this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Because the h1b visas are designed to lock in the person by sponsoring the h1b. So the company can basically pay you less than what the job is worth and you can't say shit about it or they pull your h1b sponsorship and you get ejected from the country. It's %100 indentured servitude.
Yeah I sort of agree with the lockin part but I wouldnt use the harsh term indentured servitude became theyre coming over with the expectation its a working visa not a permanent visa.
But that wasn't tbe part i cared about. I care that the stats show the companies are still paying high salaries and the average pay for the non h1b workers is still going up because the demand for skilled workers is still high. Bernie is completely wrong to claim otherwise and he should know better.
Can you define indentured servitude for me
An individual forced to work without pay for a contracted period.
Theyre on a working visa and can return home whenever they want. They can switch employers whenever they want. They aren't slaves ffs.
That's the issue. Their salaries are usually 50% of what they're worth to citizens. If a company has to pay a citizen 300k but can get an h1b for 150k then they're gonna go for the h1b even if they're the weaker candidate. It drives down salaries.
I think the problem you're running into is that your definition of "low wage" isn't in reference to their applied fields. I don't think it's right to assume that people are going to compare a pilot's low wage to someone doing manual labor.
The point he is making is that corporations aren't hiring people under h1b because there's a lack of skilled labour. They're hiring people under h1b because they help drive down labour costs, or they don't want to absorb the cost of training new skilled labour.
If it were really because there was a lack of skilled labour, and demand was so high, then there shouldn't be a gap in pay between H1b and local skilled labour. If we want the best and brightest from everywhere, why are we paying the best and brightest lower than the industry standard?
H1b program doesnt hire that many workers first of all its a tiny fraction of workers. Secondly employers need to apply for the visa for the position before they can search overseas. If thats getting approved then there isnt the local talent to fill those roles. This doesnt drive down the local labour costs because its still easier to hire locally than import labour via h1b system.
There is evidence I found suggests the h1b workers are paid 15-30% below market and that should be enforced better. But its still a win win for all parties, employer fills their role, employee gets a high paying job.
Out of all the things to pearl clutch over I think this one is just bad in every regard. Especially the people in here calling it indentured servitude. Its could be more generous to the foreign workers but ultimately its fine and doesnt seem to be harming wages or exploiting and enslaving foreign workers.
Yes, but only because there's an actual cap of how many H1b are allowed each year.
There is no such requirement for a visa being approved.....
This ignores the real value of h1b for management. Besides being able to pay less for talent, you also have a lot more control over the worker. They aren't able to take better offers or join/start labor organizations, and turn around is often one most costly aspects of jobs with higher education levels. Locking in a highly educated professional with little to no room for advancement for 6 years is going to be highly attractive to any manager.
The real problem is that the 15-30% likely isn't accounting for the experience of the worker. I work in a field that requires a lot of education and licensing, and when initially starting a career you really should be getting about a 20-25% raise every two to three years. A lot of the times this is done by getting offers from different organizations, which just isn't an option for H1b workers.
I think it's naive to believe that this isn't a ploy for employers to pay less for specialized labour. The employer wins, the H1b worker only wins in a sense that they are being exploited in a currency with higher value, and local labour loses a worker that could join a labour organization.
I mean, it's basically as close to indentured servitude as you could get in 21 century America "a system where individuals contracted to work for a set period, typically in exchange for passage to a new country, room, board, and sometimes other benefits like land or tools. "
Eh, I would say the only thing stopping it from doing so on a much greater scale in that there is a cap on the how many H1b are made available...a cap which a lot of tech moguls are trying to dramatically elevate.