them not to? It's cheaper than H1B anyways.
Spending an additional $10-15k in visa filing fees isn't that big of a deal for an employer who's already paying around 25-35% in withholding and benefits, but at $100K that makes it enough that if you needed to sponsor 10 people on an H1B, you now hit the monetary amount to avail GCC tax rebates and subsidies in most of Eastern Europe and India, where they will give you an additional $10-20k in tax credits and subsidies per head.
Basically, opening a new office abroad just to save on $10-15k of filing fees per employees wasn't worth it, but now that it'll be $100k per employee, the math just shifted.
> Why is this parasitic organization allowed to incorporate?
VC now, not a director anymore. But help me find a new grad with 3-4 years of exploit development and OS internals experience in the US. I can't.
On the other hand, I can in Tel Aviv. There's a reason the entire cybersecurity industry has shifted outside the US.
Large sectors of the US tech scene just lack ANY domestic know-how.
The upperbound for middle class pay is over $100k in all states, approaching $200k in a couple.
There could be some rare edge case where you are undercut by a direct competitor, but overall America is much richer with H1Bs that without them.
A few select tech and financial services companies, and their shareholders, benefit the most from the program.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-k...
If 150,000 people buy the app, then I have ~$150,000 of revenue. I can pay a programmer $100,000 a year and have $50,000 left over. 150,000 people benefited from the app.
Now say I have to pay an additional $100,000 visa fee for my programmer. My cost of $200,000 is less than my revenue of $150,000. I don't build the app. I don't get $50,000. 150,000 people who would have bought the app don't benefit from it. The biggest loss is to the Americans who don't get to buy the app.
There are other possibilities, maybe I increase the price to $1.99 or I hire an American. We can see that those are both bad. The former extracts $150,000 extra dollars from American consumers. Since unemployment is low for Americans and an American programmer can't have two jobs at once, the later just means that some other project that the American programmer would have worked on is not completed.
Are they underpaid, or are they swimming in cash to buy up all the expensive housing? Make up your mind.
I also am not convinced that those statistics alone can be used to draw such a conclusion; there's more to it than that.
Also, those numbers are bumped up by bigtech who doesn't discriminate by visa, so pays in bodyshops are even lower and tech salaries are way higher than that in US.
Second, Indians have to pay their bosses to get a job. Their real pay is at least $20k lower. And there's far worse as well.
