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I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

183 points proberts | 2 comments | 17 Oct 24 16:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source

I'll be here for the few hours and then again at around 1 pm PST for another few hours. As usual, there are countless possible topics and I'll be guided by whatever you're concerned with. Please remember that I can't provide legal advice on specific cases for obvious liability reasons because I won't have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and comments and I'll try to do the same in my answers. Thanks!

Previous threads we've done: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts.

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gangstead ◴[17 Oct 24 17:19 UTC] No.41871598[source]▶
One idea to replace the H1-B lottery that I've seen on HN is to sort the applications by salary and let in the top XX highest paid.

Do you have any thoughts on that? Is this one of those "why don't they just..." type of ideas that people with first hand knowledge know is majorly flawed?

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1. pnw ◴[17 Oct 24 21:09 UTC] No.41873823[source]▶
US residency and citizenship is in extremely high demand, so whatever immigration system is put in place will ultimately be gamed. Creating a visa category that is solely based on salary would be attractive to some cohort of people who want to live in the US regardless of the costs.

We saw similar things with previous "investor visas" where there was no intention to start a business and the USCIS had to stop issuing them for many years because of the pervasive fraud on both sides of the equation. I can guarantee that some creative lawyer out there was already thinking about how to game the US "startup visa" when that was proposed a few years back.

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2. kccqzy ◴[18 Oct 24 00:40 UTC] No.41875289[source]▶
A salary-based requirement is a lot less easy to game. After all salaries are reported to the IRS on W-2s. Any fraud in the amount of salary can be easily detected without sophisticated investigation.

The only difficulty I see is that salary isn't necessarily proportional to a person's usefulness to the economy or the country. A person can start a company and pay himself a million dollars a year while the person and the company does nothing at all. Sure the IRS gets to collect a bunch, but at that point we might as well create a class of visas that are sold in an auction.