Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program

A simple rule change that seems fair and will improve the view of American public towards H1B is visa bidding based on salary (as opposed to first-come, first-served).<p>Since H1B is supposed to bring in rare foreign talents to do the jobs not enough Americans are available to do, salary should reflect that. If only the highest paid people receive the visa, then the public would not complain as much about replacing American workers for wage reason.<p>(Even startups with limited budget often can afford $80,000 these outsourcing firms pay their top 25th percentile H1B employees. [1] For a technical co-founder role in a Bay area VC-backed startup, it should be higher still.)<p>Why has this obvious modification not been implemented? I suppose it does not need Congressional approval. Is it because the change would be against certain major corporate interests?<p>[1] Relevant infographics <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;us&#x2F;outsourcing-companies-dominate-h1b-visas.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;us&#x2F;outsourcing...</a><p>---<p>Response to objections:<p>Objections below regarding salary differences between fields (scientists vs bankers) and costs of living in different areas can be addressed by considering average salary in each field and area. For example, how much higher, in percentage terms, the minimum salary of the proposed H1B is, compared to the average of comparable positions in the same area. (Details need to be worked out, but the same is true for other important systems.)<p>Assistance to startups can be given using a point system (like Canadian visa) that grants extra points to applications from smaller companies. This extra benefit would also help level the playing field in terms of overhead costs which is a much larger burden for these companies.

Indian here who topped his university CS bachelor degree. 95% of my class (in a #1 state university) cheated their way through exams and don&#x27;t give a shit about the beauty of algorithms or programming. Today almost all of my classmates are in the US: thanks to H1B. I want to, but I could not: because I couldn&#x27;t afford to pay for a Masters degree in USA back then nor did I want to do the shit work that is offered in these consulting companies (TCS, Infosys). I ended up getting a MS and PhD in a top non-US university that funded me and I&#x27;m still finding it difficult to join a US company, thanks to H1B being gamed.<p>There are two ways to game the H1B, the NYT article covered only one of them. The other is the 20,000 visas given to those who finished a Masters&#x2F;PhD degree in USA. If they break out the numbers for these, they will find something that is an open secret known to all Indians: this 20K too is totally dominated by Indians.<p>Among my family and friends back in India, how to game the H1B&#x27;s other 20K visas is also an open secret. These mediocre-to-hopeless students from India just apply to some university in the US for a Masters. Either it is a shit-degree from a mediocre university or a shit-degree from a shit-university (most of them seem to be in Texas). Doesn&#x27;t matter. They get the admission, pay the fees, pass the course. Then they take internships to stay on after the degree, keep applying and taking interviews relentlessly until something works out. I believe they can stay on in the US for a few years by extending their visa in this way, until they get a H1B.

Oh wow. I&#x27;m the French engineer featured in this story, Theo Negri. Still trying to move back to the US. Hopefully this helps more than it hurts!

The problem with H1-B visa is that it&#x27;s entire premise does not make sense anymore in 2015 (perhaps it did when they started it way back whenever). Here is why.<p>It is supposed to be a visa for exceptionally skilled foreigners (and not just in IT) that companies should go look for <i>if</i> and <i>when</i> they cannot find suitable American citizens&#x2F;permanent residents for <i>similar</i> jobs.<p>Think about this. It is just so difficult to first prove this without really &quot;gaming&quot; it. So then starts the game.<p>The salary requirement or &quot;prevailing wage&quot; as they call it is again bullshit because it is very easy to meet that requirement.<p>Now the biggest issue which leads to severe exploitation specially by body shops: its ties to a specific employer and even though technically possible to switch jobs, it is almost impossible in practice.<p>If we need to reform any skilled visa process including H1B, it must include :<p>1. No ties to a specific employer. Make it merit based. If I can get it with one employer, let me switch to another one without too much hassle<p>2. Min. salary requirement may still be in place but then don&#x27;t make it the crap &quot;prevailing wage&quot;. The prevailing wage for Computer System Analysts in NY is average of $65000. Does that make any sense ? What does that even mean ? Who is a Computer System Analyst ?<p>3. Don&#x27;t make this a visa that is available when companies cannot find suitable americans for the same job. This is just not possible to prove without gaming. Instead, how about let anyone compete for the same job from across the world and let the employer decide who they want to hire.<p>4. Oh and last, have stricter standards for &quot;Service based companies&quot; or these third party contracting body shops. They should not be allowed.

