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Comment by klunger | Hacker News Reader

In Norway, if you are on a knowledge worker visa, your salary needs to be competitive. This amount increases each year with inflation.

As an American working in Norway, I have to say that this is how it should be done in the US . My Norwegian coworkers do not resent me because I was not hired because I am any cheaper than they are. And, I get a salary that allows me to meet the high cost of living here. If companies were allowed to pay foreigners significantly below industry standard, it would be a disaster. I don't understand why this is still standard practice in the US.

Oh wait, I do understand: it allows companies to pay less for labor and pad their profit margins. But it is bogus, and this is one Trump initiative I can get behind.

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The hb-1 visa does require the same salary same as norway

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/h-1b-employers-what-w...

I believe it is currently a minimum of $60K / year, which was established in 1989 and not updated since. Companies in the US (and the government too) tend to skirt laws justifying the misdeeds as, "we interpret the law differently."

In other words, some shops will gladly pay a senior software engineer $60K a year, claiming they are something else like tech support. There are plenty of examples of other methods some companies use.

The minimum salary is based on the Labor Department's "prevailing wage" which is informed by a survey of current salaries. It's based on a given role and geographic location.

Yes, you may find some prevailing wages are lower than what Google pays, but that shouldn't be surprising since high paying tech jobs don't represent the average wage.

The point being, it needs to be updated.

Do you have any suggestions on how?

If you have programmers being paid anywhere from $80K to $150K for a given skill set, the average is going to be lower than what the top companies pay.

The only way around that is to create another subset of programmers that only look at the highest wages.

It's simple: require that the employers pay the H1-B visaholder in the 95th percentile or above of the salary range for that position.

And if an employer is found to have abused the system (hired someone for a lower position and then made them do higher-level work, e.g., call them "tech support" when they're really a senior engineer), then force the company to pay the H1-B the equivalent of 100 years' salary and put any employees found to have been complicit in this in prison.

I think employers should pay a premium for H1B or any visa worker. If they truly need them and there is truly a dearth in candidates, they should be falling over each other to pay it.

Why?

Aren't there jobs whose prevailing wages are closer to the minimum?

The prevailing wage is based on the skill level of the position, and for some occupations in certain lower-wage geographical areas, it can be quite low and even less than $60,000 for an entry-level employee. (There’s is a lower bound to the skill level for an H-1B position, it has to at least require a bachelor’s degree.) But it can also be higher than $100,000 for higher skill levels, and better-paid occupations in high-wage areas.

The required wage is the higher of prevailing wage and “actual wage,” which is what other employees with similar duties, experience and qualifications are paid.

The separate $60,000 minimum is often misunderstood and not accurately reported in the news media. There is a rule that “H-1B dependent” employers (employers with a certain number or percentage of H-1B workers) need to make a number of attestations, including that they do not displace US workers and try to recruit US workers before hiring an H-1B worker. These are not generally required for H-1B petitions, which normally only require a specialized occupation and a certain wage.

But if an H-1B worker is paid at least $60,000 or has a master’s degree or higher, those attestations are not necessary, and the general H-1B rules apply.

It may technically require the same salary, but the actual implementation and enforcement renders these requirements meaningless. I've been in situations where I directly observed it happening.

Requirement to advertise for US workers first? No Problem, just advertise where nobody looks, like the physical local newspaper's classifieds. Advertise for a different lower-paid job title, even though the coding duties will be exactly the same. Hire via an outsourcing company whose entire operation is to game the system, and the costs are still less than a US programmer.

The worst part is the sponsorship structure -- when you hire an H1-B worker, you are "sponsoring" his or her presence in the US. they have only the right to work at your business, and nowhere else. They lose that job, and they will have to leave within days (60?). They would not only have to find a new job in that time, but a new job willing to sponsor them and capable of getting their H1-B approved in that time -- very unlikely. This means that the H1-Bs will take all kinds of abuse and lower pay without complaining, as complaining is the quick ticket home.

The simple change of allowing H1Bs to be a 2-year visa, and they are allowed to change to any job after 6 months would go a long way to clearing out the abuses, since the sponsoring company would need to treat them at their full worth to keep them.

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