700 Fees, 140,000 Jobs: Where the H-1B Deterred Pool Went

IEEE Spectrum spent late September 2026 calling 25 US tech companies about the $100,000 H-1B fee. None would speak on record. One year after the September 21, 2025 proclamation took effect, the deterred pool hasn't shrunk, it's relocated, and sourcers who are still working US LinkedIn like it's 2024 are losing roles to peers who learned to recruit in Berlin, Toronto, and Bengaluru through an EOR.

The real headline: 700 fees paid, roughly 140,000 roles displaced

The $100K H-1B fee didn't ration visas. It killed the program outright, and the jobs leaked overseas. According to the September 18, 2026 White House proclamation that renewed the fee, employers paid the $100,000 only about 700 times in the first year. DHS recorded fees for just 85 qualifying applications between the proclamation and February 15, 2026, and processed 87 percent fewer petitions subject to the fee. The government collected about $28 million less than the prior year on H-1Bs.

Compare that to the 141,000 approved H-1Bs in 2024. The arithmetic is brutal and the mechanism is simple: hiring managers have quarterly headcount plans, those plans don't evaporate because a policy changes, so the roles move.

700

Where did they go? IEEE Spectrum's reporting is the on-record anchor: US tech firms are building offices and hiring workers abroad to route around the rule, quietly enough that none of 25 companies contacted would discuss it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Walmart went so far as to advise visa-holding employees not to travel abroad for fear of trouble re-entering. In practice, "building an office" usually means signing an Employer of Record (EOR) contract. An EOR is a third-party entity that legally employs someone in a country where you have no legal presence, so you can hire a Berlin or Bengaluru engineer in two weeks without opening a GmbH or a Pvt Ltd.

The deterred candidate didn't become a US hire. They became someone else's EOR headcount.

Three post-H-1B destination markets, by actual supply

If you're hiring overseas to absorb displaced H-1B demand, the three markets that matter are India, Canada, and Germany, and they are not comparable in size. Here's the senior software engineer supply in each, pulled from Refolk's professional-network index in October 2026, filtered to Senior seniority plus software engineering titles.

The ratio that should reset your sourcing plan: India has 18 times the senior SWE pool of Canada and roughly the same multiple over Germany. If you're routing one $100K H-1B seat's worth of budget into an EOR hire in Bengaluru instead, you're accessing something on the order of 3,500 times the candidate supply.

Why Berlin feels crowded even though it looks hot

Berlin is the most-cited post-H-1B destination in trade press, which is exactly the problem. The index shows only ~16k senior SWEs across all of Germany, and you are now competing with Doctolib, Langfuse, dltHub, ABOUT YOU, osapiens, and TrustLab for them, plus every US company that just quietly spun up an EU satellite. Germany's EU Blue Card threshold sits at €45,934 to €50,700, with senior engineer gross comp in the $85k to $130k band. That's structurally attractive to a US buyer, but the pool is thin and the competitive density is high.

Why Toronto is a fast lane, not a deep well

Canada's Global Talent Stream can process eligible tech-role work permits in about two weeks, which is the fastest legal onshoring path for Indian engineers that exists today. But Canada's senior SWE pool is 17,641. Toronto employers already competing for it include Lazer Technologies, Clio, Super.com, Grafana Labs, plus Meta and Mastercard captives. Treat Canada as a speed play for people you already identified, not as a pool to prospect from scratch.

Why Bengaluru is where the actual arbitrage lives

300,737 senior SWEs. Six of the top-10 Indian regional slots in the index are Bengaluru. Pune, Noida, and Hyderabad fill out the hub list. Current employers of senior Indian engineers include EPAM Systems, GeekyAnts, and Crowe Capabilities Center India, alongside the captive centers US multinationals have been running for a decade. The captive-center pattern is accelerating: trade coverage of the fee explicitly flagged that US multinationals operating captive tech centres in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune would need to accelerate "offshore first" hiring to keep projects on schedule.

If you're a sourcer who built a career on US LinkedIn booleans, this is a different muscle. You need IST-overlap filtering, you need to know which captive center a candidate actually reports into (the LinkedIn employer field often lists the US parent), and you need to describe the role in a way that filters out the hundreds of thousands of mid-level profiles sitting one tier below your target. That last part is the exact gap Refolk closes: you describe the person in plain English (seniority, stack, captive-vs-product employer, IST overlap window) and get a ranked shortlist back, instead of building a 14-clause boolean that LinkedIn's new UI won't accept anyway.

The Hacker News "Who wants to be hired" thread is now a leading indicator

If you want a free, real-time read on where the deterred H-1B pool actually landed, read the monthly HN "Who wants to be hired" thread. The October 2026 thread (item 49922568) is visibly dominated by candidates whose header reads "Location: Berlin, Germany. Remote: Yes. Willing to relocate: No." Senior ML engineers (ex-Picsart among them) and full-stack candidates post that exact string. The pattern repeats across May, June, July, August, September, and October 2026 threads.

Two years ago the modal entry read "willing to relocate: yes (US)." That line is gone. The behavioral shift is the signal: senior engineers abroad have stopped treating the US as an option worth listing. For anyone not already on a visa, the US has become dead-end optionality, so they're optimizing for CET and IST employers that will hire them where they live.

