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Comment by beeboop | Hacker News Reader

An obvious solution to this I've heard of before is to make the minimum salary for H-1B workers to be very high. Over six figures. If the talent is really so rare and difficult that you can't get it in the US, surely that talent is worth spending more money on. Any reason this would be unfair?

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This has been discussed ad infinitum

eg:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11188243

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224910

Yes, because that minimum would be lobbied and lobbied to be eroded away. It's a lever for the government to pull at their whim, much like they are doing with the H-1B end run program, OPT.

I don't see it as unfair; I'd almost assert that to stay within compliance of the process the applying company must show proof that one or more US Citizens were offered the job and are willing to attest that the salary is market competitive. Essentially I don't think the program is very well policed / regulated.

Why not "auction" them? Ie, allocate them to the positions companies are willing to pay the most for in descending order.

You'd have to require that the company keep that salary in place for some number of years to prevent abuse, but that seems reasonable enough.

How far down does "descending" go? It'd be a race to the bottom.

Or at least apply the same limits as other forms of immigration

It's called a tariff. They're an incredibly blunt tool and they're generally not a good way to make anything "fair".

Also the rarity of a skill does not necessarily correlate to its economic output. So you would reduce the supply of workers for an arbitrary number of industries where wages are not higher than that number you just pulled out of a hat.

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