Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers
whitehouse.govThe $100K H1-B origin, the discussion on the front page continues (550 points, 3 hours ago, 601 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45305845
Bsky thread which reported a bunch of details I didn't see in other outlets https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3l...
> H-1B visa holders are REQUIRED to leave the country to renew their visas every few years
This part is not exactly true. You can renew H1B indefinitely within the USA(every 3 years, need a pending Green card application from the 2nd extension onwards i.e after 6 years). However, if you leave the US for any reason you won't be able to re-enter the USA without a renewed visa stamp from a US embassy. The two exceptions are that you can visit Canada or Mexico for less than 30 days without triggering the visa stamp requirement.
No, it's correct. The original comment said "to renew their visas". The visa expires on its expiration date, however the H1B status itself is extended. Hope this helps.
H1-B program is exploited. They are not supposed to be hired unless there aren't Americans who can fill the role. There should be a large fee associated with it.
Sure. But a Friday night massacre isn’t exactly a great policy fix though, n’est-ce pas?
I'd preface this by saying I'm a not fan of Trump or the direction he is aiming for in general.
But when the circumstances are that opportunistic actors have been behaving badly for many years and adjusting to small and medium changes in laws that they see coming, Friday night massacres are exactly what's needed. What would be nice (but unlikely) is a similar health care sea change.
No, absolutely not, never. This is terrible, this kind of thing is terrible, and it comes with a terrible human toll.
Find me a dozen new grads with exploit development experience or OS internals knowhow beyond a summary course.
I can do that in Tel Aviv over a week.
Maybe don't hire new grads if you need experience for the position.
The point is to highlight the skill gap. There's a reason Wiz was founded Tel Aviv and not Silicon Valley.
In a lot of technical subfields, the talent pipeline in the US is dead because of a mix of government, education, and (yes) personal apathy,
Then you go headquarter your business and live in Tel Aviv. This situation is untenable.
That's what's steadily happening, and why the pipeline crisis in cybersecurity and other segments of the tech industry is arising in the US.
The US system only worked because the US had the right mix of openness to domestic and foreign capital and talent.
A lot of people on HN and in our industry in the US need to recognize that they are competing in a global market, and need to upskill accordingly.
Just having a CS degree and knowing Leetcode isn't enough, and I'm not going to pay $150k base for an MLE who only knows how to use PyTorch wrappers and basic math, but little-to-no CUDA or Infiniband background, or for a new grad SWE to work on a CNAPP if they don't understand how eBPF and LSMs work.
And no, it is not our responsibility as businesses to incubate that talent if American admins are not helping us (though I shouted myself hoarse about this when I used to be in that space). Everything has become hyper-politicized in the US now, and that is not the kind of environment any business can operate in.
That's a tangent, I'm not making excuses for American labor. If we can't compete, then we can't compete.
But we will never stay competitive or self-reliant if we destroy our domestic markets by allowing companies to use H1 workers and offshoring to subvert our own labor supply. And it guarantees its demise if all incentives for Americans to even try are removed.
I am not, to be clear, talking about immigration or hoarding knowledge. I am more than happy to support programs to bring the brightest minds over as permanent residence - and their families - or to export knowledge to allied nations so we may all prosper.
> But we will never stay competitive or self-reliant if we destroy our domestic markets by allowing companies to use H1 workers and offshoring to subvert our own labor supply. And it guarantees its demise if all incentives for
To solve that the US needs to
1. Offer tax credits and subsidizes comparable to what countries like India and the CEE provide in order to reduce the incentive to offshore
2. With the provided tax credits add a GC and Citizenship quota that isn't onerous but nudges a firm to hire overwhelmingly in the US. A 25% quota is the magic number in my experience.
3. Work with universities to revamp CS education. The philosophy of segregating CS and CE in the US needs to end. The EECS model such as Cal's is a better approach to providing education that is aligned with that used in every other country.
Trump's proposal did nothing to solve the 3 points above which are the primary drivers for offshoring in product-led companies. All the proposal did is give a dollar value to the expected cost of hiring immigrant labor versus shifting abroad - and that dollar amount is the same amount that you would need to spend in the CEE, Israel, or India to avail significant tax windows and subsidizes.
