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".

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.

> 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

I din't know which planet you are on, but on this one replacing is enforced extremely infrequently, and anybody who had to deal with the process knows it. Your example, where they catch the whopping 12 (!) cases - out of almost 100k h1bs per year - is only a testament of how small the enforcement is.

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."

> 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.

491 Oracle jobs cut in Washington State isn't nothing

<< HN should know this

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

Oracle laid off 491 people in Seattle this week.

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

How does indian software indus try handle the llm wave?

> 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

Hope you're not saying this at social gatherings.

What the newspapers(economists | politicians) say, is not reality for most people.

> America is at near full employment

Then why does it take months and months for even experienced devs to land a job?

... 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.

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.

[flagged]

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

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.

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).

That is an LCA requirement. The company did well to publish this at a place where employees frequent.

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