Edit:
I'm mostly saying it because everyone now days thinks every tech job is some html and javascript and anyone can pick it up. Doesn't matter how smart you are, one does not simply walk into a h1b Java role. You have to be born in the darkness, molded by it.
I don't think this is succeeding even as a jobs site.
I mean, hiring is down -- but I still get those spam messages.
(And spoiler alert: I still don't want those positions)
By law, these companies must prove the job cannot be filled by an American in order to hire the visa worker. One way to 'ensure' this is to only advertise jobs in newspapers or in radio advertisements, or in unlinked and unindexed webpages. That way, the American never knows the job exists, and the company can prove on paper to the Department of Labor that they tried to hire an American but couldn't find one. The InstaCart job posting for example requires resumes to mailed in through the postal service to their immigration department.
The goal of the project is to aggregate these jobs in a place that Americans can find and apply for them. An additional thing to note is that the company MUST respond to the US applicant within 30 days, or the applicant can file an official complaint with the government.
It is entirely relevant to the explanation. PERM and H1B are entirely different processes handled by different departments of the government.
>One way to 'ensure' this is to only advertise jobs in newspapers or in radio advertisements
That's not some nefarious plot. The government (Dept. of Labor) requires them to post these ads in newspapers. If the government didn't, they wouldn't post these asinine ads.
>That way, the American never knows the job exists
The job does not exist for all practical purposes because there is already someone working in that job. Perhaps your goal is to effect some change so that more Americans get these jobs. This is not the vector of attack though. You want to focus on the root of the problem, namely that corporations are able to hire people at will in the first place. Once they've hired someone, applying to same job is not going to make them fire that person and hire you instead. You want to take the agency away from corporations at inception, so that you can be hired.
I got a single result. For an auto technician.
For Ferraris.
(not kidding: https://www.jobs.now/jobs/150823097-ferrari-classic-master-technician)
Oh, the irony.
As a simple comparison, doing a quick job search for 'golang' on dice.com yields 5k+ jobs. Tell me why I'm going to use jobs.now again?
I was on H-1B at a university where researcher appointments were nominally from July of year N to June of year N+2. But if you didn't start in July, your second appointment might be only 1 year, for some bureaucratic reasons. And you had to renew the H-1B for each appointment. I had five H-1Bs in total over ~7 years.
The statutory protection for H1Bs is thin. In 1990, Congress excluded H1B from the requirement applicable to other non-immigrants that they retain a foreign residence, and from the rebuttal presumption that someone who applies for a green card has immigrant intent. That’s it. The common operation of H1B as being an immigrant-intent visa is mostly a matter of administrative grace.
https://www.jobs.now/jobs/151415137-hotel-renovation-specialist Must be fluent in Russian. Do you really need to have this to do the job?
https://www.jobs.now/jobs/153205684-senior-director-enrollment Must have masters in Project Management, IT, Business Administration (pretty broad). Also have 4 years experience in enrollment management systems & operations in higher education setting.
Probably a decent number Americans who could qualify for this.
“Are people/companies allowed to hire for niche skill sets that fit their specific needs, when it de facto bars 99% of citizens from getting the job?”
I suppose I could imagine a construction foreman job that requires Spanish, for the reason that you will be interacting with Mexican labor that doesn't speak English.
But I doubt that Russian-speaking interior fitters in Lynwood don't speak any English.
You basically had to be already working for us to have the required experience.
If you're not very active in recruiting (especially at a sizeable company), it's not hard to be outside of the circles where those conversations are happening.
Frankly, I'm going to assume that it's not allowed in the same way that speeding is 'not allowed'.
It is like giving up a lottery ticket you have won for another lottery ticket.
Also, the law mandates certain compliance steps which the employers do. There is no expectation that they should actually hire someone else unless the compliance steps are violated. So everything is working exactly as intended.
This PERM process and law has harmed countless american citizens and employers both. Citizens end up applying for jobs they are not going to get and HR wastes time on resources over candidates they are not going to hire.
A better solution would be to hand a greencard to any immigrant who has worked for 5 years and has earned a certain high salary as proven by the W2.
This whole circus can be gotten rid off if you ask me.
Huge non-sequitur. Why is this better? Better for whom?
The H1B employees being shackled and thus having little to no leverage to demand higher compensation or better working conditions is (from the point of view of the companies abusing the system) a feature of the system, not a bug.
