[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.