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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

It is already illegal to pay H1B visa holders less than "the actual or prevailing wage for your occupation, whichever is higher."

http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupatio...

Thus, when I hear people complain of companies who hire H1Bs only because they want to pay them less, I always want to ask, "why haven't you reported them?"

Either they don't actually know that the companies are exclusively paying H1Bs less, or they don't believe that the government will enforce the salary floor. Either way, raising the salary floor from 1x to 1.5x probably won't address their concerns.

edited for clarity

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When I was working at apple IS&T 6 months ago, I saw paystubs of people working for TCS and Cognizant Technology solutions. Cognizant is paying $65K per annum in the bay area; TCS is paying $85K per annum in the bay area.

Think of rents in Sunnyvale: $2K per 1b/1b. Still people save, even on $65K salary, because one lives with 4 other roomies.

I don't know the salaries of any of the H1-B visa holders at my company. Do you?

Maybe we can make it a policy that companies make such information public when they employ more than N number of H1-B holders. With mean, median, standard deviation and error bars, you should be able to get an idea of whether or not this is happening.

Besides these numbers for salary, it would also be interesting to see the same statistics for years of experience programming of domestic labor versus imported labor. I would expect to see a significantly greater mean and median years of experience among H1-B holders versus domestically sourced talent.

It is public actually. Check out visadoor.com.

That data is extremely skimpy. Where is the comparative data? All I saw was one figure, "prevailing wage". What is the sample size? Is the sample based on workers operating in the same region (for example a company with multiple locations could very well cite a domestic salary relative to all locations (bringing the average down) or cite numbers from the cheapest region. etc. etc. etc. There are a many ways to lie with statistics and the number of ways you can lie with them is inversely proportional to the quantity of statistics released.

For example, the first petition I clicked on was very fishy: https://icert.doleta.gov/index.cfm?event=ehLCJRExternal.dspC...

$96k-116k offered for an engineering position that requires a master's degree and where the prevailing wage is quoted at $92k!?

I want to see real numbers her.

Look up the methodology, it's on the Department of Labors website. Are you suggesting that the gov't is conspiring to keep wages low?

If a person doesn't know what the salaries are, how can they complain that the salaries are too low?

When I hear people retort that "companies aren't allowed to do that", I always want to say: "Did you try a simple web-search to find out how they do it anyway?"

For example, there are loopholes in both salary-calculation and also in terms of crafting hideously specific (and not entirely honest) requirements and then claiming nobody local can fill them.

Yeah. The first example I cited in this comment[0] looks like one of those "hideously specific (and not entirely honest) requirements" that no one is going to be able to fill or even consider filling.

If you cite a job with high requirements and a relatively low associated wage, you're essentially describing a job that only foreign talent is going to be able and willing to fill. I don't know a single person that meets the criteria for that position and isn't earning way more already. What self-respecting domestic candidate with the freedom to change jobs freely and that knows his worth would ever apply for such a position?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690697

High requirements? The only experience requirement is "Two (2) years of experience in providing technical service support." Even with a master's degree, $92,000 seems reasonable to me for someone with only 2 years of support experience.

What about the other requirements like having a master's degree in computer science, EE, math or a related engineering field?

I had this boss in Brazil that also own some business in Florida - when he wants to hire some H1B from Brazil he just adds "fluent in Portuguese" to the job description.

Nope

The prevailing wage is LOWER than the average wage.

YOUR lawyer writes the job requirement such that you can get an H1B for under $50K a year in Silicon Valley

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