This is simply not believable. More competition for a limited resource (jobs) means lower wages, not higher wages.
>otherwise it creates a subclass of workers that depress wages
Again, we can just skip the middle-man here and fix wages by ending H1B.
Personally I'd just scrap the H1-B program altogether, and let the free market sort it out. H1-B is almost as bad as simply exporting jobs via outsourcing. Laws should be made to benefit US citizens, not US companies and shareholders.
At least with the H1-B they are paying US taxes and spending at least something in the US economy, but outsourcing is also taking US corporate profits, mostly coming from US consumers, and sending it overseas to benefit a different country!
Trump has said that US companies should be more patriotic in their hiring, but nothing will happen without changes to the law or tax code.
Agreed. We need to incentivize the corporate behavior we want and disincentivize or ban the corporate behavior we don't want.
The system is flawed and it forces immigrants and companies to work with the rules that are set. And people who don’t fully understand the system are angry about it.
It would be much better to simply define this as an economic test:
1) Are the prevailing wages for a position rising faster than inflation?
2) Is unemployment in the position both low and remaining flat?
Seems hard to claim a shortage if either of those is false, and there is little gaming to be done for simple government reported labor statistics, recent news notwithstanding.
You will also start to see people with ties to big tech being hired to actually compile the data.
The idea of determining skill shortages using data isn’t new, nor is it ineffective. Other countries have been doing it for a while. E.g. New Zealand
We don’t even know what inflation is anymore
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/10/the-computer-science-dream-has-become-a-nightmare/
Any job you take you need your new employer to be able to undertake the effort for H1B renewals and the inevitable green card application. There’s big companies that do it and smaller ones that will absolutely refuse to.
Either way an H1B prefers to stick around until the green card is done. They will not willingly prior to that unless they see a much better offer.
What the hell else supposed to happen to your temp worker visa when you’re no longer a worker? Are you supposed to just get an immigration hall pass indefinitely?
Same point as in sibling thread - if you cant get a new job lined up while still employed or within 60 days of being laid off, you clearly dont possess "distinguished merit and ability" which is the entire purpose of this visa
Say you lose your job. Boom, the clock starts ticking and now you're in a rush to find an acceptable job that meets the criteria of H1B.
Say your manager mistreats you; denies you promotion, raises, etc. and you want to leave. You can't just quit and start looking. You have to line up something that will come through in 60 days and only then you can be free to quit.
None of these situations apply to citizen or PRs. It tilts the balance definitely to the employer's advantage.
So? You’re not entitled to always get your favorite thing. Shocking, i know. Get a transfer, then turn in the notice. How hard can that be?
Id argue if you cant just get another job you’re probably not entitled to this visa designed for workers in high demand.
Now they have to interview you to determine that you are not.
Ultimately, this is something that the government should be monitoring. It's a legal farce that the system depends on U.S. citizens diligently applying for jobs that both sides know will never result in a job placement.
I think that y'all are a bit unfair in the way you're talking about H-1Bs.
I know that in the US recruitment in tech is at a all time low, and that you would most likely want the few jobs that actually exist to go towards US Citizens. I get this feeling.
However, thinking that you're jobless because of H-1B is kind of ridiculous. You're straight up lying to yourselves at this point.
I get that some companies might abuse the system, especially tech consulting firms that are looking for people that will work for way cheaper, since they would do absolutely everything to evade their third world country.
But please, at a time where companies are insulting everyone of us by saying that they can simply replace us with clankers, don't use H-1Bs as a punching ball. The people in charge, who are just seeking higher margins, are the one that makes it hard for you guys to find a job, and making you leave hell with layoffs.
Be better.
There are clearly jobs listed here like bookkeeper that no shortage exists for and doesn’t seem to require any specialized skill.
I find it fascinating to see the type of jobs that are listed.
Also all the jobs clearly have pay ranges! It’s very humorous to me that when I was looking for a job, most jobs didn’t have pay ranges and these all do.
Maybe a clear pay range is evidence that the job really doesn’t exist.
Relevant comment by lgleason at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44880832
That is, in fact, how the State Department turned the H visa category (created in the 1960s) became a de facto permanent immigration visa long before the 1990 immigration act. It just kept adding administrative exceptions to make it easier for people to stay.