The current gaming of H1 is pretty damaging. TCS, Cognizant are not employing any exceptional talent. Even in India, exceptional talent does not want to work for Outsourcing mega-corps for more than few years, just to break into the field of software. I have seen case after of case, of people getting offers from Microsoft, facebook etc. could not get H1. I have seen case after case of students from Ivy League or highly reputable universities lose out H1-Bs to some guys who can barely finish a cohesive sentence. I am seeing lot of students who are applying for community colleges after a Masters degree, just to hang in US for one more year to get another shot again at H1.<p>H1-B cannot be repaired, it has to be replaced.

This also kind of makes me sad. My cousin who works for one of the service based companies got the H1B and is now in the US. I consider myself if not better talented, more knowledgeable than him. I worked my ass off in college, got multiple offers from Google&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;Facebook and yet because of H1B, I had to work in India. The problem is not so much with being in India, but being distanced from the company HQ. I would&#x27;ve been so much better off had I worked at my company&#x27;s head quarters than in the Indian satellite office.

There&#x27;s one additional wrinkle that the story, in fact, gets wrong:<p>&gt; Federal officials allow only one application for each foreign worker.<p>That isn&#x27;t the case. An individual may have multiple H-1B petitions filed, provided they&#x27;re for different, unrelated employers. And indeed, it seems some people do pursue that route, accepting multiple offers, in order to boost their chances in an increasingly uncertain lottery. (In 2014, about half of the applications were selected; this year, about a third) And even if you&#x27;re lucky in the lottery, you face months of waiting and uncertainty - filing takes place on April 1, with lottery notifications going out in June and July, whereupon processing commences. (If you&#x27;re lucky enough to find a particularly good employer, they&#x27;ll add $1,225 to the already substantial fees and lawyer costs, for &quot;premium processing&quot;, guaranteeing a decision within 15 calendar days, though you still can&#x27;t start until Oct 1) Decisions then tend to come through in August and September - but, that&#x27;s not the end of it yet, as around a third to a half of all applications will hit the &quot;Request for Evidence&quot; status, which may query the company&#x27;s finances or legitimacy, the candidate&#x27;s education or experience, and so forth. That can take weeks more to file and then be acknowledged, whereupon processing resumes, for a decision in perhaps October or November.<p>Bear in mind, this is all for a process that likely started with interviews in January or February, to give enough time for the employer to gather the documentation required for filing.

Simpler answer: open offices outside of the US.<p>Amazon and Google both have big offices in Ontario (Toronto and Waterloo, respectively) which are growing quickly. Easier time with immigration issues, a low Canadian dollar (cheaper salary costs), and very low health-care costs for the company. Why would they not?<p><i>Bias note: I work at Amazon Toronto. (We are hiring! my username@amazon)</i>

EU-citizen here. TTIP should come with visa free movement of people earning more than x.<p>Screw H1-B. Can&#x27;t change jobs, can&#x27;t buy a house, can&#x27;t negotiate a raise.<p>We can argue if x = 50k, 75k, 100k. In principle it shouldn&#x27;t be more difficult for a professional person to re-settle than it is for a corporation.

