One of America's greatest assets is its brand as a place worth immigrating too. Much of the social capital is gained by high performing international hires who leverage the H-1B visa. We want methods for highly educated people to make the US their home. limiting this is short sighted and negatively impact the health of the country.
We issue 85,000 H1-B visas every year. Last year, there were 442,000 applications.
Its supply and demand. If you think any of these changes will cause fewer than 85,000 H1-B applications, then that is a good reason to believe that these changes might negatively impact the United States as a migration destination. However, with that added context and framing, I hope you'll agree that it won't; there's still going to be a smaller, but growing, number of people applying for the H1-B every year.
Increasing the number of H1-B visas has very little support from both sides of the isle. The 65,000+20,000 number was set, if you can believe it, 35 years ago. There were one or two temporary increases, but since 2005 its stayed at that 85,000 number.
I believe the main ‘change’ of this $100,000 fee is the composition of labor.
A doctor applies for H1B too and various other non-tech job applies for H1B too. Startups and hospitals have a much higher chance to not willing to pay for the fee and we will just end up with less ‘doctors’ in the 85,000 H1B visa approvals.
Its a fair point, but this $100,000 fee should not have been the flashpoint causing half the United States to care about this issue, and it being the flashpoint has got us arguing for the wrong thing. Immigrant doctors should have their own visa classification. There's no reason they should be competing in the H1-B lottery with Big Tech, especially now that its so expensive.
That isn't on the table right now. Its possible that it could be, as sometimes you need to have a problem before people will feel incentivized to solve it. On the other hand: We've had a serious medical care provider shortage since, like, the early 2000s; over 20 years of Bush (R), Obama (D), Trump (R), and Biden (D) to have solved this obvious problem; and no one has. Chesterton's Fence sometimes exists for a reason.
I want to clarify that I am not trying to argue but genuinely curious what is the ‘right solve’ here.
If we create an exception for doctors, what about ‘medical lab technicians’, ‘wastewater treatment professionals’ or ‘air traffic controller’? All these jobs faces shortage in US right now. If we leave it up to the executive branch at the time to determine exceptions, we will just end up in a situation in exceptions going to the industry with the ‘best’ lobbyist.
I am not in a position to decide a policy like this, but I have a wild idea. Why not lower the application fee for H1B (or make it free) or even make it super easy to apply. Right now, the companies that are willing to abuse the H1B system will do so because they know the higher the application fee, the less competition they have to get those 85,000 slots. If every doctor, speech therapist, medical lab technologist is applying for H1B, it would totally crowd out the H1B abusers and it might no longer be worth it for them to try to game the system. Just musing on ideas, not that I can implement any of these.
I guess the question then is, does H1-B actually make people want to live in the US? Or is it just a good way to earn some money and experience while they are young and then move back home and start their own business with their capital that goes much farther there? Because that is what it seems like it is best setup for since you can be given the boot and deported on short notice by the whim of a corporate manager.
> One of America's greatest assets is its brand as a place worth immigrating too
Not really, no. That’s mostly propaganda that got pushed hard in the 60s - right around the time the wealth gap really started growing and hasn’t stopped ever since.
The only reasonable argument for any immigration is if it equally enriches all us citizens. Given the ever increasing wealth gap this is obviously not the case.
The alternative is: no immigration, focus on increasing native births by ensuring it’s easy to have a large family. Ensure our elites have a sense of “noblesse oblige” and are self sacrificing instead of chasing profit. Some minor level of immigration is fine (for the Werner von Braun types), but staffing companies that build iPhones and gambling websites is not a good use of our resources.
All of my immigrant friends mention they’ll return to their home country if things get bad here. This is my home country, and I want my country filled with people who are here because they see it as their home, not a business transaction. I have nowhere else to go.
In their defense, if "things get bad", they probably lose their job and will be forced to leave. It's hard to put down permanent roots if you can be kicked out in 90 days.
> The only reasonable argument for any immigration is if it equally enriches all us citizens.
Name any economic policy that will equally enrich all citizens. That seems like a ridiculous bar to meet.
Immigration obviously dates back far, far before the 1960s. What in the world leads you to believe that it’s responsible for the current (admittedly massive) inequalities we face?
We shouldn't be arguing yes or no, but instead "how much".
