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> stopping companies like Cognizant and Infosys that game the immigration system by applying for the cheapest H-1Bs possible

Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company - something along the lines of "If an employee spends N months at a company on H-1B, not get into trouble with the law, pay taxes and be a productive member of the community, then that person can work at any similar job without being tied to the employer".

Facebook, Google or Microsoft are not doing H-1Bs so they can trap those employees into working at low wages - Cognizant and Infosys are. Removing the power these firms have over the employee is the only true way to reform H-1B.

President Obama's executive action plans did state intent along those lines [1], but those seem to be torpedoed by vested interests. There is currently a draft rule from USCIS titled "Retention of EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 Immigrant Workers and Program Improvements Affecting High-Skilled Nonimmigrant Workers" [2] open for comments until Feb 29, 2016.

If you are interested in acting towards a solution to this problem you identify, please consider reading and commenting on it this weekend. You can do it online by going to www.regulations.gov and searching for the eDocket number USCIS-2015-0008 [3].

[1]: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120...

[2] USCIS Seeks Comments on Proposed Rule Affecting Certain Employment-Based Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Visa Programs - https://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-seeks-comments-proposed-rul...

[3] http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=USCIS-2015-0008

> Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company.

While I agree that people on an H-1B visa shouldn't be tied to one particular employer, I don't think this will solve the problem at all. The lottery model will always unfairly advantage these outsourcing companies precisely because all they care about is billable hours, and the people working there are interchangeable. That's why they can afford to be relatively indiscriminate by throwing thousands of visa applications at the wall and hiring whoever sticks. Product companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft who have to actually care which individuals they hire are always going to be at a disadvantage in a lottery - their hiring bar reduces the pool of visa applicants and gives them fewer tickets. That doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers at these companies, but as a whole the system perversely incentivizes quantity over quality.

> because all they care about is billable hours, and the people working there are interchangeable. That's why they can afford to be relatively indiscriminate by throwing thousands of visa applications at the wall and hiring whoever sticks.

These companies apply for visas on behalf of the competent employees they have in their offshore offices. Once the employee gets an H-1B visa if the regulations are such that s/he is free to switch employers without harming their immigrant status, they will bargain for better wages. This breaks the business model of applying for lots of visas paying large fees on each of them and getting a few approved.

Right now the visa fees (> 7K for just the initial application! [1]) are considered an investment by these firms, because they know that the few that sticks can be trapped into a long employment period and underpaid for years to recoup many multiples of the initial investment.

Breaking this business model is what will prevent these firms from applying in large numbers (which is a DoS attack on USCIS, forcing the approval process into a lottery). Hence my original comment.

[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/forms/h-and-l-filing-fees-form-i-129-p...

I agree, and these people should be offered a green card as soon as they start with the employer.

>should be offered a green card as soon as they start with the employer.

they can jump ship to a big company like google after your small startup went through the hassle of lawyers/visa fees/ govt fees ect.

Maybe you should have paid them as much as what they would make at Google then. Having to compete on salary,benefits, and working environment is the true meaning of an open and free market, not a rigged market as the current H-1B system is.

Then whoever poaches them can just offer salary + cost of getting the visa. It's always cheaper to freeload off the guy who paid for the visa.

The right solution is that if google or whoever hires an H1B 1 year into a 3 year visa, they need to pay for 2/3 of the cost of the visa.

Google in a hypothetical case would then offer a lower salary to cover the visa cost, and/or deem it too much trouble to bring the H-1B on board. This leaves the H-1B worker operating in a suboptimal market. The issue of visa fees does not confront the H-1B employee, only the employer which sponsored them in the first place. Besides it should cost slighly more to bring in an H-1B than current parket rates. Maybe then more natives would be hired.

Why would it be beneficial if more (extremely wealthy) natives were hired rather than (extremely poor) immigrants?

Why would you want to use trade barriers to increase inequality?

Is should be slightly more expensive to bring in immigrants because one of the governments missions voters expect is to ensure that there is a job market where there are good well-paying jobs, not a market where it is flooded with immigrants that have driven down wages. Having American citizens and green card holders idled or having to work in a lower paying job is not a true free market because only the employers are benefiting.

Once the domestic pool of potential employers has dried up, then employers will bring in the slightly more expensive foreign labor.

Why is it the government's mission to harm Indians, harm consumers of software services, and benefit sellers of software services?

Again, why is creating more inequality, harming the poor, and harming consumers via rent seeking a good thing?

The idealised government's role has always been acting in the interest of its citizens.

More importantly though: how is not letting Indians into the US harming them? Are Indians incapable of creating a US-like environment in their own country? If so, that's an argument to keep them out. If not, why wouldn't they do just that instead of moving half-way around the world?

Why don't we pass laws saying it's illegal to move out of Flint, MI. Would such a law harm the people living there who might like to move?

Black Americans in Flint seem incapable of creating a NYC-like environment in their own city. Is that an argument to prevent them from moving to NY?

And none of this explains why American consumers should pay extra. Apparently Indian humans count for less than 3/5, but don't American consumers count as full humans? Why should labor sellers be privileged over consumers?

First, it's dishonest to compare a law stopping foreigners from moving in and a hypothetical one making Flint residents prisoners in their county.

Second, New Yorkers routinely enact regulations to stop unapproved immigrants from moving in through housing cooperatives for example. And Americans all around the country do with gated communities.