Analysis of the H1B visa, and how it really helps big consulting firms, is incomplete without also looking at the perspective of the H1B visa holder. I think I can help, as I used to have one.<p>Why do people get H1B visas? It&#x27;s rarely because they want to work in the US for a few years: It&#x27;s because they want to stay. I know I did. But how can a prospective immigrant move to the US? By getting sponsored, and waiting for the requisite number of years for the Green Card to come back (it varies, but 5+ year waits happen). The best way to do that is to get an H1B, and then, when the company you work for realizes you are actually good at your job, start the permanent immigration process.<p>The trick is that you have to look for an employer that will take you, and you expect will still be there in 5+ years, and hoping that no layoffs hit you, because layoffs complicate, if not just completely restart, an immigration process.<p>So what do people do? They go with an outsourcer. The outsources will never lay you off: They just ship you to another client. It&#x27;s an extra layer of insurance if things go bad. So ultimately, the way the system is set up, getting an H1B through one of those big consulting&#x2F;outsourcing firms is also in the best interest of the people wanting to move to the US.<p>While I do not think there&#x27;s much agreement on how to solve the problem, regardless of whose interests we have in mind, it &#x27;s pretty clear that the system is broken, as it has all kinds of perverse incentives, forcing good, honest people into situations nobody likes. But to fix this, we need a major overhaul of how the US employment-based immigration works.<p>Now, the problem there is of the very diverse interests, which we can see on any tech website: Some people just want us immigrants out of here, thinking that will help them. Others want to increase immigration, thinking that the most qualified people are in the US, the better for the US tech industry. But if there&#x27;s no sensible compromise, what we get is what we have: A system that doesn&#x27;t serve anyone very well, much less the people like me who went through it. In my case, I was fortunate enough to come in back when any company could get an H1B if they showed they needed a programmer, and coming from a country with extremely high unemployment, the risks outweighed the rewards. But it was very frustrating to be economically tied to an employer (for about 6 years in my case), and knowing that a job switch in the middle of the green card process, or a layoff, could mean having to go back home.

immigrant here ... the one change that would make the h1b immediately useless to big companies, or at least make them play fairly is to allow h1b holders move between companies freely and file for a green card on their own (providing paystubs to prove employment) after 3 years instead of having to rely on the company to do it for them.<p>Right now if you lose a job on h1b, you have to live the country IMMEDIATELY. Can you imagine the kind of fear of losing your job that instills in a person who has been here even more than a few years? You&#x27;ll accept any injustice just if it guarantees you being able to stay and eventually get a green card.<p>The program has to be fixed&#x2F;updated.

This topic has been hashed through so many times and it&#x27;s always the same.<p>H1Bs are used to distort the costs for engineering, not for hiring skilled workers that we cannot find. The engineers are then treated like slaves (Infosys), and at below market rates, to further distort the market value of these workers.<p>So we know that the companies are just simply lying when they say, &quot;We can&#x27;t find US workers.&quot; It&#x27;s always, &quot;We can&#x27;t find US workers for what we want to pay.&quot; We know how they game it, and we know how it can be fixed, but the politicians simply won&#x27;t step up. It&#x27;s political suicide.<p>I&#x27;m glad that some people are poking at this problem, but the corporations are the ones with the deep pockets and we know who wins out there.<p>We can only rant and rave, send letters to deaf congressmen and yet, it seems like it&#x27;s just completely moot and we&#x27;re just plain ignored.<p>Sad state of affairs with easy fixes, but no political will. That&#x27;s the state of the US these days it seems: Corporation ruled.

Canadian IT consultant here, and I don&#x27;t even look at opportunities in the US anymore. I used to respond to the recruiters with &quot;Do you know I live in Canada&quot;, and the conversation would end (I think most of them don&#x27;t know Canada is not a State). Now I just delete them from my inbox. It&#x27;s next to impossible to cross the border for work as an independent. Big IT still sends resources across for projects, but I haven&#x27;t met any independents in years who have worked down south.

Rather than bidding for visas or other points-based systems or even abolishing H1Bs why not this:<p>For every H1B worker an employer must have at least one American working the same exact job making the same exact salary as the H1B worker.<p>Pair programming is a thing you know :)<p>A 1-to-1 ratio would solve the &quot;prevailing wage&quot; scams as well as the &quot;we can&#x27;t find any qualified workers&quot; nonsense because even if a company couldn&#x27;t find a &quot;qualified worker&quot; they would have to hire a US citizen and <i>train them</i> in that job (or I guess they could just pay them to sit but that&#x27;d be very wasteful).<p>What quicker way to end the &quot;skills gap&quot; than to force these supposed, &quot;uniquely high skilled&quot; foreigners to train their local American counterparts?

