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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

I think that we should entirely abolish programs like H1B that leave people tied to a specific employer for a long period of time (and similar visas like the SWV in the UK).

These programs mean you have literal second class citizens in a the workplace who desperately need to avoid losing their jobs for fear of their life being completely upended. This disrupts the labour market and internal corporate culture significantly. Instead we should have work visas lead to permanent status much faster, but give them out more sparingly.

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USA should adopt the EU model: The visa is not tied to the employer but to profession. You are only allowed to do work in the professions that is described in the original visa/residence permit reasons for up to X years, which should avoid the "in the employers mercy" situation.

EDIT: this also relieves a lot of burden on the system, as you can easily change jobs between companies by simply mailing the job change documents to the foreigners office - they will just take a look at the new position that you have taken up and simply send back the confirmation that the residence permit is still valid, instead of trying to issue a new visa with all bureaucracy that comes with.

I think that's a totally reasonable compromise which would reduce abuse both by employer and employees. However actually determining what a specific job role entails is quite complicated. Take a look at the SOC codes in the US or NOCs in Canada. Even if you figure that out, auditing people to make sure their day-to-day matches their notional job code is pretty hard.

Well, at least in Germany, the "profession" field is a free text field, there are no codes. The official is only interested in that whatever you are working as closely matches the original profession on your visa, so you can easily argue that your new title of "SRE Engineer" matches the original "Software Engineer", which they will accept as long as you are a working person in the IT Field.

The Swedish visa system is a compromise, at least when I moved here 10+ years ago.

My first work visa was tied to the company who sponsored my move, it lasted for 2 years and in that period if I changed jobs the new employer would need to sponsor me as well. After 2 years I renewed my work visa, this 2nd visa is not tied to an employer and I could freely move jobs.

Agreed. The local market should just pay their citizens more, rather than import cheap labour from abroad.

The visa program should be reserved for truly the 1% of the 1% globally, not just cheap java devs to work on corporate CRUD apps.

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