alt Hacker NewsThis chart is entirely misleading. In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas. That's it, it has not grown nor shrunk.
Reason for increase in population shown here is H1B renewals. Normally the way this works is H1Bs convert to permanent residents, but due to the country caps, Indian/Chinese H1B holders keep renewing their visas contributing to this increase. Again these are people who are already here and got their approval sometime in the past, so its not like in 2022, companies collectively hired 685,117 (which is also why you see the decrease in 2023 since due to covid, a very little bit of backlog for residency cleared).
(Not to mention the sentiment of comments here is entirely disappointing, but I guess that's the vibe these days)
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> In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas.
Minor nitpick, but if you get an H-1 visa to work at a university, it's not part of that 85K limit.
But yes, your point is valid. And the headline is editorialized - they cherry picked the year 2011, because it's the lowest. It was the lowest because we were knee deep in the financial crisis, and many companies suspended/reduced their reliance on foreign labor precisely because they'd have a hard time convincing the government that they couldn't find a qualified local.
What about cap-exempt H1Bs? There are tons of new companies which streamlined the process and which are offering "nearly-guaranteed H1B with no lottery"
I don't think it's misleading. It's clearly a population chart, not a count of newly issued visas.
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I think every time the topic of H1B comes on HN, a lot of people have a lot of opinions, but don’t fully understand the immigration system. Like you correctly pointed out, the increase in H1Bs in the country is mostly contributed by the fact that country caps force some nationalities to permanently stay on H1B while others can naturalize faster. There are hundreds of thousands of people who come into the country every year through other visas (and also on H1B from other countries) and naturalize and take up jobs in the country. But that doesn’t matter because they are now US citizens.
If people from India/China were allowed to naturalize as fast as other countries, you’d not have the chart of number of H1Bs grow in the country.