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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

H-1Bs should be given out in salary descending order with no randomness.

This is so self-centered it is borderline ignorance. First, people on H1B already have to prove they are being paid above the average market. They can't hire a senior engineer for 50k a year for example.

Second, not all industry has high profit margins like software. Places like biotech or semiconductor can't afford 250K for a single worker, no matter how senior they are except in special circumstances. And these fields are just as critical and important as coding. In fact, one may argue that healthcare and chipmaking capacity are more critical to the country than someone writing the next iteration of Microsoft Word.

Third, if H1B is given based purely on salary, then company won't bother with H1B anymore. Imagine what happen if suddenly half the company on market no longer care about having a H1B program. Some politician will start trying to abolish it all together. Xenophobia and "they took our high paying jobs" and "those snobs foreigners get paid how much while American get paid how much?" are easy to sell.

Just a terrible hot take. Try to think broader than just your situation.

No its not, its a valid way of looking at the situation.

>people on H1B already have to prove they are being paid above the average market. They can't hire a senior engineer for 50k a year for example.

Companies that hire H1B's often 'downrank' employees to roles they are overqualified for in order to reduce salary requirements.

>Second, not all industry has high profit margins like software. Places like biotech or semiconductor can't afford 250K for a single worker,

If the industry cannot afford it, perhaps they shouldn't hire H1bs? How else, other than compensation, would you decide who provides the most economic value?

>Third, if H1B is given based purely on salary, then company won't bother with H1B anymore. Imagine what happen if suddenly half the company on market no longer care about having a H1B program.

A country's laws exist for the benefit of it's CITIZENS. I personally believe that the US H1B program is exploitative and should be ended, and our legal immigration system should be reformed. You need a worker? They get a green card, and can go to any company they please. That worker should also be automatically eligible for citizenship after ~ 5 years of paying taxes and staying out of trouble.

how do you suggest a person from India get a green card? there's a 50 year waiting list

Nope, I'm saying that we should reform our immigration system so that isn't the case. You really need a foreign employee? Alright, but you have to pay a premium, and that employee is free to go anywhere else they like if they don't feel they're treated well. That would end the semi indentured servitude I've seen from h1b coworkers who were desperate to keep their job least they be deported.

It would improve conditions for Americans too.

As it is - because most employees in SFBA are H1B - we all have to suffer shit working conditions with toxic management.

So they don’t get in that’s fine too.

I have read about title inflation but I do not know about title deflation. I afraid you need to provide proof for your claim before I take it seriously. I do hear entry positions requiring a few years of experience, but often that is just a way to promote an internal hire, like a contractor or an intern.

How do you define economic value? By money only is a bad metric. Take pharma for example. The top 5 biggest pharma companies combined can't equal the same market cap or liquidity of 1 Apple (1.9T vs 2.5T). Now think about the societal impact. If you have to live in a place without drugs (those 5 pharma produce almost all the lifesaving drugs in the US) and a place without Apple products, where would you go?

I can go into the reasons why Apple is 2.5T and the pharmas is fraction of that, but that would be too long. It is simply the economy of scale, cost of manufacturing, and legal regulations. The cost of doing business results in lower salary for the end workers but it doesn't mean the industry is "lower value".

If we wish to import immigrants based on 'social impact' their are other avenues to bring in extraordinary individuals. We don't seem to have any problem acquiring the best Olympic athletes or artists, or actors.

More broadly, I disagree with our entire legal immigration system. It would be far better for us to have a points based system like Canada to bring in the very best and brightest and quickly integrate them into our system. Until then, I stand in pretty firm opposition to the H1B as it stands today.

> First, people on H1B already have to prove they are being paid above the average market.

Why should a software dev in SF being paid 150k$ be considered as good a candidate compared to one being paid 400k$? Why do you call it a "high-skilled" visa, and then argue for the bar to be "average"

> Second, not all industry has high profit margins like software

If they cannot pay enough, maybe they should not be hiring international workers citing a shortage.

> Third, if H1B is given based purely on salary, then company won't bother with H1B anymore.

So, is there no shortage of tech workers? Certainly international MIT PhDs will still be in demand?

Because it is not high skilled? That is EB visa? The fact that it is paid at least the average wage for the occupation means you need more proof to claim there is wage repression?

Please read what I wrote. They are required by law to pay above average salary for the occupation they are hiring. Not all industry has the profitability of big tech. Unless you are arguing a software dev job is somehow more skilled than a semiconductor engineer or a biopharma scientist, you have no argument here.

