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Comment by freshflowers | Hacker News Reader

As a European who regularly hires people from outside the EU (including Americans), it always seemed to me that the American H1B Visas were deliberately designed to suppress wages.

Any other skilled migrant visa system I know of has a very explicit and fairly high wage minimum to prevent such abuse.

As a result, the stereotypical underpaid Indian engineer is a rarity in Europe. Indian engineers that do end up here are usually amongst the higher skilled and better paid workers.

Hell, it's even common for skilled migrants from outside the EU to get a higher starting salary than their local counterparts (especially those from poorer EU countries) just to meet the wage threshold.

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I don't know what you call abuse but I see the this sort of thing here in Germany. In one of the teams I have dealings with, there are two non-EU developers who get unusually low wages (I don't know the exactly what). They both put up with it because the german residency permit is valuable to them.

There might well be a salary limit, but it's obviously not very high, at least not by the standards of engineers. These guys are getting decent salaries by the standards of oridnary working Germans. I suspect it is a similar story for H1B in Aemrica.

Any other skilled migrant visa system I know of has a very explicit and fairly high wage minimum to prevent such abuse.

The US State Department (who initially adjudicates the visa requests) works with the US Department of Labor to determine a range of compensation that is "standard" for a given job description. Unfortunately, that range is national, with the result that you see a lot of people hired in the Bay Area at wages that would be generous in West Garbut, AR.

And what country is this? Because I've been approached by European (German and Dutch) companies and the compensation was way below my expectations. If I'm not mistaken the minimum required in those countries to get a visa is only about €45k/€50k a year.

Which is the median salary in those regions. While an argument can be made it should at least be in the 75% or something, this definitely doesn't disprove the original statement that at least it won't suppress wages (to something like Indian or eastern European levels).

Edit: I guess I might misunderstand the word suppress actually. If it means keep wages constant then I guess expanding the worker pool at the median salary level would probably do that, and the effect of not having any restriction would depress them!?

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