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Comment by hatsix | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand H1B visa program. Shouldn't we be forcing the H1B grantees to become citizens? Instead, we're training them on how to be a modern tech worker, and then shipping them back to where they came once the job is over (assuming that they can't line up another company to foot the legal bills of taking over their visa).

Why? We have 700,000 new citizens every year. Let's make H1B part of the path-to-citizenship... either they're a citizen within 2 years, or they're done. It'll add 10% increase to citizens every year, but these will be high-salary, well-trained, employed citizens.

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Excuse me. The USA have a ridiculous system of world wide taxation (like Eritrea). Sufficiently qualified people might want to work there for a while, but not become citizens.

If you force the green card or even citizenship onto H1B employees, they might not want to come.

Furthermore, if you're on a green card (or a citizen), you're subject to the exit tax. On an H1B, you can avoid it for a few years at least.

Some people do, some people don't, but US policy should be concerned primarily with what's good for the US, not what foreigners would prefer.

It's a two way street. I had to leave the US as my US tax bill on foreign income exceeded my US income. I would have prefered to stay but I draw the line at paying to work.

That's backwards. If you want to attract the best and brightest through any program - and you do, every country wants this, it's such a big win - drawbacks will put them off and defeat the point in the program. It then becomes self-filtering, and attracting only the people who are willing to come despite the drawbacks. And you probably don't want that outcome.

So, what the author of the article gets wrong is how many H1Bs want to be citizens and how hard it is to become one. Currently for anyone who starts their immigration process, it takes anywhere between 7-15 years to get a green card if you are a citizen of India or China and are already employed here.

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