Instead of an office with 50-60% American labor now this move incentivized shifting the entire office to Warsaw or Hyderabad instead of hiring domestically. A new grad with a CS degree from (randomly chosen) Ohio State simply isn't worth a $120k TC or a chronically unemployed (unemployed longer than 6 months) SWE isn't worth hiring as a business. If this administration actually cared to get us to hire those two archetypes, recommendations 1-3 would have solved it.
Doesn't this just encourage companies to off-shore even harder, which is arguably more damaging to US tech workers than H-1Bs? I agree that the program is routinely abused by employers, but I’m not sure punishing foreign workers for this fact is the remediation we need.
If the cost benefit analysis for employers still shows that H1-Bs are cheaper, how will this offset H1-B exploitation? My guess is that this will suppress STEM wages artificially to account for paying a one-time fee for an H1-B, but hiring someone for 1+ years at that suppressed rate will be cheaper. Employers will blame AI for decrease in STEM wages, of course. A complementary solution is to add the $100k fee, and to restrict H1-B per employer per year, or something like that.
In 2025, the decision isn't hiring someone on an H1B versus a citizen - the cost is mostly a wash.
The decision is hiring in the US (visa or citizen) versus hiring abroad.
Given that a large number of EMs, PMs, Directors, and even VPs are on some sort of immigration or work visa, this makes it easier to incentivize you as an employer to move some of them back to India or Czechia to open a GCC. This is what has been happening for the past 5 years now.
On top of that, vast swathes of STEM academia are dependent on H1B. You simply aren't going to find enough American citizens with a background in (say) battery chemistry to become a tenure track professor versus from Korea, Japan, or China.
Now you basically created an incentive for large swathes of junior faculty in STEM subfields to return to Asia, leading to a massive reverse brain drain.
> The decision is hiring in the US (visa or citizen) versus hiring abroad.
True, but there’s a balance that employers have to maintain to get some in-state advantages from local or state governments for job creation.
That said, it makes more sense for America to get trainers or professors for niche subfields than actual workers so you can create homegrown talent, not sure why that isn’t done more.
> but there’s a balance that employers have to maintain to get some in-state advantages from local or state governments for job creation
True! The issue is local, state, and federal governments gives limited benefits compared to CEE countries, Israel, India, and others who roll the red carpet with multi-year tax holidays, subsidizes, and targeted hiring pipelines.
> makes more sense for America to get trainers or professors for niche subfields than actual workers so you can create homegrown talent
How? They overwhelmingly came on H1Bs as well, not O-1s.
This is why this is such a stupid approach, and is absolutely showing the hallmarks of a Stephen Miller policy. Interestingly, this seems to have overshadowed the Trump Gold Card and Platinum Card announcements (which part of me thinks was part of the reason this announcement happened).
> such a stupid approach
What do you think of this alternate one?
Don't make H1-B employer-specific. That way, they automatically have to pay market rates to the guy since otherwise you would sponsor his entry and he'd switch to a market rate employer immediately. This removes the "unfair" aspect of h1bs being cheaper to hire.
> Don't make H1-B employer-specific. That way, they automatically have to pay market rates to the guy since otherwise you would sponsor his entry and he'd switch to a market rate employer immediately
Exactly.
That solves the problem of consultancies and firms trying to abuse the H1B program as indentured servitude, and makes it easier for those in that kind of a situation to demand a higher salary.
In product companies, someone on a work visa is paid comparable to an American, and bringing a foreign nation on site is already a bit of a wash savings wise.
That said, with this announcement the ship has sailed, because having to spend $100k per year per H1B filing on top of the salary premium of hiring in the US just made opening a GCC/offshoring even more cost effective. For the top 20% of talent in CEE and India, you're already seeing TC break that $100k mark. The issue is there just aren't enough people in the US in certain subdomains with the right skills.
