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1245 points mriguy | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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cogman10 ◴[] No.45306123[source]
IMO, the fee is the wrong thing that needs adjusting. It's the salary that should be adjusted. The minimum salary for an H1B should be $200k. It's something like 50k right now which is ridiculous especially with all the restrictions an applicant is under. It both suppresses wages and abuses the worker.
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dbish ◴[] No.45306145[source]
Why not both?
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cogman10 ◴[] No.45306195[source]
Because I don't really want to penalize a company for bringing in foreign labor. If a company can't find someone for a specific job or role then I don't care if they go abroad to find that person.

What I care about is the current system isn't being used to find hard to find labor, it's used to bring in cheap labor in an abusive situation.

We as a nation are really better off if we bring in the best in the world to work here with a cushy salary.

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1. llm_nerd ◴[] No.45306295[source]
>If a company can't find someone for a specific job or role then I don't care if they go abroad to find that person

It was never, ever that they "can't find someone".

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2. victorbjorklund ◴[] No.45306364[source]
If country has 10 qualified people but 15 positions to fill you cant find it by just hiring in the country. Then you just end up with a circle where the people move around.
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3. llm_nerd ◴[] No.45306634[source]
Yes, I also can make up imaginary math. 6 is bigger than 3. But 9 is less than 12.

There are extraordinarily few roles handed out to H1Bs where there aren't enormous numbers of domestic options. Indeed, by far the biggest users of H1Bs in tech are shitty consulting firms like Cognizant, Infosys and Tata doing absolute garbage, low skill development.

Yes, there are exceptions. There are truly unique talents in the AI space, for instance. Not someone to build Yet Another agent, but someone who actually understands the math. They are extraordinarily rare in that program. And for those exceptional talents, a $100K fee would be completely worth it. But they aren't going to pay it for an army of garbage copy-paste consultant heads.

In actual reality it's just a way to push down wages by forcing Americans to compete with the developing world in their own country. In Canada we have "TFWs" filling the same role. It is a laughably unjustified, massively abusive program.