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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> - Startups and small businesses will get 20% of the visas. It'll be interesting to see how this is gamed

Probably the old fashioned way: Tata Startup Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Consulting Services.

And the hill staffers who wrote the bill will start up a consulting service on how to comply with the small business requirements.

Someone will be using a "startup company name" generator for these wholly owned subsidiaries and be filling out the paperwork for 50 of them all at the same time. No doubt to get a discount on the legal fees.

Is there a simple way to say in legalese "we want startups, but not 1. startups that have large companies as controlling interests at any remove, or 2. startups who exist to serve only one or two large companies"?

Sure, you'd exclude a few enterprise-B2B startups from your program, and startups that have been invested in "over a barrel" such that the founders no longer retain control, but you'd also filter out these ne'er-do-wells.

Not really, which is why I generally oppose special rules for startups. No way to make sure that it's bona fide startups using them.

Breaking news: The name generator is available there https://www.dotomator.com/web20.html

Sounds like automating creating startups and filling out paperwork for H1-Bs is a good idea for a startup.

I wrote about this earlier:

http://fightthefuture.org/articles/hr-170-will-all-large-com...

Basically bills like this will allow Tata, Wipro and others to just absorb all the talent within the industry. Some versions I've seen do restrict the wage increase to companies that have n% of their workers being H1-B employees, which seems a bit more reasonable.

But currently they take around 60% of all awarded visas, in the future they will be capped to 20% at most if they went the start up route.

While everyone seems to be focussing on TCS, Infosys etc, the worst abuse of H-1B comes from small staffing firms in US. I foresee them using the 20% set aside for startups.

true that!

Well the "startup" still has to pay roughly 15% (or whatever the number is) more than market rate, so this loophole won't work. They can't just reduce the salary once it's "acquired".

EDIT: Also this is one of three H1B related bills in Congress. I suppose there will be some compromise between them, considering that they are sponsored both by Republicans and Democrats.

Yep. When money is to be made they need no invitation.

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