[rv3392]

> Yes, this is something concrete that I can agree on. But how would you prove that given that we don't have access to that data?

Without that data you can't really draw any conclusion can you? For all we know companies are hiring a higher percentage of American workers now. All we know from the data shown is that companies are hiring some new H1-B holders and retaining a lot of existing H1-B holders.

[vitus]

> given that we don't have access to that data?

Actually, we do have some of that data. You can just look at the H-1B employer datahub, filter by Google (or whichever other employer you want to scrutinize), and then look at the crosstab.

https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...

Looking at Google specifically, I observe two things:

1. The number of new approvals has gone down drastically since 2019 (2019: 2706, 2020: 1680, 2021: 1445, 2022: 1573, 2023: 1263, 2024: 1065, 2025: 1250). (These numbers were derived by summing up all the rows for a given year, but it's close enough to just look at the biggest number that represents HQ.)

Compared to the overall change in total employees as reported in the earnings calls (which was accelerating up through 2022 but then stagnated around 2025), we don't actually see much anything noteworthy.

2. Most approvals are either renewals ("Continuation Approval"), external hires who are just transferring their existing H-1B visas ("Change of Employer Approval"), and internal transfers ("Amended Approval").

[huijzer]

> Without that data you can't really draw any conclusion can you?

We're not dealing with software here. It's not black and white. We can try to make best guesses and then try to support it by evidence or reject it by evidence. A theory that is presented is that H1-B appear to replace US workers, but you are encouraged to provide another theory by using evidence.

> All we know from the data shown is that companies are hiring some new H1-B holders and retaining a lot of existing H1-B holders.

And why do you think that's not suitable evidence for the given theory? Another possible point of data that seems to point in the same direction could be the US Employment-Population Ratio, which, apart from some ups and downs, seems to have been steadily going down since 2000 [1]. More specifically, California's unemployment rate seems to go up since 2021 [2]. But these two data sources are way more broad than just big tech of course.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO

[2]: https://labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/data/top-statistics.html

[agentcoops]

Of course it’s not black and white: it’s the very fact that there are so many possible explanations of the current changes that makes pretending data supports a given explanation more than another when it doesn’t so misleading. There’s no doubt that offshoring and H1-B hiring is an important trend — as it has been since the 1990s, NAFTA etc. We don’t need this article to tell us that. The difficult question is whether AI is actually introducing a new dynamic into the situation. The article suggests it isn’t. All I’m arguing is that, whether or not the conclusion is ultimately true, the data presented does not shed light on this important question.