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Comment by kailuowang | Hacker News Reader

The H1B visa actually requires that the immigrant applicant being paid no less than American employees for the same type of position. Of course there could be loopholes, but the high cost of going through the immigration process currently places immigrants in a disadvantaged position in terms of financial costs to employers.

If you believe in free market, this is unhealthy to the economy. American companies should be paying duties to country through tax, not hiring discrimination against nationality.

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    "the immigrant applicant being paid no less than American 
    employees for the same type of position"

AFAIK it's very common to manipulate the immigrant employee's job title to get around paying them the same as an American equivalent.

Yes, it's common in game companies to hire people with strong engineering experience into basically QA positions, where they—surprise—end up "helping out" on stuff above their pay grade.

A way of avoiding this would just to be to have an absolute salary threshold. Say, all H1B job offers must have an $100k+ salary. That would allocate them to the parts of the economy where workers are actually severely lacking, and valuable enough to the companies that they're willing to pay premium prices to get them. Alternately, make it a bidding system instead of a fixed number: there are 50,000, or 100,000, or whatever H1B visas, and they go to the companies that offer the highest salaries (thus indicating the highest demand).

If you claim that there is a lack of workers in an area but you aren't willing to pay more than $60k, then I'm going to be skeptical about just how much of a critical skills shortage there is.

I agree. I was pretty surprised to see H1B applications for salaries of $25,000 in this post yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361656.

Hmmm, perhaps it was less of an coincidence that the very smart Jamaican EE who I worked with in 2001 at Lucent was in QA. He was making $48K to my $80K (we all knew the former because it had to be posted).

Is there any data to support that? My experience convinced me that other way.

True but the H1B scheme is used by companies to drive salaries down across the board. I would argue that this is its primary goal. So if American workers want $60k for a position, but you have a stack of pending H1Bs, you can offer it at $50k and then when no Americans take the position you hire an H1B instead. But now the standard rate for that position in your company is $50k and that's what Americans would have to work at, so technically there is no discrimination. Do that at enough companies (look at the list of signatories) and you can redefine the salary range of an entire industry. Someone should (I can't find any references) calculate what the true, competitive salary for programmers in SV would be without companies using H1Bs to drive down prices. I would bet it would be significantly higher than it is now.

You are assuming that the industry can fill all such positions with immigrant workers. In reality, the supply of immigrant workers is no where near to satisfy that assumption especially if you consider the annual quote for H1B approvals (often than not such quote was exhausted the first couple of weeks when it became available).

My wage as an E3 (ie, it's just like a H1B, but only for Australians) employee in the States was quite a bit higher than the prevailing wage at the time, FWIW.

Note that the wages being offered are supposed to be pretty much common-knowledge:

http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm

"On or within 30 days before the date the LCA is filed with ETA, provide notice of the employer's intent to hire H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3 workers. The employer must provide this notice to the bargaining representative of workers in the occupation in which the H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3 worker will be employed. If there is no bargaining representative, the employer must post such notices in conspicuous locations at the intended place(s) of employment, or provide them electronically."

We did spend a fair bit of time looking for the least conspicuous of all conspicuous places within the office to post my wage though. :)

There's also this fee among a lot of other fees while applying:

In 2007, the US Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (ETA), reported on two programs, the High Growth Training Initiative and Workforce Innovation Regional Economic Development (WIRED), which have received or will receive $284 million and $260 million, respectively, from H-1B training fees to educate and train US workers. According to the Seattle Times $1 billion from H1-B fees have been distributed by the Labor Department to build up US workforce skills since 2001.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_fees_earmarked_f...

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