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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Posted this elsewhere, but as a former H1B here's what should be done to end abuse:

1. Award a fixed pool of H1Bs to qualified applicants with the highest wage in the offer (and monitor that this wage is in fact being paid). This should be easy to pass if your representatives in congress are in fact _your_ representatives. The president will sign this immediately, since he was the one who proposed it in the first place.

2. Establish at least 6 month grace period if the H1B person leaves the sponsoring company to go work elsewhere. Currently if you leave (or are laid off/fired) you have to GTFO within 2 weeks, so people endure abuse and low wages for years until they get a green card.

There. There's your solution. No need to do anything else, guaranteed to work. It should not be possible to hire foreign workers into entry level positions at all.

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> It should not be possible to hire foreign workers into entry level positions at all.

And with that, you perhaps got rid of a (imo) very useful subset of potential future Americans: ones who went to college and graduate school in the US.

This group went through it’s formative years in the United States. They are deeply imbibed in the culture and eventually start identifying with it. However, if they can’t get an entry level job, they now have to leave the country to go back to where they came from (or some other alternative like Canada / Australia). Instead, you would rather be bringing in 30 year olds from foreign nations who are unlikely to change and adopt America as much as someone who moved here at 18 would; and who have formed habits more suited to their nation than to the US.

But as I mentioned above, perhaps this is desireable.

> go back to where they came from

That's not really a nice thing to say.

It’s been said to me plenty. I don’t mind it :)

I would mind having the place I came from called a "shit hole".

> 1. Award a fixed pool of H1Bs to qualified applicants with the highest wage in the offer

There is no reason for a fixed pool to exist, and it's not easy to rank applicants by wage given significant disparities in cost of living depending on geography

It blows my mind how, at the same time, the same people can argue in favor of "equality", and in favor of importing unlimited amounts of cheap labor to depress the wages of people who need money the most. It just doesn't compute, at all. And I'm perfectly fine with high cost of living areas getting all the H1Bs. Those areas also happen to have some of the highest tax rates in the country, so the US benefits.

First of all, there's a difference between imposing a quota on the number of H-1Bs and raising the bar for applications to be approved. I'm in favor of the latter, and the former makes no sense. If the U.S. needs more skilled labor than it can provide, then it should allow as many immigrants as needed to come over to fill the gap. I hope that strikes you as a pretty obvious argument

Second, inequality in the U.S. has nothing to do with an abundance of cheap labor. It has to do with macro trends in globalization and cheap jobs being outsourced to (mostly) Asia.

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