Charging a yearly fee to offset how H1-B is abused for cheap labor instead of high performers makes sense. Making that fee $100,000 with arbitrary waivers for friends of the administration is absurd.
The huge fee won't solve the cheap labor problem, only shift the equilibrium. The USA Tech job market faces increasing competition from Canada and Eastern and Southern European countries with lower wages but competitive talent better than available from generalist outsourcing. The new policy accelerates this trend as companies will seek to transplant workers from the USA into other countries. This is bad for American workers whose status as the geographic center of the organization declines.
In my view, the real problem with the H1-B program stems from the sponsorship system which ties each employee to a particular company and role. Unable to leave their position without threatening their residency, they are more willing to demand abuse (e.g., long working hours, poor leadership, subpar compensation) than the labor market requires.
An improvement to the program would make it easier for people to change job. Perhaps the government could permit highly skilled individuals to qualify personally for the visa so long as they sustain employment in their field.
> Perhaps the government could permit highly skilled individuals to qualify personally for the visa so long as they sustain employment in their field.
That is kind of how it works: when I was on a H1B I did look at switching jobs and had an offer from a company who would sponsor me. They need to file a Labor Condition Application to show that the position qualified for a H1B worker, but you can start working as soon as the LCA is approved if you already have the visa, while the I129 is processed.
Or maybe… make H-1B labor not be cheap. Give H-1B visa holders the same ability to change jobs and negotiate wages effectively that citizens and permanent residents have and give some teeth to the rules that sponsors may not underlay them.
The H1-B visa is intended for bringing specific technical expertise that does not exist in the US for a set period of time. This is why one of the requirements is that you must have interviewed US persons first. Its the same reason it's a nonimmigration visa.
The rampant abuse of the visa has a remedy - criminal charges against the HR directors of any company who is found to have committed fraud, and capping the number of visas per company (setting up many shell companies is a strong signal that fraud is being committed).
If an H1-B worker can't negotiate on a global level for their expertise - they should not be on that visa.
The problem is: if you do that, then you need to create a big government agency that will interview the potential candidates, evaluating their value on the job market, in order to grant them a visa. Right now that job is done by their sponsoring employer, but if you give people ability to change jobs freely then employers lose any incentive to do so.
Employers are still incentivized to sponsor people who they want to hire, because they want to hire that person, they want the job done, and they couldn't find anyone else to do the job. They just have to keep the compensation and working conditions competitive enough to retain their worker.
You can still require people to sustain employment in their field. Maybe companies can attest that a particular role classification requires a type of high-end talent. Auditing or otherwise verifying the attestation addresses the current allegations that H1-Bs are given for some jobs not requiring high-end talent.
Having managed people on H1Bs (and therefore been intimately involved with the process) the problems with switching jobs are not the requirements. You’re only allowed to switch to a similar job or a “better” job in a similar line of work.
The problem is that the mechanics of the switching process is extremely cumbersome. Some of the relevant documents are held by your current employer and not with you. The new employer effectively needs to apply for a new application minus the lottery system. There are significant weeks to months worth of delays for the new employers to get approvals, so most H1B employees that transfer are actually working provisionally on the basis of their new approval still being pending. They are very limited in terms of traveling etc during this period. There are significant risks to changing your job when you’re approaching the end of your current H1B visa expiry. This was particularly bad for Chinese applicants who unlike most other nations’s applicants who got 3 year approvals, usually only got 1 year approvals.
The real problem in switching jobs aren’t the policies but the extreme uncertainty and bureaucracy involved in doing so.
I don’t understand the logic behind why companies will be willing to pay an Indian $160k to work for them in the U.S. but will not be willing to pay the exact same Indian $50k to work from India.
This may have an effect at the margins where the company is contractually or due to some rare product specific reason required to have the person be within the U.S. But the vast majority of H1Bs are working for major tech companies that have massive campuses all over the world.
100K one time fee will be easily amortized as a pay reduction over a period of 6 years by the H1B abusing companies.
That is equivalent to getting 5 years worth of salary when you work 6, assuming a median suppressed wage of 100K. This does not seem much of a deterrent for any of these involved.
This could actually result in wage suppression for the victim and nothing else in the long run.
