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Comment by vikingerik | Hacker News Reader

On that last, beware the law of unintended consequence: that penalty would serve as a deterrent against making offers to visa users in the first place, if the company had no route out of it once offered.

It's the same idea as European worker protection employment laws compared to the US: they sound good, but the effect is that companies have to be slower to hire when firing is that much harder.

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> that penalty would serve as a deterrent against making offers to visa users

It would put the additional costs they create to be visible. This is as it should be, since visa users do cost more than hiring domestic.

However, it would not be much more. And if amazon deems it to be too expensive, then other companies which are more efficient can take up the spare visa users, just as the free market intends.

They should pay a penalty if they do this to someone domestically too. It's shitty.

Shitty, yes. But it goes (slightly) beyond the area that I would deem to be indubitable.

> but the effect is that companies have to be slower to hire when firing is that much harder.

Which is good. Nobody wants a work environment that changes every five minutes.

> the effect is that companies have to be slower to hire when firing is that much harder.

Sounds like EU labor policy causes a set of effects resulting in a kind of equilibrium, perhaps a Nash Equilibrium.

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