Hacker News Reader

Comment by steventhedev | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com