I blame CS programs over the last 10 years for that by trying to overleverage "Leetcode" and "Fullstack" style courses and increasingly reducing specialized courses.
A CSE major at a decent program in India or the CEE will have studied algorithms, digital signals processing, OS internals, and computer architecture along with the option to take further electives in a specialization of their choice (ML, Security, Systems, HCI, etc). They are much more "well-rounded" for technical roles because they will have dipped their toes in 2-3 technical subfields and did their "data structures" equivalent.
In my subfield (cybersecurity) it's been almost impossible to find the right talent at scale of OS internals, systems programming, CompArch, and CUDA+Infiniband experience in the US for the past 5-7 years. As such, there is a generational skill gap, because there is a gap of people who should be mid-career now but don't exist domestically.
And it's not something a "bootcamp" can solve either. The reality is, if we need to spend 2-3 years retraining people domestically with table stake skills like algos, OS internals, and other courses that are expected in a CS major, we should also dramatically reduce salaries for those employees, becuase I can't justify paying $150k for a bootcamp grad. At $50k-80k the math works out to only hire domestically with that level of skill while also offering training like the ASU BSCS program.
I'm seeing a mismatch between what was said in news articles and by the govt officials as well as trump in the video, and what is written in the official order[1]
Considering your background, what is your take on this? Many folks I know who are on H1-B don't know what to believe
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/rest...
We are only talking about Software - other industries like nursing and academia are way more severely impacted.
If you're on an H1B doing basics terraform scripting or maintenance work, your job is already in the process of being automated using a CodeGen tool being monitored by a senior engineer (be they located domestically or abroad).
If you a new H1B employee working at GCP's Sunnyvale office, you will most eventually be transferred to an office in India, Canada, and maybe the UK.
In neither case is new grad and early career hiring within the US going to pick up. And if you have been unemployed for an extended period (more than 6 months), well I'd recommend reading PG's article about building "Ramen Profitable" startups.
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The H1B market in software is bimodal with mass consultancies like WITCH (India), EPAM (Eastern Europe), and Globant (LatAm) who are overwhelmingly screwed because their business model is messed up, and you have people on an H1B who are basically working at a FAANG or FAANG equivalent and who are earning the same salary as citizens - these companies already began the process of offshoring 3-5 years ago when remote work kicked in because much of the CEE and India began giving massive federal and state industrial subsidizes to open offshore offices in IT Parks (and had been doing so for decades).
Short term it's a headache for companies with a large OPT-to-H1B pipeline and they will most likely do mass layoffs or push people to work at GCCs abroad - just like during COVID's early days. Long term, this only continues to incentivize offshoring because now you have a tangible upfront cost you can project and model on ($300k per employee minimum) and compare against the Section 174 impact.
My bigger question would be - if you are an H1B who was born (not necessarily a national) in China or India, why would you even make a large investment like a house or a condo in the US? Best case you are already looking at a 15-20 year backlog just to get a Green Card, and the cost to keep someone on an H1B in the US is a wash compared to hiring abroad if your salary is breaking the 6 figure mark.
Agreed, last paragraph especially. Even if it's OK now, I would not undertake 20year debt when the d2/dt^2 of all immigrant high salary labour related numbers is negative.
However, being more exact with the question I originally had, the white house youtube video, which had trump + friends speaking and signing the order, painted the picture as "100k per H1B per year for the first 6 years".
But the order as written has something completely different.
It says the companies have to pay 100k at time of getting the visa. Doesn't mention per year or 6 years.
And this whole order expires in 12 months, unless it's extended.
And they can exempt industries or whole companies if it's important to national interest.
This difference made me think that this is just optics for what was a concern for a majority of his voter base, and that in practice, they will not extend it beyond 1 year, and also exempt big industries like tech and what not. Maybe have apple do a performative hire of few americans, similar to the performative factory investments the government gloats about [1].
Was curious what you thought about that?
Of course, the media houses have their own alternate reality going on, and the less said about twitter the better.
