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by wsxcde
3370 days ago
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> The bidding may go high, but it will only go as high as how much it would cost to hire an American instead. Except this is already the case? Hiring a H1B worker isn't free. It costs something like $10K in legal costs alone. Do you really think a lot of companies are indulging in a large-scale conspiracy to avoid paying that $10K to an American instead? If you want the worker to stay longer than a couple years, you'll need to renew the H1B and probably file a PERM application as well. All of this costs something like $20K at the minimum. Getting a position on a H1B is by no means easy or cheap. If a company could hire an American, they'd much rather do it. And if the H1B thing were all about cheap foreign workers, spouses of H1Bs wouldn't have had so much trouble getting hired in the pre-Obama era. Anecdotally, I know many women with Master's degrees from top-tier US universities who were desperate to find a position, and were willing to take wages well-below par, but couldn't because companies didn't want to pay for the H1B. It's also why if you look at resumes/linkedin profiles for Indians in the US, many will advertise their green cards/citizenship status. They're communicating that employers don't need to file a H1B petition for them. Yes, it's true there are a few companies which have exploited H1Bs to bring in cheap labor. But from a statistical point of view, this is about as common as the epidemic of violence at Chuck-e-Cheese. In other words, it's a nice news story that plays well as a clickbait headline, in reality, it's a non-issue. |
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So they only need to be cheaper by $20K over a couple of years for it to be worth it?
That seems like a fairly small cost to overcome.
And if there isn't very much demand for H1Bs, even with "bidding" we'd expect the cost to companies to stay the same.
It isn't clear to me why prioritizing the value of an employee (as measured by how much they are paid) would not be an effective way of prioritizing H1B visas.