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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe… make H-1B labor not be cheap. Give H-1B visa holders the same ability to change jobs and negotiate wages effectively that citizens and permanent residents have and give some teeth to the rules that sponsors may not underlay them.

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No.

The H1-B visa is intended for bringing specific technical expertise that does not exist in the US for a set period of time. This is why one of the requirements is that you must have interviewed US persons first. Its the same reason it's a nonimmigration visa.

The rampant abuse of the visa has a remedy - criminal charges against the HR directors of any company who is found to have committed fraud, and capping the number of visas per company (setting up many shell companies is a strong signal that fraud is being committed).

If an H1-B worker can't negotiate on a global level for their expertise - they should not be on that visa.

> This is why one of the requirements is that you must have interviewed US persons first.

This is generally not a requirement for an H-1B. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit...

Reading through that I stand corrected. Thank you for sharing a link.

At the same time, if a US person applies and is similarly qualified, they must be offered the job.

Which is trivially abuseable by offering substantially less for the H-1B position. I'm not sure if there's an easy policy solution for that.

There are 85,000 visas emitted every year. Such measure isn't consistently enforceable as you can't really investigate each visa. As a result, it will be considered by the main offenders as a cost of doing business spread out across thousands of applications.

> Such measure isn't consistently enforceable as you can't really investigate each visa

You don't have to look at every single one lying on government forms is fraud start putting at the company who signed off and the person brought over (before they are deported) in jail for a couple of years and people will clean up their act real quick.

- You need to have a clear way of defining liability, otherwise companies will lawfare. For instance "you could have hired someone else in the US" is impossible to really prove or disprove.

- Jailing a foreigner before sending him back to his country for an administrative offense is somehow a big waste of public money.

- A very hard punishment still requires to consistently catch offenders, otherwise it will slowly become hypothetic.

I believe they were suggesting jailing the US hiring manager, not the foreign worker.

> "and the person brought over (before they are deported) in jail"

I think that it is very clear what was meant here.

You're right! I skimmed that one too fast.

if the "cost of doing business" is executives actually going to jail

trust me, there would be 99% compliance in very short order

The problem is: if you do that, then you need to create a big government agency that will interview the potential candidates, evaluating their value on the job market, in order to grant them a visa. Right now that job is done by their sponsoring employer, but if you give people ability to change jobs freely then employers lose any incentive to do so.

You can still require people to sustain employment in their field. Maybe companies can attest that a particular role classification requires a type of high-end talent. Auditing or otherwise verifying the attestation addresses the current allegations that H1-Bs are given for some jobs not requiring high-end talent.

Having managed people on H1Bs (and therefore been intimately involved with the process) the problems with switching jobs are not the requirements. You’re only allowed to switch to a similar job or a “better” job in a similar line of work.

The problem is that the mechanics of the switching process is extremely cumbersome. Some of the relevant documents are held by your current employer and not with you. The new employer effectively needs to apply for a new application minus the lottery system. There are significant weeks to months worth of delays for the new employers to get approvals, so most H1B employees that transfer are actually working provisionally on the basis of their new approval still being pending. They are very limited in terms of traveling etc during this period. There are significant risks to changing your job when you’re approaching the end of your current H1B visa expiry. This was particularly bad for Chinese applicants who unlike most other nations’s applicants who got 3 year approvals, usually only got 1 year approvals.

The real problem in switching jobs aren’t the policies but the extreme uncertainty and bureaucracy involved in doing so.

Employers are still incentivized to sponsor people who they want to hire, because they want to hire that person, they want the job done, and they couldn't find anyone else to do the job. They just have to keep the compensation and working conditions competitive enough to retain their worker.

$100k/yr fee could definitely cover the cost of people doing said interviews/research into if the company is complying with Da Rules so to speak. Not to mention posting jobs well below market rates.

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