I'm not a Republican, but if this is accurate, it's something that these companies (or individuals in these companies) should be prosecuted for.
I'm not a Republican, but if this is accurate, it's something that these companies (or individuals in these companies) should be prosecuted for.
It’s because the companies are following a flawed process, not that they’re committing fraud.
The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.
In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.
I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.
This model assumes that the number of positions is fixed at any given time, but that is not true. Instead, it will fluctuate based on what must be paid. So, to extend your example, without H1B or a similiar program or de-facto state that does the same thing, then we'd get roughly the 900 jobs that are willing to pay the most to be filled, while the rest are not worth the cost of employing someone in this hypothetical market. The result, then, is a higher wage for those 900 citizens.
This is not to say that such programs are bad. To consider that, we must ask questions like:
- Is citizens being able to make much more than non-citizens a desirable outcome? (it's electorally incentivized, since citizens can vote in the relevant elections but non-citizens can not but that is not the same as being desirable in a more broad sense) - How big is this effect? - How badly do we (meaning society at large) want these final 100 jobs done? - How will this affect competition with other countries? - What about outsourcing?
A labor shortage has a temporary effect of creating an upward pressure on the 900 jobs, but there’s a ceiling and the long term effects are complex. I may have to pay 900 jobs 1.5x to attract and retain the talent as a business, but that cost will be eaten by other functions where there’s a surplus. Or long term, the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away.
Additionally there will be a loss in productivity for business and the 900 jobs will have more work on their plates, so in a way they could be underpaid for the job they do. This is just scratching the surface, but I assume there’d be a lot of second order effects.
> the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away
Both are acceptable terms for me compared to importing cheap labor. If they automate, then at least it creates new high end jobs, and if they ship jobs away then they now have to deal with foreign cultures, foreign courts and legal system, etc that will hamper their business.
That’s because you’re automatically assigning “cheap labor” tag to all workers on visa. Which in itself is not accurate. But these same workers after following the above process become permanent residents and citizens. (Which implies these are the people companies want to retain and move them off a visa by sinking 10s of thousands of dollars) The reality is much more nuanced.
Nope. Companies are just taking advantage of the system. Just look at who the biggest importers are. Tata Consulting? I mean that's clearly just cheap tech labor. I once was contracting and had to train my replacement from Infosys who was there on an H1b visa.
This about the PERM process and Microsoft. Consultancies abusing H1B visas is problematic, there’s no denying that. But this is a separate matter.
> I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process.
This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
So anyone following the immigration process laid out by the government is cheating?
They elected a president twice that says he was being “smart” by avoiding taxes. Americans are fine with this logic.
> This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
Especially because when such processes are broken they usually got that way not on accident, but because of sustained lobbying by the same forces that then take advantage of the broken system they helped to shape.
(I'm speaking generally, not necessarily claiming it applies to the particular policy being discussed here, which I'm not super familiar with the history of one way or the other).
The companies lobbied for this process. It's flawed by design. If ti worked as you suggest, then companies couldn't exploit their workers.
TLDR;
They were committing fraud fraud fraud
We need clawbacks from the C-suite and disgorgement of illicit profits
100% happens. Microsoft is for sure an offender, but the biggest offenders are companies like Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, and IBM (among others).
There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.
IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.
If you are ever at a tech company and oddly see a piece of paper taped to the wall near the ceiling with microscopic font, that is a job posting. Its representing the tech company making their 'best effort' to hire an american. You can't make this stuff up.
It really sounds like you just did.
Paypal in the 2010s. San Jose Campus. On a bulletin board with some other mandated employee notifications. Never saw this at any other company.
Yes, exactly. I don't think Microsoft's hiring 6K foreign workers is really the problem. It's companies like Accenture and their shady practices. I've seen entire departments of American workers laid off only to be replaced by Accenture through H1Bs. This is just a publicity stunt from the administration. If they really cared about this issue, they would work with congress and update their antiquated immigration laws regarding foreign workers.
Yea, the technical details of visa policy do not exactly seem like the focus here - though they should be.
> They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks.
I really wish this was quantifiable in some way -- I have no way to tell if this statement is accurate.
I've worked with some very skilled H1B that definitely deserved to be here. If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem. Companies like these are not doing "highly skilled" work.
Edit: I kinda wonder if the "highly skilled" value judgement is a holdover from the era where people thought you were a genius if you touched a computer.
> "If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem."
It's hard to get data, but this is precisely what appears to me to be happening.
There's a limited number of slots by country. These companies specifically target those slots. I've worked with these folks (who are wonderful people, to be clear), and also had multiple friends with very niche, in-demand skills need to leave the country.
I don't have the data, but at a micro level, the system does appear to simply be set up backwards.
Remember that H1B is a lottery. If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery. But most of the jobs aren’t going to those people. The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
> If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery.
But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?
Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.
Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.
If H1b were about getting the most talented, it wouldn't be 75-80% from just one country and another 10% from a second country. I'd expect it to be very evenly distributed.
