[rupi]

The easiest way to solve this is to salary rank the H1B applicants. Those with the highest salaries get picked; not the ‘lucky ones’ that get through a lottery, which puts a PhD from MIT and a new hire at Tata from a no name school in India on equal footing. And I say this as someone who was on H1B. The current system benefits no one but these visa mills.

Edit: for grammar

[PedroBatista]

Where there's a will, there's a way..

It would complicate some of these "games", but I'm sure they would implement a kickback system where the person would receive a great salary but it had a "side contract" where it would be required to pay most of it to another company, or just straight up fraud..

[lolinder]

If you throw out every possible design because you can't detect fraud perfectly, you'll never have any solution to anything. The questions we actually need to answer are:

* Does compliance with the law create the behavior we want or does the law itself incentivize bad behavior?

* Can we reasonably detect a large enough percentage of fraud that the distortion to the system will be minimal?

On the second point, see patio11's The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero [0].

People better qualified than I am should analyze anything before we implement it, but at face value I'd guess that OP's proposal stands a good chance of being much better at both metrics than the current system (which is hardly fraud-free).

[0] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

[myrmidon]

This would not be quite that easy to circumvent.

The main appeal of H1B abuse is cost effectiveness. If you ruin that by forcing competitive salaries (to even get the H1B in the first place), then that ruins the whole point (and companies are going to engage less in it, i.e. only when needed/"intended").

There is also a huge difference between dealing with a consultancy agency that you suspect engages in "creative visa workarounds" and straight up comitting fraud (=> higher risk, possibly even personal, makes for a much stronger incentive).

[soco]

I know a scheme here in Switzerland where the company also provides lodging and services and such, for a cost of course, which cost is then deducted from the big salary thus bringing it to much lower and better palatable levels ("better" for the company doing the tricks of course). It works quite fine in IT because IT is not a protected domain, and much more difficult (not impossible though) in areas like construction - where you have unions and collective agreements.

[dartos]

> The main appeal of H1B abuse is cost effectiveness

Yeah but the official purpose of H1B is for companies like to hire highly skilled workers which they can’t find in the US.

Not to hire the cheapest indentured junior devs.

[myrmidon]

Absolutely; but "non-abused" H1B positions should not be affected too much, because US companies would pay competitive wages for those (presumably).

The proposal would actually help the intended H1B usecase, because it removes those "indentured junior devs" from the H1B lottery pool.

[Retric]

The goal of H1B isn’t to simply suppress wages for the highest paying professions, it’s to make up shortfalls. Lack of high school French teachers in Alaska can be an issue not just a lack of programmers with an AI background.

As such, if only one applicant for underwater welding is submitted the industry likely doesn’t require extra workers even if you’re willing to pay 500k/year. I’d still weight things so people paid 5x as much have 5x as likely to be picked which would discourage company’s submitting hundreds of applications for lower wage jobs.

PS: These were L-1A applications not H1B. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-1_visa

[JumpCrisscross]

> salary rank the H1B applicants

This isn’t a story about H1-Bs. Changing H1-B rules won’t do anything about L-1A abuse.

[n290184]

A better way is to do away with the quotas to stop all the gaming around it. Switch to a price-based system by imposing a tariff on a percentage of the salary either on the company or on the worker. This would ensure a certain wage premium for local workers to ease the political pressure. This type of policy is more flexible since the tariff can vary based on the nature of the job. After a certain number of years or amount paid the worker should be eligible for permanent residency to limit the leverage companies have over these individuals.

[cuteboy19]

Yeah the only way an extra tax would be fair for the worker would be to think of it like a fee for PR. Otherwise it's just discrimination.

[shagie]

This suggestion assumes that all H-1B applicants are highly paid technologists. While that is the majority of them, there are French immersion teachers ( https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french+immersion+teac... ), accountants ( https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=accountant&city=&year... ) and so on that have rather average wages for where they work.

While we're often focused on technology careers here, this approach puts the new hire at Tata on uneven footing with the French teacher.

[newsclues]

If companies want to pay a tax, say 100% of salary, because the employees skills are vital and the tax can fund education and training, I don’t see an issue.

[YetAnotherNick]

PhD from MIT could very well earn less than a mid range developer even though they are contributing much more to the society and country. Also salary war would mean companies face pressure to increase the salary of immigrants over the citizens.

[aleph_minus_one]

> PhD from MIT could very well earn less than a mid range developer even though they are contributing much more to the society and country.

If this is true, the supply of such people should be reduced (i.e. don't hand out H1B visas to them), so that by the laws of supply and demand the salaries increase for them.

[YetAnotherNick]

The problem is that research is not as beneficial to the company at least in the short term. e.g. Google wouldn't be affected much if quantum computing divison is shut down, but would be affected if google ads stops showing, even though the quality of people working in former is likely higher.

[lazide]

The massive pressure in these Visa systems is precisely because of the opposite issue - it’s cheaper (and gives the employer more leverage) to hire from abroad than pay someone local.

[jasdi]

Indian IT firms made about $100-120 Billion in revenue last year. That's just handling Corporate Americas IT/BPM ops. Add the rest of the worlds IT stuff and it doubles. Why will this happen if it benefits no one? This story is 30 years old now. And its not the first time the Visa system is being gamed. If you assume Corporate America saves 40-50% in salaries (usually the conservative diff in avg sal level of Indian vs American Engineer) through this route, then someone has to pay that diff to make this stop. Otherwise the incentives have not changed and there is no "easy fix".

[bongoman42]

How does this solve L1-A abuse? There are no limits and no salary restrictions on L1 visa applicants.

[apwell23]

this posts have the same ideas over and over. I've been hearing this particular "idea" for over 2 decades every few months on HN.

rebuttal to this is that, all the visas will get gobbled up by big tech in this scheme starving out startups, hospitals , chefs ect.

[mrtksn]

IMHO anything other than making it a meritocracy wouldn't work. Just remove governmnet bureaucracy from the hiring process, abolish work visas and if you are worried about the local workers help them some other way(pay them UBI, provide them with training that can make them more valuable - I don't know what works for specific case but nationality is not a merit).

Do you know how do they game the minimum salary requirements? They pay the worker the minimum and then the worker pays back the difference over the actual salary they agreed. Depending on the jurisdiction the implementation will change.

[myrmidon]

Are you suggesting allowing unrestricted immigration as long as there is a job offer?

That is simply not going to happen in the current political climate (and not under the next government either).

The whole problem from the local workers perspective is that H1B abuse depresses local wages because they now have to compete with other workers from poorer countries; eliminating bureaucracy, government provided job training or UBI does nothing to solve that problem.

[suraci]

There is a reason why the H1B exists

You are trying to kill the reason make it exist