{"id":97162,"date":"2025-08-16T05:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T09:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=97162"},"modified":"2025-08-15T20:10:02","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T00:10:02","slug":"this-is-just-crazy-enough-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/08\/16\/this-is-just-crazy-enough-to-work\/","title":{"rendered":"This is just crazy enough to work …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disclaimer: I’m not an American and I don’t know the details of the US immigration system, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, Copernican<\/a>‘s suggestion has a lot of merit:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I can’t be the only one sick of H1Bs destroying the western labor market, particularly in tech, but across the board. Out-of-work tech workers further compress the labor market in other areas. This problem is not unique to the United States, but I understand the laws of the US better, so I’ll be arguing from that perspective.<\/p>\n

I know it. Walt Bismarck<\/a> has a whole organization dedicated to trying to find reasonable employment by job-stacking. A few new and interesting resources have appeared, dedicated to screwing with these companies that open the floodgates to a horde of foreign software engineers. Seven-eleven clerks, and SAAR YOU MUST REDEEMs, that can crash our software, our ships<\/a>, and our interstate semi-trucks<\/a> for us.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, there’s something we can do to fight back. <\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Well, while the government doesn’t seem intent on doing anything about it, the Millennials and Zoomers that have been fucked-over appear to finally have enough cultural weight to start pushing back. Here’s the thing about hiring H1B workers: doing so requires that the company demonstrate<\/em><\/strong> that no American Citizens can fulfill the role. That demonstration usually takes the form of a listing in a newspaper with 500 readers, the back-end of a website with black text on a black background, or something similar. They don’t want<\/em><\/strong> Americans to apply for these jobs; they want to successfully demonstrate that no Americans even applied.<\/p>\n

So they make the application process nearly impossible.<\/p>\n

Usually, the way this is done is that when an H1B is hired, they are permitted to remain in the country for up to 6 years (2 renewals of 2 years). Once that’s completed, either the H1B worker is forced to return to where they came from, or the job must be re-posted for 2 weeks for a potential American worker. If no American worker applies (because they didn’t see it because it was posted in a hidden corern of the website or a newspaper with no readers), then the H1B may be sponsored for perminent US residency.<\/p>\n

What was clearly once a method for gaining the Best and Brightest as potential employees in the United States has become a system of exploitation. H1Bs are underpaid, undervalued, and often booted from the country, so there’s no impetus for them to assimilate. It’s a mess all the way around, and the only ones who benefit are stockholders for billion-dollar tech companies.<\/p>\n

For the most part, we all know the story.<\/p>\n

But … what if during that 2-week posting, a qualified American candidate does<\/em><\/strong> apply for the job? Well, then everything goes to shit. The company is legally not allowed to deny an American Candidate that job without opening themselves up to a massive<\/em><\/strong> lawsuit and fines, and penalties. If only one American candidate has applied, then the company has<\/em><\/strong> to hire that individual … and if they don’t hire the American candidate and then apply for another<\/em><\/strong> H1B to fill that slot, the company is in deep shit in a legal sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Disclaimer: I’m not an American and I don’t know the details of the US immigration system, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, Copernican‘s suggestion has a lot of merit: I can’t be the only one sick of H1Bs destroying the western labor market, particularly in tech, but across the board. Out-of-work tech workers further compress […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,831,84,13],"tags":[409,1106,554,95,956,661],"class_list":["post-97162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-business","category-government","category-usa","tag-corporations","tag-genz","tag-immigration","tag-jobs","tag-millennials","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ph8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97164,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97162\/revisions\/97164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}