And which visa they are going to be hired for? EB visa? Which take 2-3 years to vet? Which company will wait a year to fill a position instead of just scaling down? If you take down the H1B, there will be shortages and reduced productivity. If you need proof, just check how many of your coworkers are on H1B.

EB are immigraiton visas, that is green card visas. Unless you imagine that people just file EB visas to come work in the USA. Clearly you have zero idea of what work visas people get.

Also, just do a google search, "high-skilled professional visas" without doubt refer to H1B

> Unless you are arguing a software dev job is somehow more skilled than a semiconductor engineer or a biopharma scientist, you have no argument here.

Maybe they should be paid better. Also, I argue that being a nanny or a janitor requires skill too, much more in fact than writing a dumb CRUD app. If software industry having high margins is the problem, maybe that is a separate problem solved with anti trust actions.

> And which visa they are going to be hired for? EB visa? Which take 2-3 years to vet? Which company will wait a year to fill a position instead of just scaling down? If you take down the H1B, there will be shortages and reduced productivity. If you need proof, just check how many of your coworkers are on H1B.

As someone on H1B seeing rampant "fraud" and a mere 14% approval rate, seeing friends with PhDs not getting lotteries while people with fake job offers by "consultancies" get it, I am not asking to end the H1B. I am asking it to be actually for "high skilled" labor.

I argue a bachelor degree isn't high skilled. It is merely "skilled" nowadays, especially in the occupations we are discussing. Here is H1B requirements from USCIS:

For you to qualify to perform services in a specialty occupation you must meet one of the following criteria:

Hold a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree required by the specialty occupation from an accredited college or university Hold a foreign degree that is the equivalent to a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree required by the specialty occupation from an accredited college or university

But I understand if you call a janitor a "skilled" job then a bachelor degree is indeed "high skilled" from your point of view. Regardless, I do not think anywhere is hiring H1B to do janitor work. An engineer or a scientist with just a bachelor degree is never "high skilled" in my field of work.

>Maybe they should be paid better.

The reasons a semiconductor engineer or a biotech scientist don't get paid higher has nothing to do with how big the company they are in. The nature of software means it is inherently more profitable (low manufacturing cost, less legal regulations, more location flexibility, etc). Those result in the workers get paid more of the profit share. A biotech company with 200M funding and 5 years is barely enough to test 1 pharma product just to have the FDA deny it in the 6th year. You can get 5 guys in a garage to churn out a multimillion dollar software product in 6 months. It is not comparable.

My whole argument is this: Granting visa based on salary is a bad take and unfairly prioritize one type of industry over everything else.

Lets look at the top semiconductor and biotech companies.

* NVidia: $10B in net income 2022. Gross margins 70%. CEO comp $22m

* J&J: $18B in net income 2022. Gross margins 68%. CEO comp $13m

* Pfizer: $31B in net income 2022. Gross margins 75% CEO comp $30m

* Qualcom: $13b in net income 2022. Gross margins 55%. CEO comp $5m

* TI: $9b in net income 2022. Gross margins 65%. CEO comp $22m

Also H1Bs are being paid above market rates. That isn't true. The data is searchable. Look at Tata for a software developer in Austin. I see 20+ developers making less the $80k(Average according to glassdoor) with most making in the $60k range which i would argue is below entry level.

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=tata+consultancy+services+...

Edit(for comparison):

* Apple: Gross Margins 44%

* MSFT: Gross Margins: 70%

* Googl: Gross Margins 57%

Your example is a consultancy. Not really a good example. Most likely they are already skirting the law in the first place.

Gross margin is a bad metrics. It doesn't cover overhead costs or R&D. Take for example J&J whose net profit margin is 13% while Apple is 24%. Or abbvie is also 13% vs Msft 34%.

Also why did you not put in the net income for those big 3 tech companies in the bottom?

It's a solid example considering those consultancies employ a large number of h1b visas

There are provisions in place to make sure employers are paying their workers the prevailing wage and not replacing American workers. However, a giant loophole makes companies paying $60,000 and above per employee – or hiring employees with master's degrees – exempt from this rule. An author of the 1990 Act that created the H-1B program, Bruce Morrison, told The Atlantic it was "a dastardly deed," and he blamed lobbyists for the caveat. The caveat is greatly relevant since more than half the approved petitions in 2014 had master's degrees or higher making it perfectly legal for them to be paid less than an American worker they were replacing.

https://www.investopedia.com/news/h1b-visa-issue-explained-m...