Not my circus not my monkeys but I find the public discourse around immigration pretty astonishing.<p>Somehow raising the H1B cap from 65K to say 100K would take away American jobs and drive down wages but legalizing few million illegal immigrants (many of whom are barely educated) is a humanitarian gesture ?<p>Even if those thousands are Chinese and Indians are willing to work for lower wages and aren&#x27;t technically special, they are indeed far more productive than illegal immigrants, have significantly lower crime rates and probably lowest reliance on welfare. Not to mention, higher you go up the skill level more people does not mean driving down wages on the contrary it means increase overall output of that industry.<p>Two engineers can invent a bike 5 can invent a car. On other other hand 1 gardener is useful 2 gardeners drive down wages of each other.<p>H1B and overall immigration policy of USA does not seem to be based on sound economic arguments but rhetoric. No wonder results are a disaster.

This article doesn&#x27;t even scratch the surface of how &quot;job consultancies&quot; game H1B. I know for a fact that these &quot;job consultancies&quot; apply for H1B for a person using their services, as an employee of more than one company. Employees needing sponsorship typically apply for H1B through the company they are actually working for and as employees of couple other companies that they don&#x27;t actually work for (the &quot;job consultancies&quot;). So effectively, the person&#x27;s probability of getting picked up in the lottery in a year is tripled.<p>Once they secure the H1B, the person is more than willing to resign from the current employer and work for these &quot;job consultancies&quot; temporarily. And since H1B transfer is not that complicated, they jump ship to any other company later.

I recently ran some entity-resolution code on the h1b applications from 2008-2012. Here are a list of the companies that Amazon has applied as:<p>[u&#x27;a2z computer services inc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon fulfillment services nc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z devleopment center inc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z signs&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon services llc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z consulting inc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z technologies llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon coporate llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon fulfillment services&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon media group llc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z signs llc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z healthcare services llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon technologies inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon web services&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z field services llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon pharmacy inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon produce network llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon mechanical turk inc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z medical supplies co&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon construction inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon produce network llp&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z global llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazoncom dedc llc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z mobile home services llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon fulfillment services inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon consulting corp&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon web servicse llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon studios inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon payments inc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z development center&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon cargo inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon fulfillment services llc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon watch&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon digital services inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon logistics group llc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z systems llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazoncom nvdc inc&#x27;, u&#x27;audible an amazon company&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon web services llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon captal services inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon fulfillment service inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon professional care&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon capital services inc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z development center inc dba lab126&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon corportate llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon society inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon electric fire alarm inc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z development center inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon global resources inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon corporate llc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon builders hardware inc&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon hut inc&#x27;, u&#x27;a2z development center inc dba amazon music&#x27;, u&#x27;amazon web services inc&#x27;]

Honestly, this is a sad thread, showing many US ideological biases in presumedly intelligent people.<p>Many pseudo-libertarians want to use central-planning to determine wages(!) of foreigners while criticizing the minimum wage.

I&#x27;m currently an visa holder, not H-1B though.<p>For me H1B has always been the standard option to get a work permit in US. If you have a college degree, skills and someone is willing to give you job, it&#x27;s a visa to work in US few of years or longer. For many people it&#x27;s pretty much the only option. In this time of global mobility, it&#x27;s crazy how hard and how limited the visa options are for this purpose.<p>Sometimes I see people talking here about moving to Europe. In Europe, there is a similar system for foreigners to work there. You apply for a work permit, and if the company and you meet the sanity check, it usually gets granted. That&#x27;s it. There is no artificial annual schedules, caps or lotteries.<p>Salaries Myth. Excluding those outsourcing companies, I&#x27;ve never saw or known anyone get hired in a startup with much less salary just because they are a non-resident alien (sample size ~100) (Obviously foreigners don&#x27;t always have as good market information about costs and salaries as locals.). Also I never heard any founder say that lets hire bunch of foreigners because it&#x27;s so cheap and easy. Usually the hires end up costing more since you have to pay to relocate, pay the lawyers, and a hr person to create and manage process for the employees.<p>I understand that lot of people want to come to US, so there needs to be some limits, but it&#x27;s crazy how hard or complicated this system currently is.

