Source: Olga Nesterova on X/Twitter — Private front-end.
People also share that this is causing travel disruption:
Relevant: President Donald J. Trump Suspends the Entry of Certain Alien Nonimmigrant Workers
Comments
Trapping hard-working H-1B immigrants—who are already (relative to American citizens without a visa at stake) in a weak bargaining position regarding salary increases—in the country unless their employers pay a $100,000 bribe is such a despicable thing to do.
Edit: As a reply pointed out, the law mandates that such employees be paid at par with other employees. Despite this, the dependence on the benevolence of one’s employer to remain in the country, in addition to the filing fees associated with any job transfer, already puts such employees at an inherent disadvantage.
Nah, you can un-cross-out “underpaid;” it’s accurate. The other employees are underpaid, too.
Edited it again to avoid implying that they’re not underpaid, as the billions in profits that those companies make is certainly exorbitant.
Your point?
I’d prefer to be living in a liberal democracy than in a xenophobic, conservative, fascist state is all.
Fair enough then.
Just introducing shit with a few hours deadline is insane
Pray I don’t alter it any further.
Right? And nobody is grandfathered in I guess?
The cruelty is the point. Every time.
“I’m fairly certain nazis can’t cum unless they’ve just harmed a few thousands of people”
This is not a John Oliver quote. I wrote it. But putting it in quotation marks makes me feel less dirty.
Holding people hostage outside of the US for a 100k fee just seems like on-the-nose corruption. Which is par for the course with this administration…
The H1-B system has been abused for decades, so I agree that it needed to be addressed. This is not it. This was done the way it was done and when it was done (Friday evening) for only one reason. To create as much chaos as possible and inflict as much pain as possible.
After Trump tariffs, firing federal workers, deporting friends and loved ones, and censoring the media; ordinary people be like:
This is not what we voted for!
After April 2025 stock market crash, farms and corporations can’t find workers and oligarchs be like:
This is not what we paid for!
Already backtracking, they said it’ll only apply to new H1bs.
Honestly, this isn’t a terrible concept. The execution leaves a lot to be desired, however.
That $100,000/yr would presumably be paid by the employer, because what employee would agree to that?
This increases the cost of their previously-dirt cheap labour by a lot, opening positions for Americans.
opening positions for Americans.
Sure dude. Not like companies will offshore entire teams to Asia to save money. They can hire entire team there for a salary of American employee.
Then no H1b workers earning and spending money in USA. That should do wonders for the economy.
Microsoft has ~4 major office buildings in Vancouver.
Amazon has two(one massive) and two warehouses that I know of.
Nintendo has an office.
Salesforce had one of their core dev hubs there.
EA has two massive compounds, their main one which just added 50% capacity.
They won’t offshore them to Asia. They’ll move them back across the border.
Microsoft has ~4 major office buildings in Vancouver.
And 10 in India. Amazon has 9. Salesforce has 4. What’s your point?
Plus Canadian salaries are much higher than Asian salaries. If companies are trying to save cost, they won’t bother bringing people to Canada. They’ll instead offshore the jobs to other countries.
Canada had their chance during Trump’s first term to set itself up as a safe haven but they wasted it.
Those offices in India are for people that were never going to get H-1Bs. India devs get like 10k-15k/year based on past convos I’ve had with them.
But the offices in Vancouver have traditionally been for H-1B tracked people.
Yeah I suppose that’s a good point.
However, you’d have higher paid Americans spending more money in America.
I dunno. I’m not an economist, but there’s a housing crisis and I feel like companies importing cheap labour is a piece of the problem.
Also, I’m Canadian, so I’m kinda using our TFW program as an analogue, I’m not entirely sure how H1Bs work.
There’s more housing than demand in the US. The cause of the “housing crisis” is institutional landlords who snapped up foreclosures after 2008 for pennies and jacked up rents beyond affordability, as well as keeping units vacant to make it appear that there is constrained supply. There aren’t nearly enough H1B holders to impact nationwide affordability.
It’s a multi-pronged problem, all of which lead you back to the same root problem of corporate greed.
So another “tariff” tax for Americans lol.
Technically yes, but if it keeps jobs in America it’s a much more worthwhile one.
The way it was done is ridiculous though. I’d rather have it stay the same than this crap. Having a fee so companies can’t just outsource for cheaper labor is probably what’s been needed for a while though. $100k is too much and is basically never going to be worth it. And having it apply to everyone instantly is stupid as well.
if it keeps jobs in America
Making it harder for people to move to the US to work is not going to keep jobs in America. It means companies are more likely to hire foreign talent as remote workers instead.
It’s not a zero sum game. If you make the workforce more expensive guess what, your products gets more expensive, and thus less competitive so you’ll export less and the cycle continues. The production of competitive items will just shift to another country, and if you try to block that (say more tariffs) from coming to the USA, bravo you played yourselves and only now have access to inferior products.
Yea I suppose, but if they pay Americans a fair rate instead of immigrants dirt rates, that tax will be less and Americans on average will have slightly more money.
I wonder how much micro$quash gave the demented rapist. At least a few million, right? Pennies, to them, really.
Ah well. Table stakes.
Aaaaand… when they can’t or don’t, MSFT will happily inform ICE of all of their locations, and those of their family members.
star spangled banner plays in the background
Oh no big corpo that didn’t produce any benefit for mankind is gonna lose her cheap labor aka slave that can’t even loose their jobs without legal retaliation ( isnt recent was always the case for hb1 visa) and is related to stagnation in wage and labor shortage
Like the research hospital in my city, who just told my friend, who’s a PhD researcher from India, not to travel outside the US and to hold tight while they figure out what to do? They definitely can’t afford to pay this, so he will be looking for another country to continue his research in. Neuroscience, brain inflammation, dementia. Cutting edge shit.
2/3 are in the computer field with 2/3 of applicant coming from india. Some stats tend to prove the overall abuse of the system like having a 70% refusal rate for men while having only 30% for women. O1 visas still exist and should be prioritize for “citing edge shit”
Message could have been: don’t worry, we are going to pay the fee immediately. Have a nice vacation.
Why wouldn’t they pay immediately unless they plan on terminating most of them?
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It’s great when the people actually making this country worse identify themselves like you just did.
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Yes, that’s clearly the problem, nothing else.
