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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'm generally pretty pro-immigration and I'm very anti-H1B.

It's very abusive to the workers hired as H1-B and it's designed for wage suppression. You can stay an H1-B for years. If you lose your job, you'll face deportation. It gives your employer a VERY large amount of leverage over your life.

It's supposed to be about bringing expertise when local expertise isn't available, but in practice it's companies saying "Oh, we can't find someone who will work for $50k as a software dev so we need to hire H1-Bs."

Either the program needs to end or the minimum salary needs to be raised to something like $300k to compensate for the leverage the employer has.

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I don't think raising the fee fixes the abuse problems. Unless maybe most of the fee goes into eacrow and is paid back to the employee if the employer terminates employment (maybe without a good, documented cause?). But that could produce its own misaligned incentives. I think the best way to solve it is to remove or reduce the restrictions on staying in the country after they have worked here for some number of years.

> I don't think raising the fee fixes the abuse problems.

It doesn't totally fix them, but it does make it so the applicant is more fairly compensated for accepting a more abusive work environment. It also stops companies from using H1-Bs as a mechanism to reduce overhead.

> I think the best way to solve it is to remove or reduce the restrictions on staying in the country after they have worked here for some number of years.

I'd be for that as well. If someone comes in on a work visa I want them to either have full access to the labor market with all the freedoms any american citizen has, or I want their compensation to be high enough to justify locking them to a company and out of the general labor market.

> but it does make it so the applicant is more fairly compensated for accepting a more abusive work environment

How so? It increases the cost to the employer to hire an H1B employee, so they might hire less of them. But it could also mean they pay the employee less to compensate for the higher cost of bringing them in to the country.

It's not just that. There are many sources coming out of the woodwork of massive H1B fraud rings. Basically from the top (CEO level) down a F500 company starts replacing its hiring loops to mostly focus on H1B and remove all American workers. And some of them just sit idle once hired.

I wouldn't be upset if we fixed both ends... make H1B an immigrant visa (they can apply for residency after ~7 years) and place reasonable minimum salaries (currently pegged at the prevailing local wage - probably should be 150% of that figure instead).

They’re doing the opposite and floating the idea of making the program more coercive by ending the grace period to find a new job, so that essentially ICE could wait outside an office after layoffs and start cuffing people. This is because “protecting workers” is a pretext and not their actual goal.

No. The fees definitely slow down the companies from trying to hire cheap replacements. Yes, the end of a grace period does make things tougher for people in a bad job, but I think the goal is really to end these bad jobs.

Well then it’s not working; they’re just hiring people abroad. That outcome would be a disaster if your goal is helping American workers but a success if your goal is just reducing the number of foreigners in the country without regard for American workers. Between the results of the policies they’ve chosen and the types of rants they go on television or social media to make that interpretation suggests itself.

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