As usual with H1B discussions, most of commentators here are full of hidden xenophobia.<p>Almost nobody voices the interest of foreigners who struggle to get better paying jobs in their countries (just keep these foreigners out of here, so we can squeeze an extra dime from our fat employers).

The H1B abuse discussion comes up once every few months on HN and elsewhere but things have gotten a lot worse in the past 2 years with the lottery. There are a number of definitive and progressive steps that USCIS can take to prevent misuse by TCS, CTS and other consulting companies.<p>Just establishing a cap on the number of visas per company as a percentage of the workforce will solve this issue. This will work well for everyone (large tech companies, startups, small businesses) except the sweatshops. If i had to take a guess (not hard to verify), 95+% of employees of the consulting companies will be underpaid visa workers. The prevailing wage is a joke ($70k in the bay area for someone with 5 years experience) and enforcing salary based bidding isn&#x27;t really a practical solution. It can easily be gamed or it will only be beneficial for a certain group of employers.<p>I wrote an essay two and half years back on how to fix this and it is sad that all those are still true <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ramanuj.me&#x2F;fixing-the-high-skilled-immigration-problem.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ramanuj.me&#x2F;fixing-the-high-skilled-immigration-proble...</a>

Does anyone mention that these companies usually file multiple H-1B for the same person? That one of the major reason how Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) like companies get so much visas, and which is unfair to others.

How about we just get rid of immigration caps and other restrictions? Limit the amount of public benefits that recent immigrants can receive and open the borders. An infusion of ambitious and hard-working immigrants has always done wonders for this country. Let&#x27;s recapture that frontier spirit of rugged individualism. Let&#x27;s tell the world: &quot;This is the place where your hard work can make a better life for you and your family. Where you control your own destiny. America is open for business again.&quot;<p>Edit: To clarify, I&#x27;m talking about immigration policy in general, not just H1Bs. The reason to limit public benefits would be to, in the absence of restrictions on immigration, ensure that people are coming to work, not to live off the state. Public benefits in the US pay better than most jobs in a lot of countries. We shouldn&#x27;t stick our heads in the sand and pretend that such incentives don&#x27;t matter.

H1-B is a massive corporate subsidy, even Milton Friedman says so.<p>H1-B doesn&#x27;t need to be reformed, or improved with half measures like changes to the visas being awarded based on salary, etc.<p>H1-B needs to be abolished. Those employers that need extraordinary talent can use the O1 visa and the rest of the employers and employees can let supply meet demand. As it is now the H1-B&#x2F;F1 OPT corporate loophole is skewing the education system (American universities share some of the blame) so bad that american students aren&#x27;t able to get seats at American universities, and the &quot;talent shortage&quot; (which there isn&#x27;t) becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.<p>If I were a smart, aware 18 year old person trying to decide what field of study I was interested in with a focus on career longevity and life time earnings, I sure as heck would not pick computer science, and I don&#x27;t blame them.

The simple way to fix this is to remove the indentured servitude. In a fair market, labor is free to move around. Overnight, the incentive for companies to hire H1Bs go out the door, because all the advantages of doing so (below market servitude for years) disappears.

This is a very well known issue that has been brought up before. The NYT Piece has a basic error: the case highlighted of Mr. Négri - His H1-B Visa was not Denied (which would imply that his case was processed), it was returned without being accepted.<p>There are also two well know tweaks that can take the perverse incentives out of the H1-B system:<p>1) Allow the H1-B to be a work permit with free movement between like jobs at other companies - this will reduce underpayment and remove the virtual slave-labor conditions of an H1-B holder<p>2)Reform the Labor Certification process (the precursor allowing you file) so that it actually ensures that no Americans can be found - the current state of the LC system is a joke.