Then they don't get H1-B workers. If they were that critical and in low supply in the US they could pay more. The lottery that favors consulting companies has made the H1-B program ridiculous hard for great folks and it isn't bringing in the quality talent that we should be inviting to the country.

This does not work for non tech, non Silicon Valley employers. Non tech businesses that depend on foreign skilled labor will never be able to compete.

A business depending on foreign labor while offering subpar salaries so no domestic employee wants to work for them is the perfect example of abusing the skilled visa system. If the change makes them unable to compete then great, that's a bonus.

why should it?

The real answer?

Because non-tech companies pay lobbyists, too.

They should pay market rates and what stack ranking by salary does is set a market rate for H1B labor. H1B shouldn't be used to get cheaper labor based on your chances with a lottery.

That's the point - non tech/silicon valley have a lower demonstrable need (salary) and should be able to find indigenous talent by paying appropriately. A COL adjustment wouldn't be an unreasonable modification though.

Salaries reflect the ability to capture value, not need or value to the society. There are plenty of highly-paid jobs with effectively zero or even negative net contribution to the society.

>Salaries reflect the ability to capture value, not need or value to the society. There are plenty of highly-paid jobs with effectively zero or even negative net contribution to the society.

Politely, society disagrees with your views on what contributes (see: the high salaries).

There are positive-sum, zero-sum, and negative-sum games. Some people (such as scammers) make the society unambigously worse, but they often still get paid for doing their job.

Then there is the question of externalities. People working in fields with positive externalities tend to be underpaid, if there are no sufficient mechanisms that allow their employers to capture the value they create. Similarly, people working in fields with negative externalities tend to be overpaid.

Lots of non-tech businesses depend on foreign skilled labor and compete just fine.

Mexicans just don't do software.

I can think of no better way to ensure that H1-B holders are concentrated in the Bay Area, NYC, and Seattle...

So put a cost of living adjustment on it.

As a holder of work permit in Europe reading about H1B is bizarre. For me to get a work permit it took company founders to write a motivational letter (tldr, we work in tech, we need this dude), put an indication of salary being above certain fixed threshold (something something above median salary, revised yearly) and it was done in a few weeks. No lottery, no quotas, I can change employers whatever amount of times I want, I didn’t have to show academic credentials or answer binary tree interview questions from border agents.

Why is US so complicated for no reason? It’s not like it even makes a difference in the end, it’s just needless friction .

The current US Immigration system wasn't designed. It accidentally came together from a patchwork of individual programs and various bills modifying the rules.

There is political disagreement over what a new system should look like so there has never been enough agreement to completely overhaul the rules.

largely lots and lots of racism.

As per [1]: "29 000 highly qualified non-EU workers received an EU Blue Card in 2021, giving them comprehensive socio-economic rights and a residence in the EU." it's unclear how many applied but if the process is as easy as you described it could not be much more, say 50K is a fair estimate?

As per [2]: "USCIS announced that the agency received a total of 308,613 H-1B cap registrations, of which USCIS issued 87,500 registration selections in March 2021."

If the EU system was as oversubscribed as the US it would have the same problems.

1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

2. https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/uscis-rel...

It isn't really a fair comparison. Netherlands alone gave out 30k Knowledge Migrant permits last year, they just don't fall under Blue Card schema (which is mostly Germany). Notice the almost 100% rate of requested/granted in the chart [1]. That's also the same year the service had to grant refugee status to Ukrainians.

Then again, total amount of immigration permits per year is 7 in US vs 2.5 for the whole EU, so maybe you have a point.

1. https://ind.nl/en/about-us/statistics-and-publications/the-i...

Whatever you have is not a Netherlands work permit though because[1]:

"Change of employer or job The residence permit is valid as long as you meet the requirements. This can also be the case if you change employers or job. If you no longer work for your employer, or change jobs as a result of which you no longer meet the rules for which the residence permit was issued, then your employer must notify the IND of this. If you have found another job as a highly skilled migrant, your new employer must notify the IND of this within 4 weeks. The IND will then check if the requirements are still met."

Also this has much more requirements on issue than you described and the 30K number likely includes the changes described above, as well as extensions.

1. https://ind.nl/en/forms/3072.pdf

>Also this has much more requirements on issue than you described

Which one did I miss?

You apparently need to pay fees, get passport stamp, get TB test, register somewhere etc.

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