Well it does put a bit more power into the employee's hand so im not sure it is all a bad tradeoff. Usually the company is holding all the cards, but if they just ate $100,000 that they will never get back then their threat of firing someone 3 months in if they don't lick enough boot polish is going to hurt the company too.
I feel like a big concern could be resolved by creating a new type of visa for students who studied in the US and now want to work there, rather than a general foreign professional visa.
Students have access to OPT (1y) and STEM OPT (2y) on the same visa to work after their degree. If they go for a higher degree then they can get OPT again. Grad students from US universities also get a separate quota in the H1B cap.
All of this should to a little extent alleviate some of the concerns.
The weighted system should still work since the candidate pool (from within the US) is likely mostly students on OPT. They should have comparable salaries, unless they are hired by rotten companies.
That anecdote is a sample size of 1, and the OP of that thread did end up getting the visa, despite their company's partner's lawyers' "belief" that their application would be "on the weaker side."
Only if visas can only be paid through earned income or returns on investments made with such. Otherwise you're mixing people who bring value by contributing labor with people who contribute capital. Both can be nice, but should we treat them the same or independently?
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I've heard people here asking for curbs on H1Bs for years because of not only abuses, but also engineers who come with a ton of experience as entry-level hires. I know this very well, I was one of these engineers. I was a senior software developer from overseas hired on H1B at the same level/pay of US college hires. I'm a citizen now.
Now that Trump is trying to do something about it, I start seeing a flood of negative posts. We need to decide what we want.
Well different people on this very site want very different things. So you can't really ask us to decide what we want. Probably most folks commenting here want to be paid a good wage, but their view on H1B visas is then going to depend on their own situation. I personally live outside the US and contract for a US company, I hope that whatever happens doesn't interfere with my work or my relationship with that company.
What part of this being a bad execution of the idea is confusing or contradictory? What "we want" is for the governance of our country, including but not limited to H1B reform, to not be a shambolic disaster.
I was prepared to accept this as one of the handful of semi-useful things Trump did, and I might still personally benefit, but the details quickly disabused me of the idea that it was actually good.
> What part of this being a bad execution of the idea is confusing or contradictory?
And even then, "bad idea" is what you get after the extreme charity of assuming the Trump administration is fundamentally lawful.
It's even worse if you believe they're bunch of crooks that will use the "special exception" clause to extort/bribe companies into corrupt favors. For example, granting access to snoop without a court-order, biasing their moderation policies, silencing voices or messages the administration finds inconvenient, etc.
As a matter of rhetoric, comparing human beings to invasive ants in your house might be a reflection of the times but I think is probably not the best idea
Good points, but maybe international outsourcing is the way to go in some areas. This is how it was sold "a few years ago" in some circles. Specifically, one argument ran that you could have people working around the clock globally, while respecting their own local circadian rhythms. Seemed great in theory.
By the way, this is total bullshit pushed by people who are upset that the loss of H1B labor will mean that they have to pay labor more.
If the offshoring was a comparable product and cheaper, they would have already done it. But guess what - everyone already knows outsourcing leads to a lower quality product!
There are multi-multi-multi billion dollar companies that no longer have SWEs in the US outside of gigs requiring clearance. you should chatgpt-that-shit and check how many off-shore employees are actually current employed by US companies and then see whether it “leads to lower quality”
At this point in time Israel has not yet learned how to be multicultural. And I think we are going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Israel is not going to be the monolithic society they once were in the last century. Whites are going to be at the centre of that. It’s a huge transformation for Israel to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Whites will be resented because of our leading role.
One of America's greatest assets is its brand as a place worth immigrating too. Much of the social capital is gained by high performing international hires who leverage the H-1B visa. We want methods for highly educated people to make the US their home. limiting this is short sighted and negatively impact the health of the country.
We issue 85,000 H1-B visas every year. Last year, there were 442,000 applications.
Its supply and demand. If you think any of these changes will cause fewer than 85,000 H1-B applications, then that is a good reason to believe that these changes might negatively impact the United States as a migration destination. However, with that added context and framing, I hope you'll agree that it won't; there's still going to be a smaller, but growing, number of people applying for the H1-B every year.