I lost track of what you're arguing. Are you arguing against freedom of association? For some sort of forced integration where everyone should be allowed to move wherever they please regardless of the opinion of people already living there?

Why is it dishonest? Why is it wrong to make people prisoners in their county, but not prisoners in their country?

I lost track of what you're arguing. Are you arguing against freedom of association? For some sort of forced integration where everyone should be allowed to move wherever they please regardless of the opinion of people already living there?

I'm arguing that it's wrong for person A to use violence to prevent person B from hiring person C, even if that undercuts the wages of person A. I believe this to be true even if person C was born into an unfavorable group.

None of the arguments you've made explain treating Indians different from Flintians.

Maybe you are arguing that some arbitrary lines on the map (e.g. countRy boundaries) deserve moral weight, but not others (e.g. county boundaries)? Is that your claim?

Exactly.

It's not really an argument to keep them out. We should let them in when real demand is there. Right now, its a race to the bottom in this country due to job market manipulation by business.

Also I'm all for letting Indian entrepreneurs into the country because they will create jobs.

and? They aren't indentured servants.

The issue is that companies won't take on the risk and hassle of sponsoring a visa. Employees will arbitrage this by taking any job they can get until they can get sponsored, then leave.

It's not necessarily about pay, it's about wanting to work for a big name like Google.

I think the best solution, as others have suggested, is that the new employer has to buy out the visa costs. This is the deal I made when my employer paid to relocate me to the Bay Area -- if I left in the first two years, I would have had to repay my moving costs.

They can also jump ship to a startup after a big company like Google went through the hassle of lawyers/visa fees/govt fees, etc.

Sizeable number of visa interviews sponsored by startups are rejected at the consulate. They find it very difficult to differentiate an authentic startup from a phony body shop.

Put the corporations in charge of immigration? H1B a program is for special access for tech firms to nonresident alien guest workers.

Good response.

And of course the objections to your idea highlight the point that hb1s have generally not been about finding people with unique skills but rather about getting cheap labor on a tight leash.

I second that. Change lottery to auction based on highest wages. Also, don't bind the employee to the employer.

I like the idea of the auction because it is essentially where the company says "We are importing the best talent and we are willing to pay extra for it" and it also says "Local candidates are so inadequate that it would cost more to train one." in a way that's simply useless to lie about.

The current system encourages my boss to buy extra lottery tickets at the lowest price so he can be surprised later when productivity, morale of local employees, and quality ratio to labor cost is at rock bottom.

Now about being unfair to startups... If the auction somehow doesn't account for offering ownership/equity (which seems like an obscure rare situation anyways), that's clearly a better problem to have than a market flooded with cheap labor that still needs regular training, in addition to language training and cultural training.

>In my opinion, the real fix is to make the H-1B 'lottery' into an auction.

Wouldn't that punish small startups by favoring big co's like google/ms?

It depends; are small startups going through the regulatory hoops to hire H-1Bs at the low end of the engineering pay scale?

My opinion is, no, most are not doing this.

People choose to work for things like equity/mission ect. Sorting people purely by salary very counterintuitive.

It's not counter-intuitive, it's textbook market economics. Your compensation package is your compensation package. You don't get to tell the government they should issue a visa so you can pay someone in missionary zeal.

Unless you have numbers to show about usage of H1-B in start-up and how much share it is of the overall H1-B, its a moot point.

It is such a high burden on an early strat-up to hire a H1-B and only post Series A, H1-B makes some sense.

In the grand scheme of things, I like the market oriented auction, that will at least eliminate the rent-seekers who are clogging the pipeline.

What I've seen based on friends' startups that brought him in people via H1B at seed stage is that I f you already have someone in mind, the time and cost of H1B is much smaller than the time and cost to find a similarly qualified applicant in the states when you are a young company that many of said candidates will find to be an unattractive option to them.

An auction based on highest wages will be the worst thing that can be done to H-1B. You may have only technology/CS viewpoint here with this proposal. There are lot of other industries that use H-1B. At one time, I was one of such H-1B holder.

Do you really want to import foreigners for high paying jobs? Do you really want to starve low margin industries that are unable to pay high wages but need specialized locally unavailable skills? The skill shortage doesn't necessarily equates with high wages, for example shortage of skills needed for short term. One example, a COBOL programmer needed for a cobol to xyz conversion project.

Using any one criteria as qualification is recipe for disaster and gaming the system. An appropriate process should look at multiple items both from hiring org perspective and the fit of a foreigner for hiring org as well as industry and the country. A point based system that evaluates suitability of employer and non-immigrant candidate might be better approach, a system somewhat like what Canada uses for permanent residency.

In the end, either you import foreigners or you export jobs. If there is an arbitrage opportunity, it will be exploited by someone somewhere.

An auction is impractical. It will shaft smaller companies. Even in larger companies, the hiring decisions are based on group/division budgets. Who decides how high to go on the bidding in a big company? In a small company, where will you raise the capital for such auctions? How will it impact wages?

The point is that hb1 aren't supposed to be about bringing down wages, now are they?

Is it fair for a UPenn grad with a good offer to lose out lottery to oh-so-nobody from TCS. Auction is a lot fairer than the current situation.

I think the opposite is true. Smaller companies will be forced to only hire high quality rockstars from international sources. Owners will no longer think they can save 20k/year in entry level labor (at the hidden costs of 200k/year in productivity, employee morale, etc..).