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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

So I was at a company that did this a lot - it was much less nefarious than on the surface.

It was usually related to them recruiting a certain specialist or acquiring a team at another company. But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.

So it was less about racism and more about hoops to jump through to hire someone that you have already basically hired. If you've ever had experience with how a government RFP works, maybe don't throw rocks from glass houses.

Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.

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As I understand it, the issue is that the official pathway to hire a permanent foreign worker (PERM status) is very long (18 months+), and most companies don't want to start a process in hopes of hiring someone in a year or more. H1B offers a shortcut, where they can be brought in on a temporary permit, then apply for PERM status. But PERM status requires a bona fide search for American workers; using the H1B shortcut legally would require an awkward job search where you already have an employee in the role, and if an applicant is found the current employee not only loses their job but has to literally leave the country. So instead of getting into that awkward situation, employers are faking the "bona fide search" requirement and trying to hand the green card status directly to the H1B even when Americans are available that could do that job.

That said... there is still the question of why companies choose to go down this road instead of simply hiring Americans. We can speculate about their intentions (cost saving via lower wages, employees willing to work more hours and under worse conditions, racism, etc) but it's unlikely that they're violating federal law just for fun. This is a lot of hoops to jump through and risk to take on without a compelling reason to do so.

It's still picking someone for the job when there might be other qualified workers who are fit for the job, but you're not even giving them a chance.

The whole point of the system is that you shouldn't do this, and you legally can't.

So it really is as nefarious as it seems.

> Is it unfair? Maybe. But in my opinion anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.

For some reason those stupid racist citizens don't want to compete with the whole world in a borderless economic zone. Thankfully we have wise corporations to subvert democracy for the better.

What’s evil about the current situation is that the system tries to have it both ways: bring in cheap foreign labor, but in such a way that makes it easy to exploit them and hard for them to become permanent residents or citizens.

If the country’s goal was really to avoid direct competition with people outside its borders, you wouldn’t deliberately import so many of them, and you’d also take steps to prevent businesses from depending so much on undocumented immigrant labor.

Now, you might say that you don’t agree with the government’s position on all these things, but in that case you ought to be more in line with the comment you replied to.

Some call it subverting the tyrrany of the majority.

>But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.

The spirit of the law is that this should not be your intent---that your intent should be to fill the job requirements, not to hire a particular person.

You're basically saying you think breaking the law is okay, because you don't agree with it.

The problem is, a lot of people don't agree, and would rather have your former employer prosecuted for the fraud.

Isn’t it funny that in the past the only thing you had to do was simply show up?

> anything is fairer than our country's evil immigration requirements.

I agree. There's 8 billion people in the world and we should let them into the US if they really want to be here.

The process forces everyone to act like they are

"The "hacker ethos" seems to be in decline, for any number of interconnected reasons"

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