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".

> 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

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.

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."

If America was near full employment you'd be seeing real wage growth. Something that's not existed since the 1970s.

> America is at near full employment [2]

That can’t be further from the truth

Your [3] shows that the government enforces paying H1-Bs competitive salaries, not that it cares about the Americans they replaced.

Oracle laid off 491 people in Seattle this week.

<< HN should know this

HN does know. Some of us question whether brave and courageous leadership knows.

> 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.

How does indian software indus try handle the llm wave?

... 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.

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)

> 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.

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 remember seeing it on HN but didn't know if would still be up. Glad it's still going. Thanks!

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…

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.

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.

Cheaper goods in exchange for losing your well-paying job is an awful deal for the one who lost the job.

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

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).

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.

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 would assume many were change-of-status from F-1 / OPT etc.

By taxes, do you mean buying Trump's crypto?

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.

Yeah you don’t want to work 60+ hours a week to be even remotely close to what you were making before?

> 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.

Sorry what? Yes, they do. Second-hand knowledge, though.

He’s a shill.

3,000 Indians were laid off out of 15,000.

How is it different from democrats who didn't complain about gas prices under Biden and are now throwing tantrums over gas prices?

You're definitely not wrong but I still voted for Kamala because I didn't want Trump to burn the country down.

> 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?

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?