[1] I don't at all intend to say that all american hires and all factory investments are performative
Well my suspicions were right:
> A CSE major at a decent program in India or the CEE will have studied algorithms, digital signals processing, OS internals, and computer architecture along with the option to take further electives in a specialization of their choice (ML, Security, Systems, HCI, etc). They are much more "well-rounded" for technical roles because they will have dipped their toes in 2-3 technical subfields and did their "data structures" equivalent.
I am sorry but this seems to lack complete awareness of the standards of many U.S. CS and computer engineering programs.
I'm American. I literally did an AB in CS with a secondary in Government back when Obama was still in office. It was an Ivy and we were not required to take OS or CompArch classes (the OS class is now a requirement recently from what I've heard).
Outside of 10 universities (Stanford, MIT, CMU, Cal, UIUC, GT, UMich, UCLA, UW, UT Austin), there isn't much of a point to run campus hiring events or building a pipeline unless alumni help build that pipeline (B10s not mentioned are a great example of that) or it's a local school (SJSU for the Bay, NCSU for RTP).
For cybersecurity and DevSecOps at least, it's legitimately difficult to justify campus hiring in the US when you can hire or fund an IDF, PMO, or Police cybersecurity alum who went to TAU or BGU for around 70-100% of what you would pay an American new grad.
An experienced hire in the US ends up becoming much more expensive and still has a skill gap compared to an equally mid-career hire in Israel.
And if I want to cut costs, it's easy to poach from the various OS development teams in CEE and India, because much of the IBM-Red Hat, IBM AIX, Oracle Linux, and MS Windows Kernel orgs were offshored decades ago.
If I can hire a new grad from IITB (India) or TAU (Israel) for a base salary between $30,000 (India) to $90,000 (Israel) it's much cheaper than hiring the handful of new grads in the US with a similar skillset for $120k-140k base, especially when HFTs like Citadel or HRT are targeting the same candidates at the same unis for their SWE roles.
> and computer engineering programs
CE/ECE programs do require those classes, but the total number of grads from these programs is around 19k [0] for all degree levels (from BS to PhD), and most of the Masters and Doctorate candidates are themselves in the OPT-to-H1B pipeline.
Seems to be limited to H1B applicants who are outside the country. If I'm reading this correctly, it doesn't impact renewals for those in the country.
You cannot renew a visa (any visa) in the US. You need to exit the country and apply to a US consulate.
Yes, but a visa stamp renewal is a visa “application” while the document that allows the application is the “petition”, which is the word used on this text and the step requiring the payment.
"Section 1. Restriction on Entry. (a) ... the entry into the United States..., is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000".
OK, if I consider this interpretation, which of the following do you think will apply to already-approved H-1B petitioners: 1. Existing H-1B holder can amend their already-approved petition by "supplementing a payment" to become eligible for a visa and re-entry. 2. It's not possible to amend an already-approved H-1B petition. So existing H-1B holders can never satisfy the requirement. They cannot re-enter with H-1B visa anymore. 3. This EO is not retrospective. So already-approved H-1B petitioners (with or without visa) are fine.
I’m not not a lawyer at all and I have no real idea. My guess is that existing visas are already printed and henceforth there is no petition anymore, you have a status or visa already. Since the old petition didn’t require the payment, you don’t need to show proof of payment now. But lol if I actually know how this works, can be anyone’s guess.
My guess is that if this goes forward new h1b visas petitioned while the worker is outside the US will have a line saying “must show proof of payment” or something like that, while petitions while in the US won’t have that line on their visa stamp
Does it apply to people who planned to start on Oct 1, 2025?
With the current system, you must apply in April if you succeed in the lottery, and then you can start in a few months in October, once per year.
Looks very uncomfortable for those who were about to relocate.
Looks like it:
a) Pursuant to sections 212(f) and 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) and 1185(a), the entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000 — subject to the exceptions set forth in subsection (c) of this section. This restriction shall expire, absent extension, 12 months after the effective date of this proclamation, which shall be 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on September 21, 2025.
Good. Skilled Indians/Chinese/Europeans should go back to their countries, build their own tech and compete with the US.