Increasing the number of H1-B visas has very little support from both sides of the isle. The 65,000+20,000 number was set, if you can believe it, 35 years ago. There were one or two temporary increases, but since 2005 its stayed at that 85,000 number.
I believe the main ‘change’ of this $100,000 fee is the composition of labor. A doctor applies for H1B too and various other non-tech job applies for H1B too. Startups and hospitals have a much higher chance to not willing to pay for the fee and we will just end up with less ‘doctors’ in the 85,000 H1B visa approvals.
Given the cost of healthcare in the USA and the AMA artificially limiting the number of doctors, I'm skeptical this fee will change anything.
Its a fair point, but this $100,000 fee should not have been the flashpoint causing half the United States to care about this issue, and it being the flashpoint has got us arguing for the wrong thing. Immigrant doctors should have their own visa classification. There's no reason they should be competing in the H1-B lottery with Big Tech, especially now that its so expensive.
That isn't on the table right now. Its possible that it could be, as sometimes you need to have a problem before people will feel incentivized to solve it. On the other hand: We've had a serious medical care provider shortage since, like, the early 2000s; over 20 years of Bush (R), Obama (D), Trump (R), and Biden (D) to have solved this obvious problem; and no one has. Chesterton's Fence sometimes exists for a reason.
I want to clarify that I am not trying to argue but genuinely curious what is the ‘right solve’ here.
If we create an exception for doctors, what about ‘medical lab technicians’, ‘wastewater treatment professionals’ or ‘air traffic controller’? All these jobs faces shortage in US right now. If we leave it up to the executive branch at the time to determine exceptions, we will just end up in a situation in exceptions going to the industry with the ‘best’ lobbyist.
I am not in a position to decide a policy like this, but I have a wild idea. Why not lower the application fee for H1B (or make it free) or even make it super easy to apply. Right now, the companies that are willing to abuse the H1B system will do so because they know the higher the application fee, the less competition they have to get those 85,000 slots. If every doctor, speech therapist, medical lab technologist is applying for H1B, it would totally crowd out the H1B abusers and it might no longer be worth it for them to try to game the system. Just musing on ideas, not that I can implement any of these.
I guess the question then is, does H1-B actually make people want to live in the US? Or is it just a good way to earn some money and experience while they are young and then move back home and start their own business with their capital that goes much farther there? Because that is what it seems like it is best setup for since you can be given the boot and deported on short notice by the whim of a corporate manager.
"One of America's greatest assets is its brand as a place worth immigrating too"
Rich people started playing this on repeat while they crushed the standard of living via immigration and low interest rates
>We want methods for highly educated people to make the US their home.
Who is we?
People who recognize that countries become wealthy when people do useful work in them.
An educated, young person doing useful work that comes to your country is a massive gift, and a debit to the country they have left.
> One of America's greatest assets is its brand as a place worth immigrating too
Not really, no. That’s mostly propaganda that got pushed hard in the 60s - right around the time the wealth gap really started growing and hasn’t stopped ever since.
The only reasonable argument for any immigration is if it equally enriches all us citizens. Given the ever increasing wealth gap this is obviously not the case.
The alternative is: no immigration, focus on increasing native births by ensuring it’s easy to have a large family. Ensure our elites have a sense of “noblesse oblige” and are self sacrificing instead of chasing profit. Some minor level of immigration is fine (for the Werner von Braun types), but staffing companies that build iPhones and gambling websites is not a good use of our resources.
All of my immigrant friends mention they’ll return to their home country if things get bad here. This is my home country, and I want my country filled with people who are here because they see it as their home, not a business transaction. I have nowhere else to go.
In their defense, if "things get bad", they probably lose their job and will be forced to leave. It's hard to put down permanent roots if you can be kicked out in 90 days.
> The only reasonable argument for any immigration is if it equally enriches all us citizens.
Name any economic policy that will equally enrich all citizens. That seems like a ridiculous bar to meet.
Immigration obviously dates back far, far before the 1960s. What in the world leads you to believe that it’s responsible for the current (admittedly massive) inequalities we face?
Every immigrant wave that came to the US (voluntarily) came here to make money, with the sole possible exception of the Puritans.
We shouldn't be arguing yes or no, but instead "how much".