I would expect tons of H1Bs from former soviet bloc countries that have incredible math and science education. The fact that the H1B program isn’t clogged with Russians and Ukrainians is evidence something is amiss.
You'll notice it follows a population distribution of the world, with higher weighting from less developed countries. Soviet bloc people are not a high %age of world population and also tend to be captured more by europe since it's closer. People from developed countries tend to have less incentive to move on top of that. Indians have a further advantage of already knowing english on top of that and you get our current distribution of mostly people from india, china, canada (proximity, easy TN visa and english), europe with significant slavic representation and then everywhere else in the tech industry.
The relevant metric isn’t population, but educated population. India has 70% of H1bs while most other countries have under 1%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-h-1b-visa-approv.... India doesn’t have 70% of the world’s college graduates in developing countries.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
It’s a scam.
I mean that each employer petition on behalf of a worker is selected randomly. But, prior to the petition, the workers are hired by the companies in a non-random fashion. That’s important to keep in mind because I think a lot of people are like “oh the H1Bs I met working on AI at Google are super smart, so the program must bring over the best of the best.” But the system treats an H1B petition from WiPro the same as one from Google. Because the system is a lottery, it can be true that there are super smart H1bs working at Google and also that most of them are doing jobs many Americans could be doing. The lottery system makes the bar quite low and the spread very wide.
> The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
This actually changed this year. Applicant gets 1-4 tickets depending on their pay relative to job/area. So $500k Google engineer has quite a bit higher chance than $100k WiPro one.
Of course it still has issues (Google probably has 1-2 possible applicants for that position and would prefer all of them, Wipro has 100 and cares more about what % of them pass).
Fair. I think there's a discussion to be had on whether it should be a lottery, but I don't think that discussion is feasible in the current political zeitgeist.
The people that deserve the jobs are Americans. It doesnt matter if a foreigner is more skilled--the American people don't want to complete for jobs in a global labor market.
What is an American if not a temporarily foreign worker ;)
Read the report, these WITCH companies are also included ;)
It's fairly accurate.
It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.
I used to work for corp Walmart and they’d do H1B postings on a wall which would list salary and stuff. I don’t think they’d post it anywhere else
This is for the PERM. The labor certification that you cannot find an American to do the job and thus your employee should be granted a green card.
This happens. It’s the SOP, but it’s because they already have someone doing the job on a work visa and they don’t want to have to fire them and hire/train someone else.
It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.
It's rather insane that you have to state that first - don't you think?
I get it. Like 90% of the Republicans platform is the dumbest policies imaginable. It’s like saying you agree with a bunch of drunk, belligerent, clowns. You’d want people to know that you don’t paint your face and piss your pants too.
You really think that the democrats are much better? It seems like they are more concerned with their image than actually doing anything. Or if they do, it seems like they are more interested in the symbolic aspect of it and to perpetually keep the problem, such as how they deal with homelessness.
One should not have to disclose one's politics to make such a comment. IMO. That means that we should not think "smells like a Republican, so ignore them!".
One shouldn't pay heed to any comments one way or another that are prefaced with "I am X". They are thinly veiled attempts at appealing to people's base emotions.
Or -more likely- they reflect fear of being judged for their political views as inferred by others. But yeah, it could be manipulation! "I'm not an X but <opinion voiced by people who are X>" could be a purposeful way to push views held by people who are <X>.
These companies are going to bribe the govt for h1b. They thrive on cheap labor provided by h1b and the whole masters to h1b pipeline via opt.
That's not really how corruption in the US works.
It's literally required by the government's PERM process
You can't prosecute someone for following the law verbatim.
Trump gave the Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, the National Medal of Science today
From the New York Times:
"Hours after the [Microsoft H-1B] announcement, President Trump awarded Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a summit in Washington where Mr. Musk and other tech executives also were honored.
Mr. Nadella came to the United States for graduate school and joined Microsoft in 1992. Two years later, he wrote in his memoir, he turned in his permanent residency for an H-1B visa so that his wife could immediately join him in the United States."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/us/politics/microsoft-vis...
If Republicans started prosecuting crimes there'd be no republican politicians left.
Wait, you're saying the party of law and order... isn't?
You did not respond to the point.
> they're applying this argument asymmetrically to their allies vs. foes
If a law is on the books, but it's only applied to a specific set of people in a retaliatory fashion, then it's worse than not being applied at all.
The "replacement of an American" is where the narrative breaks down. Traditionally we haven't had large numbers of unemployed developers. One of the consequences of the the Dot Com bubble bursting is we lost an entire generation of native-born engineers. People weren't going in to CS. At the same time there was an explosion of software positions. This is part of what fed the increasing use of H1B talent. This was also one of the sources of the bootcamp phenomenon. Things are bit more dynamic these days. This is just a nativist, anti-immigrant move.
>This is just a nativist, anti-immigrant move
Yes, but what is the implication of the word "just"?
It's only kind of accurate. It has to be 2 newspapers in the area the person is employed in. Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.
> Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
Well if that's how one want to proceed. Fine. In that case these companies are not really prosecuted. Government is just doing fraud prevention out of abundance of caution.