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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> The law should be written that if you caught violating the terms and spirit of the h1-b visa program, you give up right to participate in h1-b sponsorships for x number of years.

Let's go a step further. If you are in gross violation of the H1-B program terms, you lose the right to participate permanently.

Incentives matter.

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Permanently is a long time. It would seem nonsensical to handcuff a company 20 years from now for violations made today. Not only could there have been complete turnover in the intervening years, but there could have been various mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs.

> Permanently is a long time.

Permanently is a long time. If you prefer not to hold the corporation responsible forever, I would be satisfied with holding corporate officers personally liable instead.

If the IRS and state labor government is able to purse corporate directors personally for payroll taxes that haven't been paid by a company in the event of insolvency, this would be no different (ie labor regulation).

We've tried the carrot, now its time to try the stick.

Tough. Many people were idiots when they were younger, and have found themselves saddled with criminal records. Most of these people are not the same person they were when they committed the crime. Yet they still find themselves paying for it. I fail to see why a company should have it any different.

If anything, this is an argument to stop giving people life sentences, not for giving companies "permanent" punishments. Basf, Siemens, Bayer - all used to work for the Nazis and used labor from concentration camps. Yet you can't possibly say that these companies are the same as they were 70 years ago.

Not just Bayer, the whole IG Farben conglomerate.

Unfortunately, actual people generally only have one true identity and punishments and records stick to that identity. Companies on the other hand, especially those prone to skirting or breaking laws intentionally, come and go. The profit incentive for exploiting foreign workers (and many other criminal corporate activities) is much higher than the costs of creating a purpose-built fall-guy corporate veil. If you lay out permenant company specific bans, those companies will just disappear and a new hydra head will pop up in its place doing the exact same thing. The profit incentive to exploit cheap foreign labor is just too high.

Personally, I think if "companies are people", then the people (board of directors, owners, executives) in charge of that "person" should personally share in the company's legal punishments as accomplices or co-conspirators. Let the actual human people who made those illegal choices sit in jail for a few years and decide if that activity is worth pursuing again with a new company.

I would imagine permanent punishments would just cause companies to dissolve and reform through some paperwork acrobatics (similar to bankruptcy processes like New GM).

Then the government should blacklist the corporate officers by name if there is a pattern of certain individuals using this tactic.

Wouldn't they then just simply split off the technology arm into it's own entity, incorporate it, re-brand it and continue on as usual?

I'm glad someone pointed this out. Companies constantly change identities, in particular for employment, and if there was punishments imposed for an entity, they'd just split it into many smaller entities and let them get punished.

In my comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9733417) I address holding corporate offers personally responsible if necessary.

Make it so all managers involved in the decisions lose their ability to participate in the program. Make it an administrative judgement, not a punishment, so you don't have to worry about the whole 'being found guilty' bit.

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