Charging a yearly fee to offset how H1-B is abused for cheap labor instead of high performers makes sense. Making that fee $100,000 with arbitrary waivers for friends of the administration is absurd.
The huge fee won't solve the cheap labor problem, only shift the equilibrium. The USA Tech job market faces increasing competition from Canada and Eastern and Southern European countries with lower wages but competitive talent better than available from generalist outsourcing. The new policy accelerates this trend as companies will seek to transplant workers from the USA into other countries. This is bad for American workers whose status as the geographic center of the organization declines.
In my view, the real problem with the H1-B program stems from the sponsorship system which ties each employee to a particular company and role. Unable to leave their position without threatening their residency, they are more willing to demand abuse (e.g., long working hours, poor leadership, subpar compensation) than the labor market requires.
An improvement to the program would make it easier for people to change job. Perhaps the government could permit highly skilled individuals to qualify personally for the visa so long as they sustain employment in their field.
> Perhaps the government could permit highly skilled individuals to qualify personally for the visa so long as they sustain employment in their field.
That is kind of how it works: when I was on a H1B I did look at switching jobs and had an offer from a company who would sponsor me. They need to file a Labor Condition Application to show that the position qualified for a H1B worker, but you can start working as soon as the LCA is approved if you already have the visa, while the I129 is processed.
Or maybe… make H-1B labor not be cheap. Give H-1B visa holders the same ability to change jobs and negotiate wages effectively that citizens and permanent residents have and give some teeth to the rules that sponsors may not underlay them.
No.
The H1-B visa is intended for bringing specific technical expertise that does not exist in the US for a set period of time. This is why one of the requirements is that you must have interviewed US persons first. Its the same reason it's a nonimmigration visa.
The rampant abuse of the visa has a remedy - criminal charges against the HR directors of any company who is found to have committed fraud, and capping the number of visas per company (setting up many shell companies is a strong signal that fraud is being committed).
If an H1-B worker can't negotiate on a global level for their expertise - they should not be on that visa.
The problem is: if you do that, then you need to create a big government agency that will interview the potential candidates, evaluating their value on the job market, in order to grant them a visa. Right now that job is done by their sponsoring employer, but if you give people ability to change jobs freely then employers lose any incentive to do so.
Employers are still incentivized to sponsor people who they want to hire, because they want to hire that person, they want the job done, and they couldn't find anyone else to do the job. They just have to keep the compensation and working conditions competitive enough to retain their worker.
You can still require people to sustain employment in their field. Maybe companies can attest that a particular role classification requires a type of high-end talent. Auditing or otherwise verifying the attestation addresses the current allegations that H1-Bs are given for some jobs not requiring high-end talent.
Having managed people on H1Bs (and therefore been intimately involved with the process) the problems with switching jobs are not the requirements. You’re only allowed to switch to a similar job or a “better” job in a similar line of work.
The problem is that the mechanics of the switching process is extremely cumbersome. Some of the relevant documents are held by your current employer and not with you. The new employer effectively needs to apply for a new application minus the lottery system. There are significant weeks to months worth of delays for the new employers to get approvals, so most H1B employees that transfer are actually working provisionally on the basis of their new approval still being pending. They are very limited in terms of traveling etc during this period. There are significant risks to changing your job when you’re approaching the end of your current H1B visa expiry. This was particularly bad for Chinese applicants who unlike most other nations’s applicants who got 3 year approvals, usually only got 1 year approvals.
The real problem in switching jobs aren’t the policies but the extreme uncertainty and bureaucracy involved in doing so.
I don’t understand the logic behind why companies will be willing to pay an Indian $160k to work for them in the U.S. but will not be willing to pay the exact same Indian $50k to work from India.
This may have an effect at the margins where the company is contractually or due to some rare product specific reason required to have the person be within the U.S. But the vast majority of H1Bs are working for major tech companies that have massive campuses all over the world.
It’s the same logic as RTO.
100K one time fee will be easily amortized as a pay reduction over a period of 6 years by the H1B abusing companies.
That is equivalent to getting 5 years worth of salary when you work 6, assuming a median suppressed wage of 100K. This does not seem much of a deterrent for any of these involved.
This could actually result in wage suppression for the victim and nothing else in the long run.
Seems to be poorly thoughout?
