Western nations are getting played by the whole immigration charade, at best it’s a useful tactic to rob brain and labor power from competing nations, but that doesn’t work when the money flows back out of your economy and to another. If your H1Bs are managers who create pipelines for outsourcing labor, then that’s just extracting tax benefits from your country while extracting labor benefits from another. It’s great for corporations and the country where that labor gets outsourced to, but not so much for the population of the tax-friendly nation. A way to offset the perverse incentives here would be to reward companies for each H1B they don’t hire. One also needs to be cognizant of the fact that competing high GDP nations will engage in any number of market tactics to prevent nationalist agendas from succeeding, but that’s just the game.

That all said, America needs to bring up its test scores, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor....

These CEOs are correct. But that doesn’t mean the existing H1b program isn’t broken. 70% of H1bs go to India, while a negligible number go to other countries with good education systems. Is it believable that 70% of the “smartest people” are in India? https://fortune.com/2025/09/22/india-government-responds-tru...

India has about 70 million college graduates, which is a lot, but only a bit more than half have the skills to be employable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_... https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/degree-vs...

We already have evidence that Indian consulting agencies, among the largest recipients of h1bs, are discriminating against American employees: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/us_jury_cognizant_cas... https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s... https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

I can understand why maybe Japanese wouldn’t want to leave their homeland. But if these workers are the cream of the crop, the compensation in America should be such that we could hoover up top candidates from the former soviet union.

H1B visa should be reformed full stop. But this isn't reform, this is a shakedown. Enforcment will not be consistent. The CEOs who are ready and willing to pay the vig to the trump family and fellate the man will get exceptions.

I'm somewhat concerned that "smartest" is being conflated with "best at solving LeetCode problems and other time-limited interview exams". The American educational system doesn't focus on these types of Olympiad-style exercises.

I worry the pipeline is being tailored to pick up people with Olympiad-heavy educations at the expense of recruiting our local talent and creativity. And the more people are recruited from one such pipeline, the more biased its interview process becomes towards that style. (Not to say there's no overlap.)

As many others have pointed out there remain EB-1 visas and O category visas. In particular the O visas (for "extraordinary ability") are not subject to any nationality quotas. If these companies are serious about hiring the "smartest people", why would they not fall into these categories? Just for fun, here is an example of a teenager who recently got an O-1 visa as a software engineer [0]. Surely the folks applying to OpenAI, Nvidia, etc. would have similar qualifications?

[0] https://x.com/Mokshit06/status/1955377782902624410

Stick to O-1 visa if you truly want the smartest people.

You are all being fleeced. This has nothing to do with India H1b visas or foreigners of any kind. This is Howard Lutnick , Formerly of Cantor Fitzgerrald / BGC Partners / Newmark Knight Frank setting up the biggest market manipulation you have ever witnessed. The hope is the jobs report will go south as a result of this and the other amusing games they are playing, lets install our buddy on the fed. Then the few in the know will swoop in and buy up stock in the resulting fire sale. As a former Cantor employee, Howie is as crooked as you can imagine.

Sounds like they want O-1 or EB-1/2/3 visa holders and not H1-B visa holders, then. Those are the visas for exceptionally skilled/talented/educated/smart workers.

My understanding is that the smartest people are getting EB-1 and O-1 visas. We should definitely get them all.

What these CEOs are asking for, must be something else.

Large FAANG tech companies are largely unaffected, cool.

Yet, I see some startups whining and about this on X and other places.

If you really want to say that you're "hiring the best" or you want to "hire the world class best talent" then you would hire the best american engineers or pay the fee for overseas talent.

No excuses.

I can't for the life of me understand why some startups say "we need skills" and "we only hire the best" then choose a way cheaper talent via H1B overseas rather than train or hire a an Ivy / Stanford recent CS grad.

$100k is nothing to these companies.

This fee is a great compromise between the various parties fighting over this.

Putting a dollar amount on a disagreement is vastly easier for negotiations than words that can be interpreted depending on the time of day and week.

Evidently the CEOs have no notion of value...

I know for many reasons this won't work for all cases but couldn't they just set up offices etc in other countries aswell?

outsourcing is hardly something new.

It's nice at the comments are full of pretty reasonable and balanced discussions.

It's unfortunate that everything gets disregarded as simply just racist / neo Nazi, The powers that be do not want you to discuss.

People are missing what this probably is. It’s a way to effectively tax tech companies who have been actively avoiding actual taxes for years. It’s at least plausible. The administration knows tech companies want smart people. Sometimes smart people need this visa. And now those who need the smart people have to pay to get that access. Or just hire them remote. But the. What will they do with all of that commercial office space? We’d have to walk back our RTO initiatives.