Comment by lovich

Comment by lovich 6 hours ago

I’d be fine, as a citizen competing against migrants for jobs, if h1bs were structured so that they

A: were the top end pay, so they pushed the pay scale up

B: were uncoupled from employment. A company could pay the cost to let someone enter, but that person should be able to jump jobs day 0.

I’m not suggesting the specific implementation but I feel like if those two guiding directives were kept, both society and the individual workers would benefit from brain draining the rest of the planet while simultaneously pushing worker comp higher.

Has anyone suggested a significant change to the h1b system like this beyond just a close it all/open it all binary?

pandaman 5 hours ago

It's fine to have various aspiration for H-1B but the issue in the topical article is, ultimately, with businesses defrauding the United States and getting away with it. Meta got barred from filing PERM for several months and ended up paying $4.75M, which is probably less than it spends for catering per month. Nobody got disbarred, nobody went on trial, so it's just a tiny cost of doing business.

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lovich 5 hours ago

This is off the cuff game theory, so please feel encouraged to poke holes in it.
Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
I would also expect this to result in massively less immigration for the same reasons companies are loathe to train entry level employees nowadays as they can jump ship as soon as they become valuable

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- pandaman 4 hours ago
  
  >Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee?
  I don't see how. As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed? It is already so. Of course, H-1Bs are not the only way foreign labor is imported, L-1s, for example, cannot change jobs and there is no limit on them and every big corp in the US has an office in Canada, where they hire foreigners from all over the world and move them on L-1s to the US, it's much easier and cheaper than H-1B.
  However, the fraud here is: a) committed by a US business, not a foreigner and b) is not related to any non-immigrant visa such as H,L,or O are. It's a fraud in immigration process. And the immigration is the expected perk of working for a company on a temporary visa. If companies stopped filing for immigration then they would not be able to hire as many temporary visa employees.
  
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  lovich 3 hours ago
  
  > As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed?
  No explicitly not that. I want whoever sponsors and h1b or the equivalent in my fantasy world here to pay for the cost to society up front and then for that h1b person to have the same freedom as a citizen.
  My thinking behind that is that if a company is saying we can not find a single citizen who can fill this role so we need to import one, then this makes it real. If that argument is true then I want said immigrant to be in the workforce with the same rules that I have, instead of being a second class citizen which makes them more attractive to companies because they are cheaper/more controlled
  I believe that allowing for the corporation hiring said h1b to have any say, direct or indirectly, in said h1bs ability to remain in the market will necessarily make them an employee that US companies prioritize.
  The only way to stop that, from my current understanding, is to make it so that corporations have to pay the cost to add a person to society, but have no say in the decision making process after.
  Upon review of my post and thinking through why I feel that way, I realized I just want the same deal applied to corporations for bringing in new entrants to society as is applied to people marrying foreigners.
  I married someone outside the country and as part of their green card application I was required to commit myself to personally covering their social security checks if they divorced me before they made, iirc the exact number was 40, enough payments into social security.
  Somehow companies aren’t required to have that level of skin in the game
  
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