Senior engineers abroad have stopped listing the US as an option. That's the policy working as advertised, just not for the people who wrote it.

Demand on the other side confirms it. Beyond Border reported inquiries about H-1B alternatives tripled quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026 as applicants prepared for the next cycle. The candidates have made peace with staying put. The employers have made peace with EOR invoices. The only party still pretending nothing changed is the sourcer running a US-only search string.

The in-country loophole is where domestic sourcing still works

The fee does not apply to petitions filed as a change of status, extension, or amendment of stay for individuals already present in the US. In plain English: the F-1 to H-1B pipeline from US universities is still open. The majority of first-time H-1B petitions in each annual lottery are for students already on F-1 status, which is why employment-law commentary flagged early that the proclamation's bite was narrower than the headline suggested.

For a sourcer, this splits domestic work cleanly in two:

• Still viable: new-grad campus pipelines, OPT candidates, STEM OPT extensions, F-1 to H-1B change-of-status candidates at US universities and already-US employers.
• No longer viable at scale: mid-career imports from abroad on fresh H-1B petitions, consular processing of new H-1Bs, L-1 blanket transfers from captive centers (now under scrutiny).

If your pipeline for a given role was previously "experienced engineer from a Bengaluru captive, transferred on L-1 or lotteried on H-1B," that pipeline is closed. The replacement is not "same engineer, now in Austin." It's either "same engineer, now on an EOR invoice in Bengaluru" or "new-grad from a US MS program, OPT-to-H1B inside the country."

What this changes about how you source

The sourcing stack for 2026 looks different from 2024, and the differences aren't cosmetic. The pool you can legally hire from the US has shrunk, the pool you can hire via EOR has exploded, and the tools you use to find each are not the same.

1. Default to EOR-first for mid-career engineers. Open the role in Bengaluru, Pune, Toronto, or Berlin at the same time you open it in the US. Let the EOR invoice compete with the US salary.
2. Switch your pipeline metric from "US candidates sourced" to "IST-overlap and CET-overlap candidates sourced." The old metric penalizes exactly the right behavior.
3. Treat HN "Who wants to be hired" as a monthly inbound funnel. The Berlin-remote-no-relocation header is a filter, not noise.
4. Audit which of your competitors have quietly become EOR employers abroad. A US company suddenly posting Bengaluru or Berlin titles on LinkedIn without a legal entity in-country is the real "they opened an office" signal.
5. Keep a parallel domestic pipeline on F-1 and OPT candidates. It's the one H-1B-adjacent play that still works.
6. Rebuild your boolean strings as plain-English briefs. LinkedIn's boolean field has been degraded, and the long overseas tail isn't well-indexed by job-board strings anyway.

The one-year scoreboard

The $100K fee was sold as a protection for US workers. One year in, the measurable outcomes are: 700 fees paid, $28 million less in revenue than the prior year, 87% fewer petitions, 25 companies refusing to publicly describe how they adapted, Beyond Border inquiries up 3x quarter-over-quarter, and six consecutive HN threads where the modal senior engineer explicitly declines to relocate to the US. The fee was renewed through September 21, 2027 before another federal judge struck it down, which means the legal status for 2027 planning is "assume it's back by Q2."

The sourcers who adjusted won the year. The ones still debating whether offshoring is "the right call" lost roles that got filled by someone with an EOR contract and a shortlist of 40 Bengaluru senior engineers.

FAQ

Does the $100K H-1B fee apply to extensions and change-of-status petitions?

No. The fee does not apply to petitions filed as a change of status, extension, or amendment of stay for individuals already present in the United States. That carveout is why the practical damage to the H-1B program is concentrated on new consular-processed petitions from abroad, and why F-1 to H-1B pipelines from US universities remain the most reliable domestic sourcing play for engineers who need visa sponsorship.

Why is EOR hiring in India a better arbitrage than relocating candidates to Berlin?

Because the pool sizes aren't close. India has 300,737 senior software engineers in Refolk's October 2026 index versus 16,441 in Germany, so the Bengaluru pool is roughly 18x the German one. Berlin is also where every US company that opened an EU satellite is now fishing, which means competitive density is high and comp inflation is already starting. India via EOR gives you more candidates, lower total cost, and IST overlap that covers EU morning and US evening.

What is an EOR and why does it keep coming up in post-H-1B sourcing?

An Employer of Record is a third-party company that legally employs a worker in a country where you have no legal entity, handling payroll, taxes, and local compliance while the worker reports to you day-to-day. It matters now because the IEEE Spectrum reporting confirmed US firms are "building offices abroad" to route around the fee, and in practice that phrase almost always means signing an EOR contract rather than incorporating a foreign subsidiary. EOR gets you a Berlin or Bengaluru hire in two weeks instead of six months.

Is Canada's Global Talent Stream still the fastest legal path for Indian engineers?

Yes, for engineers you've already identified. The Global Talent Stream can process eligible tech-role work permits in about two weeks, which no US pathway currently matches. The caveat is that Canada's senior SWE pool is only 17,641 in the index, so Canada is a speed advantage for specific named candidates rather than a deep prospecting pool. Use it for the engineer you already decided to hire, not as a place to start a search.