YHK - yet another hacker news clone

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...

What's really interesting to see is your blindness to that self destruction.

The situation could be easier, make approved I140s portable and issue an EAD, but you aren't trapped with an employer.

Neoliberalism ignored domestic worker concerns for shareholder returns and corporatism, and an alternative was offered, here we are. It’s a natural experiment we might not otherwise had had the opportunity to run.

It still matters a bit for architectural direction - but those roles are so few I wouldn’t be concerned as an American.

You can't be saying this in seriousness

No. It’s not.

These companies are D tier talent, at best. D for desi.

> Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE

Companies have usually gotten around it saying we r laying off in 1 division but hiring in another. Maybe that hand waving can’t be swept under the rug anymore.

As a foreigner: How does this work and what do they do?

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/new-aclu-afl-cio-report-...

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2026/05/12/g-s1-12...

I mean, we don't really need that west coast comp either? If I was pulling my old FAANG comp here in Spain, I'd be in the top 0.1% of earners...

That's not what the program is for. If that's the goal they can create a visa program with that objective. The current one had the objective of filling positions that can't be met otherwise, and is indeed a farce and fully abused to suppress wages.

For minimum wage you can work in your home town, basically anywhere.. if you expect someone to spend 45minutes each direction on a bus for you and pack tupperware lunch, because there are no cheap "daily meal" restaurants around, you'll have to pay more... but hey, our government does the same, and there are always poorer countries with very desparate people.

The same applies to every other job, but you seem to not pay enough to even get someone good from poorer countries.

Just pay more, and you'll get good people, from your town even, not just across the whole country.

I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.

On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.

On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.

Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:

1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.

2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.

I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.

The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.

By the time a “qualified” candidate is sitting across from you, you have already created a sampling bias simply because the population of India and China are staggering compared to the US. Wow, there are so many eager candidates from India, we must have a labor shortage in the US!

If you're doing 10+ interviews a week, likely you work in Big Tech. And that means several things have happened before you even interview a candidate, specifically screening by ATS, AI systems, recruiters and hiring managers. There are perverse incentives (eg recruiters putting people in the pipeline to boost their numbers) and there's also massive discrimination, particularly age discrimination.

Tech companies in general want to hire grads or near-grades in vast quantities, particularly from the more prestigious US colleges. You get to 40 and suddenly you don't make it through those initial pipelines before you get to interview the candidate. They're not suitable in some way. And over 50? Forget about it.

And if you do make it through these filters, you may still get filtered for not being a "culture fit", which is just code for "not like me". And if the employee pool already skews young, male and from those same colleges, "culture fit" is just a thin veneer that reinforces discrimination.

Ok you said it. Where's your empirical evidence?

Except these programs weren't importing top talent, but the same talent the locals have, to suppress their wages.

Good luck telling people affected by mass layoffs and getting rejections that the country need to import more talent because there's a "talent shortage".

Top talent talent means Nobel laureates, distinguished fellows in niche research fields, etc , not more full-stack devs and Microsoft Certified IT specialists, that's not top talent, that's average working class jobs, and the former category already has a red-carpet express-way through the US immigration system called an O-1 visa or "Operation Paperclip" in case of emergency, but H1B workers and diploma-mill grads aren't that, they're corporate welfare in human form.

Exactly. This is the trap that's befallen Russia and India. A future generation will look around at all the smart and enterprising children of their friends and neighbors doing world-beating research and engineering somewhere else and raising their children in a foreign land, never to return.

Cultural supremacy logic wraps back around like ouroboros. The truth is that we're all better off working together, and has been for thousands of years. The idea of "winners" is an illusion.

The H1B program today acts to undercut American workers.

the H1B program is mostly a wage control tool for american big tech. I'm no friend of the current administration btw, I think they are monsters, but there's no reason to lie about a program that has had incredibly damaging effects on the labor market in the US.

Right. And the practice of some of the world's wealthiest tech companies bypassing legal requirements by posting H-1B related job advertisements in the local grocery store circular and nowhere else fits that picture how?

I'm generally pro immigration, but having participated in the process, I would be willing to wager that more than half of issued H-1Bs in the past 2-3 decades had nothing to do with bringing top talent to the US. It had to do with importing cheap IT labor, which may be something we want as a society - let's have a discussion about it, I'm sure it will be civil - but isn't what H-1B was meant for.

Department budget doesn't allow for a new Desktop PC ? Call it a "data collection terminal."

Just change the words to the ones you like, and cash those checks, easy as flying a kite ! :D

Not really, the backlog for a greencard is so huge that no one seriously plans for one when they go for a H1-B. They can hope of course, but the other pathways you mentioned are more likely at this point.

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H1-B demand will remain high since people here in india that aren't able to land a target job with high salary use US employment as a resume patching tool. It just happens that the masters is the safest path to that employment. And then they return and become an engineering manager at some company here, as an "ex-MTS 3, Nutanix" demanding a salary that they never would have been able to demand with their pre-US resume.

> Down 50%, 70%, 95%....

Many other factors, one of which is that target companies across the comp band now hire much more in india. More quants/big tech, as well as more mid-comp GCCs. For example, walmart's tech team pays 35L INR to my friend in a city where this salary lands an extremely comfy life. This did not exist even 10 years ago and my friend's resume would have necessitated migrating to the US to get the same QoL. Of course, at the extreme top end people keep going e.g bay area founders/AI unicorns. But that was always a minority. So unless you are aiming for and have a good chance at a unicorn/FAANG-level payout, OR on the other of the spectrum you want resume-patching, there is no reason to migrate anymore.

For reference, at 0YE quant TCs reach 2cr in the top colleges, and stripe/databricks almost 1cr. At a tier-2 university, local unicorns like zomato pay 60L. The former is slightly lesser than a bay area salary even without any PPP adjustment and the latter two are europe-level salaries, so you can imagine why there is less migration.