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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

If you look at it in a vacuum sure. When the same administration is actually floating the idea of making the program more coercive by making it so you can be deported immediately after losing your job I think it’s pretty reasonable to recognize the coercive nature of the program isn’t their concern.

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Exactly. My entire problem with H1-B is the coercive nature of it. That is the thing that is ultimately designed to suppress wages.

There's a bunch of levers you could pull to stop it from being such a huge negative, faster paths to citizenship, looser requirements for switching jobs, higher minimum salaries. All these things would improve conditions for the H1-B applicant.

That's why I call it a bad program.

Put another way I don’t think this policy is a good way to address the issues you’re talking about because it’s just moving jobs out of the U.S. altogether.

Jobs that Americans weren't getting because it was cheaper to hire an H1-B indentured servant instead. The current administration will no doubt find a way to make everything worse, but they didn't start with a good program to begin with.

Just because the status quo isn’t good doesn’t mean we should blindly support anyone changing it even if their results will be even worse.

I think I'm more likely to become a nun than blindly support anything from the current administration.

Well I’m not sure you will find many people who feel the program is perfect as-is but the natural interpretation of what you said in context seemed to be that we should at least temper our criticism.

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