The Floor Keeps Rising and the Bots Eat the Rest

The letter lands in the mailbox of some kid from Bangalore who just finished his master’s in Illinois. Entry-level software job in San Francisco now requires one hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars a year before the government will even look at the visa.

Used to be lower. Way lower. The old rule was tied to the seventeenth percentile of what Americans were making. Now they’re jerking it up to the thirty-fourth. Same role in Dallas jumps to a hundred thirteen grand. New York, one thirty-two. The math is deliberate.

They say it’s to protect American workers. Maybe it does that for a few. What it really does is make the math impossible for anyone who isn’t already at the top of their class or backed by one of the big houses that can shrug off the new fee on top of it.

Because there’s another number moving at the same time. Meta and Microsoft aren’t just firing people. They’re lighting payroll on fire and calling it AI capex. Seventy-eight thousand tech layoffs in the first four months of this year. Half of them blamed on the machines taking the work.

The entry-level slice is the part that’s getting thinner fastest. That’s exactly where the visa floor just went up. So the companies that can still afford to sponsor the foreign talent will do it and eat the cost. The smaller shops, the universities, the research labs that run on postdocs and grant money, they get told to go pound sand or go offshore.

I keep thinking about the guy who was supposed to start next month. The one who already sold his things and told his family he was moving. Now the job evaporates because the spreadsheet says it’s cheaper to let the model handle the routine tickets. The model doesn’t need a visa. Doesn’t ask for health insurance. Doesn’t complain when you make it work weekends.

The universities are the next ones to feel it. Those foreign-born researchers who turn their thesis into a job are the usual pipeline. Raise the floor against academic pay scales and half of them wash out before they even apply. The labs stay shorthanded. The ones who remain get told the machine will pick up the slack.

None of this is shocking anymore. We’ve been watching the same movie for years. The powerful companies absorb the new rules and keep the talent they want. Everyone else gets told the future belongs to the people who can work for free or the machines that already do.

The kid in Illinois still has the degree. The rent is still due. The floor just got higher and the door just got narrower. Outside, the servers keep humming. They don’t care who used to sit in front of them.

Source: Trump’s H-1B proposal would push entry-level tech salary floor near $162,000