Comment by WildUtah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WildUtah | Hacker News Reader

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An auction is the obvious solution. Submit bids with your application for the fee to be paid yearly to the USA and the highest bidders get the H1-B visas.

There's no need to raise the cap and all the Apples and Googles get all the applicants they want. Today the majority of H1-B visas go to Wipro and Infosys and the like for low paid tech grunts; Apple won't have any trouble outbidding them. And those tech grunt companies aren't doing anything valuable for the USA so it won't be any loss to have them struggle.

In fact, we should be able to drop the cap to a more reasonable 30-40,000 instead of the recent 85,000.

And we should be able to eliminate almost all the paperwork. In the current system, a US government bureaucrat tries to determine if you're qualified when you apply. Applicants hire lawyers to fake, translate, fabricate, apostille, and make up education and work experience that USCIS expects. If applicants are paying cash, we can presume they're qualified and reduce the application paperwork to one page.

With an auction system like that, basically every small business will be out of the picture then.

The more I think about it, the more I like the auction system.

The big companies that need highly skilled employees can afford to pay en masse.

Now if you are a US based small business and you found a dream employee in say Australia. Either this employee is so valuable that you would be willing to shell out something like 50-100k to bring him/her over, or what is more likely you become flexible and let him/her work remotely.

I do not foresee many small businesses who would actually need to bring a foreign employee in for a constant presence in US. Does a barbershop really need to bring a foreign born barber. If it does then that barber would probably qualify as an alien of extraordinary ability...

My views is biased as a European who programs for a medium sized US business and sees no need to visit US more than once every year.

It hurts startups - the small businesses that are specifically designed to grow quickly, in fast-changing markets.

A small business that's small because it's a niche can afford to have a dream employee work remotely. A small business that's small because it's not-yet-large in a fast-changing market will be slowed down dramatically by the timezone differences, and probably lose out to competitors that colocate all their people.

Not necessarily. A small company that generates say $1 million per engineer would be in a better position to outbid an Infosys type shop that might be bigger, but generate a lot less revenue per engineer. And indeed, that's the beauty of the auction: it would ensure that the people getting visas are the ones whose positions will generate the most net value to the economy.

My thoughts exactly - basically a immigration system for the Fortune 500.

Theoretically you could design a tiered system with a separate quota allocated for companies with <10 employees to bid for (or some other easily enforceable definition of start-up or small business).

Why would that be?

Because a Google or Apple or Facebook can bid $100K+ to get someone a visa in this proposed auctioning system. A 10person startup couldn't reasonably.

But that's part of the labour budget. It's like saying that small companies can't compete with big companies for employees, because they can't afford to pay them as much.

If your small company wants to employ someone then you have to be willing to pay as much as a big company will for the same employee. And that goes whether you're just paying salary or paying salary plus visa price.

The only disadvantage I can see to small companies is that a big company could afford to buy visas in bulk at the start of the year and figure out what to do with them later, while a small company wouldn't buy visas until it had a specific employee in mind. So I'd make the auction monthly, not annual.

But that's the thing. Labour budgets ARE smaller at smaller companies. Hence your salary at a startup will most of the time be lower than what you could make at a similar position at a big corp. They make up for it by handing out more equity.

Whereas a large company can make a better case for paying say $100K on a visa for a $200K/year job, this is much harder for a startup paying e.g. $100K+1% equity for said job. If I have only $1MM or so in funding as a startup I am limited to what I can pay and couldn't reasonably waste a year's worth of salary on a visa, whereas a $50,000MM revenue company might have more leeway. No?

"$100K+"

I'm sure that was proposed as ridiculous, but you have to keep in mind that there's only a programming labor shortage in two, maybe three cities on the coasts.

For a national program like this lottery, every non-citizen the .gov lets thru will result in many social program costs not only for the one citizen who won't be employed and at a higher pay rate, plus all the downstream effects of lower salaries and less jobs for citizens leading to lower economic activity leading to lower tax revenue.

A $100K cost per immigrant is below the low side of what it costs .gov to take care of the local citizens.

What I'm claiming is the program is a stereotypical crony capitalist "socialize the losses and privatize the gains" scam. Screwing the program up or limiting it or making it very expensive to participate in is a net economic gain to the country. "Fixing" the program would be a net economic loss to the country. Furthermore the program is literally inhumane, a real wage for a human with real working conditions is X, but as a psuedo-slave psuedo-indentured servant you are less human than a real human so we'll only offer you 50% of X and treat you like dirt because thats highly profitable and helps rich guys get richer at the expense of everyone else. Its disgusting that the program exists on several levels.

Besides Canada has better medical system, better crime stats, arguably better recreational opportunities... I wouldn't necessarily describe being "stuck" in Canada as much of a punishment. Its not exactly like being trapped in Somalia.

> every non-citizen the .gov lets thru will result in many social program costs not only for the one citizen who won't be employed

I don't think F1/H1B visa holders are entitled to ANY social programs. They HAVE to pay medicare/social security, but they cannot avail any of the benefits.

I'm referring to the local STEM workers who operate at a class based disadvantage.

Its fundamentally a zero sum game, actually its a declining sum game for anyone middle class or below. So a guy from Canada or India or whatever gets a job, that means the local who would have gotten it is unemployed, mom and kids on welfare, etc.

Also there's a local utility who advertises for a $60K CCIE as part of their H1B program and aside from the $100K+ local who now has to work at walmart or pull cable or something, there are secondary effects on the local marketplace such that the $60K H1B can't participate in the local economy from retail to home construction quite like the now unemployed formerly $100K local. So that's $40K/yr not going to walmart / real estate developers / whatever. True, every penny of that $40K goes to the execs bonuses, but they might not live in that area (or even in that country) and there is a declining economic effect as fewer people have money (A poor dude with his first $100 bill contributes toward more economic activity (velocity of money, etc) than a rich dude with his millionth $100 bill)

Yeah I suggested it because it seemed like a rather obvious solution. Now not sure if government is just incapable running an auction or there is an obvious flaw in it that I just couldn't see.

They seem to auction off spectrum pretty efficiently.

> An auction is the obvious solution. Submit bids with your application for the fee to be paid yearly to the USA and the highest bidders get the H1-B visas.

Nah. They can bid with salaries rather than fees. Better to just collect the income and payroll taxes while giving the visas to the most valuable guest workers possible.

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