Last Updated on September 25, 2025 by stlplace
I received my H-1B visa about 25 years ago. I went directly from F-1 student visa to H-1B worker (without the OPT or Optional Practical Training) because I quit from the Ph.D program from my graduate school at the time. I was probably one of the first batch of the international graduate students took that route in my school. Do keep in mind the US job market and economy was in much better shape at the time (1999 and 2000) compared to now. The current job market is the worst job market I’ve seen in last 25 years.
I came across a thread re: H-1B on linkedIn re: this topic. I pasted the content below as not everyone has LinkedIn. You may find the discussion below the post interesting too.
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I’m seeing a lot of takes about the new H1B $100,000 fee. What I rarely see is this issue framed from the perspective of the unemployed senior software engineer with 10–20+ years of experience who has been searching for months; or the recent CS graduate who can’t land their first job.
The reality is that the H1B program has been heavily used for cheap labor. When you count renewals, there are over 600,000 H1Bs in the U.S. Roughly two thirds (400,000) are in technology; and the vast majority of those are software engineers.
Multiple studies by the Center for Immigration Studies; a group that is generally pro immigrant; have found that H1B employees in technology earn about 30% less than domestic engineers. With around 1.2 million employed software engineers in the U.S., that means roughly one third of the field has been replaced by H1Bs over the past decade. This isn’t a case of “we can’t find enough domestic engineers.” This is “we’re going to replace our existing engineers with cheaper labor.”
The most glaring example came recently… Microsoft laid off thousands of employees and then applied for thousands of H1Bs to replace them.
So yes, the program is heavily abused. I’m not calling for it to be axed; the original purpose of H1B was to bring in the best and brightest to fill genuine gaps. That’s still important. But the way it’s being used today is a complete distortion of that purpose.
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The US is obviously going through a lot of changes since the new administration took over in January 2025. But I didn’t expect things happened so fast: probably some other friends felt the same way too.
另: 我已经很久没有特别注意美国h-1b 签证的情况了，总的感觉是比我那时候更难弄。现在美国国内就业市场不好，移民和拿工作签证的非移民也就成了替罪羊。现在的新移民让我想起很多年之前，在上海上下班的时候坐公共汽车，售票员一般让大家往里面挤一挤，让下面的人多上来一些。但是对已经上了公共汽车的人来说，也就是美国公民和绿卡持有人，让新移民或工作签证人员上来（进来）意味着自己的活动空间变得更小，或者说自己的饼可能要分给别人。
其实在我看来，同是搬砖人，相煎何太急。当然问题是亿万富翁宁肯自己手上的饼都烂掉，也不肯跟大家分 🙂