Re: H1Bs and STEM. Specifically Research positions. While an anecdotal observation at the beginning, I was able to review some of the numbers via the H1B Data site (which I believe I found through here) to get a feel for if my hunch had any merit.<p>What struck me is that there is a very, very large public outcry that US students need to get into STEM fields, and that &quot;the US is falling behind in reserach science!&quot; is a genuine problem. Well, I do think that&#x27;s true, but in practice, I see a push toward a corporate business model treating cheap labor as preferable to sustainable business practices.<p>As in, I&#x27;m not delusional that research science in the US is a glamorous, higly-paid industry for which people are clamoring to get in due to greed. To my understanding, most people understand following their academic dreams isn&#x27;t a path to becoming wealthy. However, it does appear that US research institutions are very comfortable with claiming more students are needed in research science, more graduates are needed...and then they drive the standard of living down by seeking out H1Bs to fill everyday positions, such as Research Associates.<p>I wish I had the skills and or time to put such a theory to the test using various data sources (H1B data, graduation statistics, BLS information as available, etc), but for now it&#x27;s simply one of those suspicions that I&#x27;ve developed due to personal observation; it may be overly skeptical of the system, but that&#x27;s kind of the point. I like context.

Lets look at this problem. 20K visas are gamed every year. Lets assume polices in place made them unable to game the system, we might have save as much as 8OK jobs say here in the USA (assuming 3 jobs from India are also moved back to US in addition to the one in US). But people who know economics say that is not a big deal or the source of American economic woes, it is the decimation of manufacturing and millions of jobs having gone to China + Korea + Indonesia + India +...rest of the world. It is globalization.<p>So why is this not talked about? The reason being: unlike H1B visas they are not easily quantified in terms of number of &quot;human jobs&quot; even though they are a factor of magnitude larger I would reckon. However, they can be measured by trade deficit that America builds up( because the money goes to that country) and you are right about which country America has the highest trade deficit with US (worth millions of jobs in USA).<p>So H1B visa is really a small fry, but delicious fry and easy catch and an easy problem to describe and easy to vilify.<p>Also, if the H1B visas were completely eliminated, its not like those jobs may stay in the US forever, companies may find alternate strategies to get less &quot; important &quot; work done by foreigners.

In addition to what has already been said, the H1B visa system drives wages down.<p>All of the foreign nationals I worked with could not negotiate a higher salary by changing jobs. Their employer owns their visa, so they can&#x27;t just get a better job.<p>Big companies game the system. We should change the law. The individual should be able to take their H1B elsewhere like a green card.

Wait, Amazon applies for L1 Visas. Do they offer H1B? It is given that they&#x27;ve filed for 700+ H1B&#x27;s.

What&#x27;s so good about US that someone would like to work there and not UK for example?

An outsourcing firm was fined by the DOJ in 2013 for alleged visa fraud: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;top-10-companies-request-visas-foreign-workers&#x2F;story?id=20730536" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Business&#x2F;top-10-companies-request-visa...</a><p>Note also how some of these companies spend millions of dollars in lobbying each year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opensecrets.org&#x2F;lobby&#x2F;clientsum.php?id=D000000786&amp;year=2015" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opensecrets.org&#x2F;lobby&#x2F;clientsum.php?id=D00000078...</a>

You can fill any job without H-1B if you put in enough money (you may need a bit too much though).<p>The bigger the shortage, the bigger the spread of salary between americans and foreigners salaries. So, if a company doesn&#x27;t get the visa it will pay the spread, or worse, it will produce less.<p>Minimizing the total loss of the companies under a constraint of total number of visas is a very simple problem mathematically speaking: by selling H1B visas to the highest bidders.<p>Plus, it means that these companies are compensating society for bringing more job competition.

Large companies game pretty much everything, thanks to things like regulatory capture and the fact that they have the resources and the incentive to do so. I&#x27;m coming around to the idea that as a philosophy, capitalism doesn&#x27;t work in the face of companies past a certain size (Adam Smith thought that they would be too inefficient to survive, which is why he didn&#x27;t pay them too much mind). I don&#x27;t know what to do with this thought though.

