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Comment by dmayle | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that the current salary requirement (min 60k) was a poor way to go about implementing H1B. Companies want H1B visas, workers want to make sure that their jobs are not displaced.

As such, they should make the salary requiement something like twice the rate of whichever is greater: market rate for the role, the highest salary paid to any non-H1B employee at that company in the same role.

At that point, you can relax (not remove) the H1B cap, because it makes it cheaper to hire locals, so companies will only seek out H1Bs when there really are talent shortages.

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> market rate for the role, the highest salary paid to any non-H1B employee at that company in the same role.

Easy, just give all your H1B software developers the official role of "janitor".

The real way to solve this is with a higher salary floor, or even better, a salary auction.

Do you really think the labor certification process which all H1Bs go through will allow janitors?

Already most H1B jobs are entry-level jobs with senior-level requirements. Maybe that's part of the reason for the recent purge.

It's not Labor certification. They file a labor condition application. All it requires is that the wage be above the prevailing wage for that occupation in that metro area.

The most noticeable impact that will have is shift many many jobs to immigrant friendly countries in the same time zone like Canada, or just straight to India. That'd be a lot of taxes and local consumption happening outside the US.

Take places like Japan, negligible work immigration but wages haven't really been growing along with productivity.

> immigrant friendly countries in the same time zone like Canada

Canada has a stricter immigration requirements than US. Its just that there is a huge demand for visas so it gets backlogged.

In the context of skilled workers, Canadian immigration is exponentially easier than US immigration.

Haha yeah ive had work visas in both ca and the us. Ca is much more straightforward. It’s not easy, but it’s not riddled with hostile confusing BS like the US process is

Huh, till a few years ago you become a Permanent Resident in some provinces, just for being a tech worker in the US. No need to have even visited or ever worked in Canada on their work visa.

> Take places like Japan, negligible work immigration

Japan has work immigration, they dont call it work immigration, they call it technical internship.

Sounds like an opportunity for a tech maquiladora in Mexico or points farther South. Mexico has the benefit of low cost of living and easy access to the US. I placed people in Buenos Aires and it has a standard of living similar to any large city in the US.

Argentina has little in common with Mexico besides the Spanish language.

It is already happening here in GDL, Mexico. Several start ups have opened dev shops down here. They have a competitive advantage and plenty of comparatively cheap talent to get from big companies like Oracle, hp, IBM, Intel, Tata,Cognizant, among others that already have bored developers.

That would be a huge drain on small businesses like startups, though. Only companies like Google would be able to afford it.

> the current salary requirement (min 60k)

That's not actually what it is. You have to submit the job for a "labor market opinion" (if I recall the name correctly) that tells you the prevailing wage for that job in your area.

Here's an idea. Make the caps salary dependent. No caps for positions paying > 100k (example), or keep the lottery if needed but every 10k increase on the salary from the minimum gets the application a new ticket on the draw.

The $60k salary minimum hasn't changed since 1989, so it originally wasn't really unreasonable to think that only high skilled/hard to find labor would be brought in thru the visa.

Companies want the visas primarily to undercut American workers.

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