Raising the minimum wage is a welcome move to counter abuse of this visa. However, the minimum level needs to be set based on the city of employment and it's living cost. It cannot be a flat rate.
Counter argument to that is that its better for government and country to have higher paid employees as it increases tax revenues. Tax rates don't change based on living costs.
My proposal would be stack rank all h1b candidates based on salary and take the top X. This would push up the salaries for H1bs and stop the abuse. It would indirectly lead to increase of all engineering salries both my removing negative pressure of having low salaried employees but also H1Bs salaries are public record.
> Counter argument to that is that its better for government and country to have higher paid employees as it increases tax revenues. Tax rates don't change based on living costs.
The goal of reform is to prevent employers hiring h1b workers at below market rates instead of hiring qualified US citizens. It is not to increase tax revenue.
If you don't adjust for cost of living you'll end up removing all h1b workers from lower cost of living areas - or those areas will simply outsource all their tech work overseas - while in higher cost of living areas companies will still be hiring h1b workers at below market rates. So in essence the wage threshold won't be doing its intended job.
However if you adjust for cost of living you can make sure that in all locations the required salary is setup to prevent h1bs as being abused as a cheap source of labor.
Businesses will just lie about where the person is working. Also this is probably not constitutional. If the rate were left up to states to set it might be constitutional, but places like CA and WA would just set their rate to $60k, 50% below market, because that's where all the rich elites who want cheap indentured labor are.
My proposal would be stack rank all h1b candidates based on salary and take the top X. This would push up the salaries for H1bs and stop the abuse. It would indirectly lead to increase of all engineering salries both my removing negative pressure of having low salaried employees but also H1Bs salaries are public record.