Auction, auction, auction - but not with fees, with salaries.<p>Set a cap on number of entrants, and then "auction" the slots. Adjust the cap on entrants annually. No showing of specific market need required, or educational background of the applicant. Just criminal background and health checks on the applicant.<p>The bid is the (gross) pay of the role with a minimum commit of 36 months. Winning bids are paid to the <i>employee</i> (i.e. as regular income) over the first 36 months or until their employment with the sponsor ends, whichever comes first. (The fee paid is de minimis, just what's required for processing.)<p>Employees who voluntarily quit or are terminated are free to take any other job paying at least what the sponsor's job paid, provided they do so within 3 months. The new employer does not need to bid or sponsor them. If the employee can't find a new role, they have to leave. In any case sponsor then pays the remaining bid/salary to the government over the remainder of the 36 month term.<p>After 5 years keeping your nose clean and remaining employed making more than the starting pay at entry, get a green card and eligibility to apply for naturalization.<p>At a stroke this would eliminate the abuses of H1-B - lowball salaries, exploitative conditions - and open a legitimate market for global talent. The sponsor has a strong incentive to vet the applicant and not abuse them, as they are on the hook for 3 years of comp whether or not they retain them.
A someone who benefited from the H1-B program I’m 100% behind the idea of adding higher wages requirements.<p>I went to Carnegie Mellon and met some of the smartest people there and it crushed my heart seeing some super talented people lose on the lottery several times and be forced to go back home when they already had an employer in the US paying them 100k+ and willing to go great lengths to keep them.<p>I was lucky enough to get a visa in my first lottery draw, but that was the only reason I got to do what others couldn’t. Luck.<p>They lost against those consulting companies that exploited the program with impunity for years.<p>So the QZ article author here is wrong. Whoever is the next US president, this is the best thing that could have happened to the H1-B program.
The visa is meant to give highly talented people an opportunity to fulfill their potential by participating in the US economy, while also benefiting America.<p>Sadly it has been aggressively abused by some companies to bring cheap labor into the US, actually undermining the local skilled labor system (eg why bother training Americans).<p>H1-B does indeed need reform, and that does mean an end to the 'good old days' (good for who, though).<p>All IMHO - I'm not even American, or Indian.
You can take all kinds of policy positions on a campaign, but any president cannot really do much to the H1B system without passing laws. Passing a new immigration bill is very hard since there are so many competing interests benefiting from the status quo and there is very little to gain electorally.<p>The current administration tried using executive action and regulatory approaches to fulfil their agenda and both keep getting struck down in courts. The new upward revision in wage levels are also expected to have the same fate. There is simply very little regulatory leeway on H1B visas since they are encoded in law.<p>It is highly unlikely for a democratic administration to spend political capital changing H1B when they have bigger priorities (healthcare).<p>At the end of the day, Indians are the only affected population on H1B due to backlogs and aren't a strategic voting bloc for democrats. Everyone else gets a green card in a couple of years anyways. They are more focused on undocumented and family based immigration.<p>A broken immigration system and the H1B status quo is expected to last for a while unless there are external factors (collapse in international student numbers, US emigration, US companies moving jobs out of the country) forcing action.
How is wage-based visa allocation denying entry-level applicant visas a bad thing? If there are entry level roles to be filled they should be filled locally since they're low skill/experience by definition.<p>If you're going to develop talent you should develop local talent. The deal is that you give foreigners the opportunity because they offer valuable skills.
I don’t understand why USCIS and other tech forums spend so much time and energy on H-1B rules.<p>How is it possible that 85K non immigrants with no rights are blamed for decimation of entire tech sectors.<p>For comparison , the US allows one million immigrants (green card holders ) every year into the United States . Most of these immigrants come over in the family based immigration category. They are free to take any job, start any business and do any legal activity as US citizens.<p>Yet it is the H-1B visa holders that are blamed for lowering of wages in the tech and engineering sectors and we spend a lot of political energy to make life difficult for them.<p>Also whenever articles related to H-1B are posted, the most upvoted comments are usually comments that point to gross changes to the H-1B program. Those are just pipe dreams. There has been no meaningful legislation changes to H-1B program in over two decades and I don’t think that there is political capital to make those changes .
Every time H1b comes on HN, I see people making the same arguments over and over again.<p>It’s a topic that never fails to provoke. I also wonder if it’s a different set of commenters each time..
“I am hearing from many constituents, who have been waiting over ten years, for a green card“ -<p>Constituent - “ any of the voters who elect a person to represent them.”<p>H1B are not US citizens, and politicians considering them their “constituents” are misrepresenting their true constituents interests.
Thank God. H1-B is a dishonest, abusive program that preys on both foreign and native workers. Some of the arguments in this article arguing against a higher wage floor for visa holders are extremely weak.<p>I'm in favor of a much fairer immigration program (starting with not tying a visa-holder to an employer), and H1-Bs in their current form are not it.
The H1 reform is a great move. The current H1B program made no sense at all.
If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or<p>A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop<p>my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
I encourage all US voters to have a good look at all the available candidates.<p>Besides clear political positions, there are differences in diversity, including a woman on the ticket.<p>Cast your vote!
3/4 of all H1Bs are going to Indians. Having some level of diversity from other countries doesn’t sound like a bad idea. On top of it, most of those H1bs are from Indian body shops gaming the system which is how they get so many H1Bs in the first place. So I’m okay with these changes.