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Comment by makeitsuckless | Hacker News Reader

Or simply prevent the problem.

In the Netherlands, similar visa have a minimum salary requirement. As a result, we have tech workers from all over the planet, but no herds of cheap labour from India. The Indians that are here are well paid experts.

If knowledge migrant visa are abused to import cheap labour, the problem is clearly in the word "cheap".

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The H1-B visa program has a minimum salary requirement of $60K USD a year. Of course, that's almost entry level in the technology sector. Raising that to $100K-$150K/year would definitely help, and it would be hard to argue against it. If you're relying on talent from outside the country due to a skills shortage, paying a premium is the cost of doing business.

It would hurt startups under a few conditions. Perhaps there could be an overall package, rather than pure salary (e.g., equity, etc.)? Or a gradient on the scale of the employer? It's difficult to find a set of rules that don't hamstring the small companies, don't misalign incentives for big companies, and aren't ridiculously complex.

I wouldn't be against taking equity into account, but in the end, cash salary is most important. Equity is almost always a lottery ticket, even if you're a founder. If you're a founder, you should be riding on a different US visa, not an H1-B.

Oh sure, but for example, a company that's doing a knowledge-app that's unexpectedly big in Japan, and they want to hire Japanese-fluent (also technically very high skilled) engineers here. Early on they may not have the cash-flow to hire "market-rate" (e.g. MicroGoogleBookZon) salaries, but is willing to put skin in the game with other resources.

It's impossible to compare absolute numbers because the tax and benefits are so different, but the Dutch minimum is well above entry level.

In fact, it's well above what companies that don't value top talent are willing to pay for locals at senior level.

Because of this, there is no quota and very little in the way of formalities involved in becoming an accredited employer. If they're willing to pay top money for foreign talent, a business is free to bring them in.

Department of Labor also requires H1 applicants on the employer side to pay "prevalent" wage.

It does seem to make sense for Department of Labor to grant the visas to highest salary earners first. As US government taxes personal income, it's even in their self interest.

if there was a true shortage of skilled workers and there was political interest in fixing the shortage the minimum H1-B wage should be set at 5x of the "prevalent" wage, in order to provide an incentive towards actually developing these skilled workers.

If an H1-B costs me as much as 5 non-H1-Bs my incentive would be in hiring one H1-B short-term and using them to train/mentor normal employees and use as few H1-Bs as possible, laying off my employees to hire H1-Bs would not make sense in this case.

Also as many others have said, H1-B should be an 'exceptional' visa, which means that as a country there should be a strong interest in making these 'exceptional' individuals citizens as soon as possible, which should mean a guaranteed green card within 1-2 years, and no "lock" to the employee requesting the H1-B (because if there is a true shortage other employers could be interested too, the visa should be tied to the exceptional individual, not to the company hiring them).

> in order to provide an incentive towards actually developing these skilled workers

Or an incentive to offshore that part of business.

The exceptional O-1 visa is a separate program. There's no annual cap for O-1.

We have one as well. However, we also don't have any kind of maximum work week, so many of these people who come over for companies like Tata find themselves working insane amounts of hours, and have no chance at raises, bonuses, or promotions. So they'll be working for 5 years at the same rate.

I like that solution.

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