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Comment by hash872 | Hacker News Reader

But most H1-Bs are brand new grads, so their salary is just not very high. You'd be kicking out every 22 year old graduate of Stanford, Harvard etc. if you enforced a pay scale. The US has had a public policy since the 60s of making it easy for foreign grads of our elite colleges to stay here, I wouldn't mess with that

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That’s F1 visas. You get a couple years on the F1 in private industry before you have to convert.

Also, H1B began in the 90s.

I just don't think that salaries are high enough for engineers that have been working for 2 years, that we can employ a market-based model for just the highest paid ones. I guess to be fair you could lengthen the OPT visa period to like 5 years, but that just seems cruel to all of the OPT folks who don't make it

Yeah OPT is way too short after college (I think 2-3 years max). And it does make sense to expand it to 5 years and offer a time based path to a green card (which many other countries do employ).

But there is the risk people might game the system to take advantage of that framework (though that sounds like a higher hurdle than the H1B charade now).

There isn’t an easy answer but for sure what exists now isn’t working.

You get a single year of work authorization on an F-1. Only STEM graduates get an extra 2 years for a total of three. It's called OPT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_Practical_Training

OPT is mostly only useful to give you extra tries on the H-1B, since the current system is a lottery. Since that lottery is once a year, OPT also makes it easier for employers to hire you at any given time so that you can wait for the next lottery. But no employer is hiring an OPT with an expectation that they will leave in 1 or 3 years, so the H-1B is still what everyone anchors on.

There's basically no way to get a green card straight after an OPT. There's also no way to extend an H-1B past it's 3+3 years.

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