Big tech has negotiated this H1B narrative very well.
It kills two birds with one stone -
* Easy excuse to reduce hiring junior engineers just as AI is getting good. People seem to think there are 'slots' to fill with reduced immigration, but no, not this time.
* Streamlined hiring experts. If you want a linux kernel developer with ten years of experience, now you can just get one instead of going through the lottery and waiting ~8 months before they can start working. (And no, you are not going to find many unemployed US citizens with ten years of Linux kernel development experience.)
Outsourcing has never worked for core products and innovation. Anyone claiming all these jobs will go over seas has never tried to outsource something complex. Zero large cap businesses have succeeded at this. The outsourcing comes in long after the innovation has stalled and the product is KTLO
Big tech will likely just employ the same talent but abroad.
The question of finding cheap competent programmers has already been answered via remote work.
There are tons of agencies who provide access to good to excellent talent from abroad (India, Eastern Europe even Latin America if you prefer same time zone) for a fraction of what the US market offers (even after accounting for overhead).
You can literally find someone vetted to work on your project within hours. No mess with payrolls, insurance and whatnot, you just pay a consulting fee.
So if the H1Bs were not really better than the expensive local and cheap remote talent, why would the companies get into this mess?
This sounds like a great natural experiment (the quota dropped by 3x!) until you realize that they weren't even coming close to hitting the old quota, and the number of approved h1bs actually rose in the two years after the quota was dropped.
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/h1b0...
The NBER can cherry pick the data all they want, and change the argument from wages to jobs, but the H-1B system (as it has existed for the last 20+ years) is bad for American workers.
Of course it doesn’t.
Don’t forget that immigrants are participants in the economy. If they are removed there are fewer customers.
Without immigrants, the US is losing population. That is fact.
Vancouver is very close to Seattle. Would restrictions in H-1B result in increased hiring in Canada or a higher usage of L-1 visa perhaps?
The reality will probably be hard to discern. Programming has become the new doctor/lawyer "big money" job in the past 25 years. That has drawn a lot of people unsuited for the work. Add the lack of a meaningful gatekeeping accreditation system like the other professions and you get a system burdened with a lot of dead wood.
The outcome going forward might end up looking superficially bleaker than the recent gravy train of overhiring suggests but that doesn't mean it's a valid indicator. Lots of disingenuous media outlets are cherry picking the COVID tech runup from 2020-2022 as an indication of a trend that collapsed but the real long term trend has corrected back to where it should have been all along.
With this change, I'll bet alot of the worlds best talent is coming to Australia. Perhaps we'll be able to set up our own rival Silicon Valley?
The only downside is for the countries these people come from - these countries don't have an immigration problem. Their issue is a much bigger brain drain problem.
well it don't mean less either.
We live in the age of AI, it takes approximately 2-3 minutes to get a condensed report on why your paper is misleading or incorrect:
Control group mismatch: Treats non-profits as a clean counterfactual for for-profits, but the sectors have very different occupational mixes and shocks—so the triple-diff can pick up sectoral composition, not policy.
Short pre-trend: Only a tiny non-binding window to test parallel trends → weak pre-trend evidence.
Approvals ≠demand: Uses approved H-1Bs (not applications), so results reflect rationed outcomes and USCIS processing quirks, not employer demand.
Strong wage-equalization assumption: Identification leans on wages equalizing across very different employers; if sector premia move (e.g., recession), estimates drift.
Relative, not absolute, effect: The estimate is “for-profit vs. non-profit”; if non-profits expand (cap-exempt), the “effect” can be reallocation, not a true for-profit decline.
Recession confound: Lottery years coincide with 2008–09; macro shocks can differentially hit new vs. established hires across sectors.
Noisy worker/firm measures: Experience is imputed (age minus stylized schooling ages); employer names are inconsistently harmonized → concentration trends may be artifacts; “large firm” cutoff is arbitrary.
Wage results are shaky: Based on offer wages (not realized), trimmed, and imprecise—tail stories are fragile.
Placebo underpowered/misaligned: Native “no effect” test is noisy and not analogous to “new vs. established” H-1Bs, so it’s weak evidence on substitutability.
Ignores geography: Cells are national; regional wage floors and local cycles could drive composition shifts.
Net: clever design but brittle; treat findings as suggestive reallocation under approvals data, not clean causal effects on demand, wages, or “top talent.”
There is some evidence of fraud, substitution of native workers with H-1Bs, power imbalances and more playing a part in the labor market. A lot of Americans, including in tech seem to be clamoring for less H-1Bs and immigrants, let them have it and see how it goes. Maybe it really will be better. It should be a win-win where India gets to keep more of its best talent and the US native population has less competition.