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Comment by wobbleblob | Hacker News Reader

But what if your start up is a Mongolian restaurant, and what you really need is a cook skilled in traditional Mongolian cuisine? It's completely plausible that such a candidate can only be found in Mongolia, but what startup restaurant can afford to pay a cook $100k ?

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The answer is that you pay to train someone in mongolian cuisine before you start the business, find local mongolian cuisine talent for under 100k, or you fail.

Who starts a business without the person that makes it possible in the first place on staff? If you dont have a buisness without someone you cant afford to hire, you dont have a buisness to begin with.

It was just a hypothetical example. Why would a H1-B have to be a techie making a 6 figure starting salary?

The H1B program is aimed at bringing in exceptional talent. If you are paying low wages then either the talent is not exceptional or you are not paying a fair wage to the talent. In some parts of the tech world 100k is average in others it's slightly above.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

A pure market based approach to immigration will create an overly financialised economy. Who can afford to participate in visa auctions? Financial companies!

If tech companies can afford to participate right now, it's only because they are funded by financial companies. Half of tech companies aren't even profitable...

You definitely want more Mongolian restaurants, not just tech startups dependent on cheap money. Because when the money stops, only one of those will still be in business.

That's technically illegal anyway. Can't discriminate by race/nationality.

eh? Parent didn't say anything about race/nationality - "what you really need is a cook skilled in traditional Mongolian cuisine? It's completely plausible that such a candidate can only be found in Mongolia"

You can say "I need a cook skilled in traditional Mongolian cuisine" but saying "such a candidate can only be found in Mongolia" would technically be against the law in the United States (if you have 15 or more employees). Freakonomics had a whole podcast about this.

Analogy doesn't really work is TMT work is the same world wide - and that's not counting the nice opportunities for kickbacks that would obviously occur.

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