People are smoking if they think “talents” would still want to stay in the US given this series of policies (i.e. recent cuts/restrictions on science funding, international students, and visas) from Trump government.
This is a good time for EU to build its own digital economy.
Pretty much. This is basically a free "Thousand Talents" program for much of the EU, India, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and others.
This is ridiculously stupid given how vast swathes of industries we want to redevelop need talent from our partners in the EU, Japan, Korea (still opposed to Hyundai's visa shenanigans, but two wrongs don't make a right - also interesting how HN is so positive about this but so negative about that), etc
>Good. Skilled Indians/Chinese/Europeans should go back to their countries
Agreed. Rest of the world needs to choke the USA and prevent our talent from improving the US.
Theres no reason to try and help Trump.
They do well explaining how H-1b is broken - but adding a $100k petition fee only breaks it worse.
A real fix would be fantastic.
Why does it break it worse?
This does nothing to stop the rise of GCCs.
In tech industry, we already began slowing down H1B hiring after COVID, and remote work only exacerbated that trend (I can't justify spending $150k plus an additional 25-35% in withholdings, medical, and benefits when I can hire 2-3 people with a similar outlay in Praha or Bangalore or Tel Aviv).
At least with H1B hiring, there was some incentive for industries like cybersecurity to keep some engineering headcount in the US. Now I have no reason not to completely offshore to Tel Aviv or Praha becuase the talent is there and not in the US.
This H1B change does nothing to solve the pipeline crisis nor does it solve offshoring (though even with a services tax, I'd be hard pressed to find the same ecosystem in the US like I can in Israel or Poland or even India for significant swaths of cybersecurity).
Finally, charging $100k per year per H1B employee means I can now justify a $1-10M investment in building a GCC abroad in CEE or India and availing tax benefits, subsidies, and tax holidays.
All this did is now incentivize me to push my portfolio companies to move hiring almost entirely abroad and choose a couple of high level PMs and EMs on H1Bs who would be open to becoming a Director of PM or Director of Engineering at a GCC abroad.
On top of that, the cream of the crop you want with a brain drain like academics in STEM fields, nurses, and doctors are sponsored on H1Bs.
America has a pipeline and skills problem in a lot of STEM fields and subfields, and coding bootcamp grads aren't going to cut it.
Cutting down on processing abuse by consultancies is something everyone can get behind, but this is literally the stupidest way to approach that problem.
Then make the GCC itself unprofitable to operate as an extractive force and the costs unable to be mitigated as an extractive entity.
Your GCCs will be paying for the direct training of the US side people you overlooked and essentially a generous and well backed “pension” for the few that can’t be made current.
Unless you’re helping to fix the pipeline problem you allege exists, you’re expanding the problem space.
What’s a GCC?
Global Capability Center - think offshoring, except now you have a VP or GM assigned at that office, and a couple of P/L owning PMs and Eng Directors and actual IP being created.
Basically, back office work offshoring like in the 2000s is dead. Now entire revenue generating or complex IP product lines are being produced by offshore teams.
GCP's Security and K8s portfolio is a good example of that or that team at Facebook's Infra Silicon team in Bangalore.
One personal pet peeve I have is using obscure (and in this case, non-Google-able) acronyms. Its easy to just give the full name once, then use the acronym after.
> in this case, non-Google-able
The first two hits I get are for Gnu GCC and the Accenture article explaining what a GCC is.
Google's search results are personalized by geolocation and user history. When I Google for GCC, the first page of links has no results for Global Capability Center. The first page has GNU Compiler Collection, Gulf Cooperation Council, two community colleges, a manufacturer of laser engravers, and a manufacturer of cement and aggregates.
The AI Summary box at the top of the page does have Global Capability Center, but it's far enough down that you have to expand the summary box to see that meaning.
Just rip out the entire 1965 Immigration Act root and stem along with its follow on provisions. Then replace with a points system with citizen impact factored into the equation.
To handle the losses, have any firm and their downstream contractors and clients pay off displaced individuals many times over, with regional adjustments - such that it is cost prohibitively expensive to even think of bodyshopping people.