Comment by cadamsdotcom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cadamsdotcom | Hacker News Reader

First let me say that I support the underlying intention of this piece of writing. However and this is crucial - it is based on a factually wrong premise which invalidates the entire hit piece. Unfortunately that also makes the surrounding discussion and angst misdirected.

I am urging you to go into the rest of this comment with an open mind.

H-1B visas require a “prevailing wage” which the foreign worker must be paid at or above in order to get a visa. Prevailing wages are made based on the area the worker will be in and their title, and are published on the DOL website: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/wages

Before being allowed to hire a foreign worker a company must advertise the position in the US. This could be improved as right now you can put the ad in the most obscure newspaper you can find or on TV at 3am. But you do have to do something.

The decision to grant or deny a visa is made by a consular officer - a trained human - who carefully considers all the foreign worker’s case materials (called a “petition”).

All this is to say, they thought of this “bringing in foreign workers depresses wages” problem way back when they created this program and invented prevailing wages to mitigate it. They thought of “bringing in foreign workers denies locals opportunities to apply for those roles” way back when they created the program and invented job ad requirements to mitigate it.

Don’t get me wrong the H-1B is definitely being exploited. Bodyshops are a thing. But it’s not at huge scale. It is a problem to be fixed with better enforcement and targeted reforms, not pitchforks.

Mr. Sanders’ argument needs to be backed up differently. As it stands he is misleading the public. It’s surprisingly out of character.

The local employees would be able to negotiate higher wages given the absent

It provides supply in the market and lowers their bargaining power, so the parity in wages is parity in a lower baseline

Also in practice there are salary ranges and the H1B's usually take the lower of the range AND work longer hours at the fear of visa loss.

You didn’t refute anything. You even conceded the problems but then washed your hands of it.

What happens to the prevailing wage when you add large numbers of workers to the supply side?

Wages are suppressed. Exactly as intended by the major companies abusing the system for their benefit.

I worked at a place that wanted to hire a foreign worker. Then they just simply hired him. I didn't realize you can't just hire a foreign worker the same way you would a US citizen. They did publish the job ad they hired him for but I don't know if it was even circulated. It seems like a cottage industry of lawyers make a nice living creating a plausible paper trail for that kind of thing but it's all borderline fraudulent. But the job can also be crafted so specifically as to exclude all but one foreign person. I think we're just rubber stamping the visas.

My point here is that what happens when someone from XYZ country comes over, gets in charge of hiring then decides they want more from their country, and then exploits the system to bring over all their friends and maybe family from their country and this goes on for decades and you're kind of hiding it under the carpet as we seem prone to do in these situations. This goes beyond just enforcement and worker protections into a place that's beyond the scope of the purpose of H1B.

There's still plenty of opportunity for playing games with the specific job categorization and level - the definitions are wooly enough and work opaque enough there's functionally no oversight possible.

And because the lottery is purely random and not based on category/level, there's little advantage to the sponsoring company to try for anything but the lowest salaried bucket that kinda fits. At least until it gets to the level where the employee is willing to torpedo their own petition by bringing it up.

Anyone working on software in the USA should check the local prevailing wage for a level 1 "computer programmer", or even "software developer", and ask themselves of they would be interested in applying for their current position at that salary.

> H-1B visas require a “prevailing wage” which the foreign worker must be paid at or above in order to get a visa

In other words, wage suppression.

What causes wages to rise? Shortage of supply.

What's the fix to that pesky problem? Importing tons of people at, let's call it, current wages.

If H1-B visas are really meant to fill jobs where there are not enough US workers than the minimum salary should be at least twice the prevailing wage. As it is it is just another unfair tool companies use to lower wages.

Not being done at scale? That is blatantly false. The program needs to end. American workers are being undermined.

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