Why not just increase the fees for companies that are filing a lot of H1B applications? For example, they could charge 4000$ per application for the first 100 applications and then increase it to say $8000 or $10000. Companies that are taking advantage of this, would be discouraged due to the higher fees. At the very least, it would bring down the number of applications from these companies and would increase the chances of other smaller companies.

I have another &quot;simple&quot; idea: modify the lottery to distribute the visas more evenly.<p>Step 1: Randomize the list of employers with applicants.<p>Step 2: Give one visa to each employer in a round-robin fashion until they are exhausted or they have no more applicants. The company then decides which of its applicants gets the visa.<p>Assuming that there are fewer than 65k employers petitioning each year, each employer could count on at least 1 petition succeeding.

Simple short term solution would be to pay special attention to applications coming from Wipro&#x2F;Infosys&#x2F;TCS and not treat them same as applicants from Google&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;Amazon. This will sure improve the odds for the next year&#x27;s lottery.<p>And eradicate consultancies for the love of God. The relationship should not be Employee-to-Employer&#x27;s payroll. Instead it should be Employee-to-Employer&#x27;s product.

What&#x27;s the point of putting a cap on highly skilled exceptional labor? The US is in a unique position in the world where it can absorb the very best people from around the world. Surely these people are not going to be a drain on the public funding system or social services. Just let them come in and work for american corporations.

All complicated legal systems are built by lawyers to be gamed by lawyers. I guess there&#x27;s some value in generating outrage about it in that there are ad impressions to sell, but as lawyers run the government for their own benefit foremost, expect no meaningful changes.

This breeds mediocrity. It creates problems for both sides - USA where talent gets sidelined for less costly resources and it promotes mediocre-go-onsite culture back in countries like India - and talent gets discounted&#x2F;demoralised back there too.

Any system based on bureaucratic rules rather than market forces is going to get gamed.

This can be fixed by forcing companies to pay H-1B&#x27;s the same wage as local hires and allow them to quit and move on to other companies if they&#x27;re unhappy. The benefit to companies would disappear, and so would H-1B.

It seems like the lottery should be weighted in favor of more companies getting the visas instead of being totally random, although I suppose that system is also not immune to gaming.

A question, how long does it take for &quot;rest of the world&quot; engineers with H1B visa to get Green card from the day they apply? Assume it is EB2.

Say it ain&#x27;t so! What, our corporations use immigration to triage short term problems instead of being forced to come up with long term solutions by closing down immigration and forcing corporations and government to come up with a solution to educate our own people??? Yeah, I know, screw those mostly black poor people in underserved communities, we&#x27;ll just continue importing talent and siphoning it off of other countries to solve immediate impediments to extracting profits.

Capping the visa limit per company should do it. I am sure the loophole has been lobbied in .

So by &quot;game&quot;, you mean they submit the applications early? Not sure if I follow.

In other news, water is wet.

Trump is the only candidate who wants to make it fair for H1Bs and Americans.<p>Let&#x27;s make America great again, for all people!

&quot;prevailing wage&quot;<p>Only in la la land does massively increasing the supply of labor maintain the wage rates.<p>Sand Hill Road : 7<p>Garage Startup : 0

Large companies game everything they can. If they&#x27;re public companies, their directors are required to.

The entire H1B system is a &quot;game&quot; for big business<p>There is no way they cannot find people already in the USA to fill those positions, they just don&#x27;t want to pay full wages&#x2F;benefits.

&quot;“I would expect most people would feel Atulya was making a positive contribution to the U.S. economy,” he said. “There is no American who could do his job. Without Atulya, there would be no company.”<p>Wow, you are one BART bus away from being gone. I can see making a statement like this in your request to have someone come and in their application to be a citizen. But if your entire business model depends on one person you should get another smart person to shadow them to have some kind of backup plan. I&#x27;d be scared to death to be an employee where my future depended on them being alive and healthy.