Well it does put a bit more power into the employee's hand so im not sure it is all a bad tradeoff. Usually the company is holding all the cards, but if they just ate $100,000 that they will never get back then their threat of firing someone 3 months in if they don't lick enough boot polish is going to hurt the company too.
I feel like a big concern could be resolved by creating a new type of visa for students who studied in the US and now want to work there, rather than a general foreign professional visa.
Students have access to OPT (1y) and STEM OPT (2y) on the same visa to work after their degree. If they go for a higher degree then they can get OPT again. Grad students from US universities also get a separate quota in the H1B cap.
All of this should to a little extent alleviate some of the concerns.
The weighted system should still work since the candidate pool (from within the US) is likely mostly students on OPT. They should have comparable salaries, unless they are hired by rotten companies.
But for students there is the O-1 visa?
way too hard to get. see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/USCIS/comments/13uk5yb/o1_visa_peti...
studying here is no guarantee you'll get to stay, even if you did a phd.
That anecdote is a sample size of 1, and the OP of that thread did end up getting the visa, despite their company's partner's lawyers' "belief" that their application would be "on the weaker side."
Is the theoretical most efficient and foolproof wage-based merit immigration system just...auctioning off visas?
Fine with me, if so!
Only if visas can only be paid through earned income or returns on investments made with such. Otherwise you're mixing people who bring value by contributing labor with people who contribute capital. Both can be nice, but should we treat them the same or independently?
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I've heard people here asking for curbs on H1Bs for years because of not only abuses, but also engineers who come with a ton of experience as entry-level hires. I know this very well, I was one of these engineers. I was a senior software developer from overseas hired on H1B at the same level/pay of US college hires. I'm a citizen now.
Now that Trump is trying to do something about it, I start seeing a flood of negative posts. We need to decide what we want.
Well different people on this very site want very different things. So you can't really ask us to decide what we want. Probably most folks commenting here want to be paid a good wage, but their view on H1B visas is then going to depend on their own situation. I personally live outside the US and contract for a US company, I hope that whatever happens doesn't interfere with my work or my relationship with that company.
Probably not the same people.
What part of this being a bad execution of the idea is confusing or contradictory? What "we want" is for the governance of our country, including but not limited to H1B reform, to not be a shambolic disaster.
I was prepared to accept this as one of the handful of semi-useful things Trump did, and I might still personally benefit, but the details quickly disabused me of the idea that it was actually good.
> What part of this being a bad execution of the idea is confusing or contradictory?
And even then, "bad idea" is what you get after the extreme charity of assuming the Trump administration is fundamentally lawful.
It's even worse if you believe they're bunch of crooks that will use the "special exception" clause to extort/bribe companies into corrupt favors. For example, granting access to snoop without a court-order, biasing their moderation policies, silencing voices or messages the administration finds inconvenient, etc.
// removing bad analogy
As a matter of rhetoric, comparing human beings to invasive ants in your house might be a reflection of the times but I think is probably not the best idea
I wasn't comparing human beings to ants, but the fact you read it that way means I should have picked a different analogy.
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Good points, but maybe international outsourcing is the way to go in some areas. This is how it was sold "a few years ago" in some circles. Specifically, one argument ran that you could have people working around the clock globally, while respecting their own local circadian rhythms. Seemed great in theory.
It’s great in theory but it leads to maddening conversations where you get one half-useful sentence response every 24 hours.
The ol “I’m rubber you’re glue” argument.
By the way, this is total bullshit pushed by people who are upset that the loss of H1B labor will mean that they have to pay labor more.
If the offshoring was a comparable product and cheaper, they would have already done it. But guess what - everyone already knows outsourcing leads to a lower quality product!
There are multi-multi-multi billion dollar companies that no longer have SWEs in the US outside of gigs requiring clearance. you should chatgpt-that-shit and check how many off-shore employees are actually current employed by US companies and then see whether it “leads to lower quality”
Yes, it’s well known that Indians like to hire only more Indians.
Which ones specifically?
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What the fuck?
At this point in time Israel has not yet learned how to be multicultural. And I think we are going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Israel is not going to be the monolithic society they once were in the last century. Whites are going to be at the centre of that. It’s a huge transformation for Israel to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Whites will be resented because of our leading role.
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