H-1B Shakeup, Kimmel Apology, Autism Causes, California Hate Speech Law

After some opening banter about an Emirates first-class flight and a busy week of news, the episode turns to its main topic: an overhaul of the H-1B visa program. As described on the show, the Trump administration announced a new $100,000 fee for all future H-1B applications. The rollout was confused at first. Lutnick originally said the fee would be charged every year, and the White House then clarified that it is a one-time fee.

The hosts frame this as a big jump. By their account, employers currently pay the government roughly $2,000 to $5,000, and large corporations may pay lawyers two or three times that to handle the paperwork. They tie the change to Trump campaign promises to be tougher on immigration and to protect US workers. They also cite a Polymarket market on whether courts would block the fee by September 30, which put the chance at 3%. The host takes that as a sign of broad alignment with the program.

The first participant to weigh in supports the fee because of how many applicants compete for the slots. They say about 85,000 H-1Bs are granted each year, applications outnumber slots by roughly five to one, and a lottery picks the winners at random. They add that over the past decade about half of H-1Bs have gone to IT consulting firms, at an average salary of around $65,000 a year.

So it kinda puts the lie to this idea that you hear that H-1Bs are for, like, high skilled engineers, AI researchers, things like that.

The reasoning is that a $100,000 fee uses market forces to make the visa scarce. Applications would shift toward higher-skilled, higher-paid jobs where Americans are actually in short supply, and companies would be pushed to try American candidates first. The speaker says they are setting aside "some of the details" to focus on this big-picture effect.

Another participant describes working in IT in the early 1990s. They say abuse was constant at the bottom of the market. In their account, managers hired workers, typically Indians, because the workers would put in long hours for less pay and could not refuse weekend coverage or ten-day stretches. Their visa status meant they could be sent out of the country, with thirty days to find a new job.

the abuse was happening all the time, and it was indentured servitude. It was disgraceful.

The same speaker says every H-1B conversation they had in IT and consulting was about saving money. They note they raised the issue on CNBC in 2015 and say they had suggested a fee of $20,000 a year. They then add a proposal of their own: auction one third of the visas so that big tech companies seeking rare talent, such as AI PhDs, could bid for them, possibly paying $100,000 to $200,000 per person.

A participant who came to the US on a TN (NAFTA) visa, then held an H-1B before getting a green card and citizenship in the early 2010s, starts by noting that Elon, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella all came in on H-1Bs. They agree the system has been abused, and they build their case on what they describe as an exhaustive thread by Robert Sterling from about a year earlier.

The three points this participant makes from that data: 1. Volume: the program is meant to be 85,000 visas a year, but in many recent years the numbers have been "upwards of 10 times that number", which they describe as 600,000 to a million people a year. At that scale, they argue, the effect on wages and jobs for native-born workers and legal immigrants already here becomes noticeable. 2. Pay: they put the average salary at slightly under $120,000, which they say does not fit the image of top PhDs in well-funded industries. They read the gap as a sign of possible indentured servitude and wage suppression. 3. Recipients: a large plurality of visas go to foreign companies arbitraging labor. They name Cognizant, Infosys, Tata and Wipro, and say this kind of work is not wrong in itself but belongs in a different visa class.

Most executive assistants at tech startups make more than $119,000 a year.

The two salary figures in the discussion differ: about $65,000 for IT consulting placements in one account, and slightly under $120,000 as an overall average in the other. They may describe different groups. The participants do not reconcile these numbers, or the gap between an 85,000-visa program and the much larger annual totals, beyond citing the thread and their own impressions.

The same participant answers critics who say the fee will cut off a flow of exceptional talent. They point out that graduates of US master's and PhD programs already get an automatic work authorization called OPT, which gives them several years to find a job and can often be extended. They say they employ several Carnegie Mellon graduates on this basis at their firm, and they call those graduates "off the chart smart." They argue that OPT gives employers enough time to judge how exceptional a person is, and they say they would gladly pay the $100,000 for such people. In their view, the changes are a course correction back to the program's purpose of helping American companies hire the best.

A host recounts an interview from their other podcast with a guest named Colin. Colin applied for a product manager role at New Relic, citing the reference number of a specific job listing, and was not even interviewed. The host explains that H-1B sponsorship requires advertising the job in a newspaper, and says companies "allegedly" place these ads in obscure papers so Americans won't see them. Groups of Americans are now finding these so-called shadow jobs and urging people to apply.

The host calls this a sign of tech-company entitlement and says the company is basically listing fake jobs. They also say they do not know New Relic's position, invite the company to respond, and offer to share its response on the next episode. Their overall summary is that the program is dirty at the low end and under-monetized at the high end.