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Comment by guitarbill | Hacker News Reader

What I don't get is why they don't just raise the minimum pay for H1-B visas. It might not fix all issues for this type of visa in the long run. But the fact that the minimum pay was set in 1989 seems like an obvious issue to me. This would seem to be corroborated by the numbers.

The lottery system is arguably the worst part of it, it punishes companies who carefully and rigorously select candidates and rewards companies who "spam" applications. Again, while not perfect, compensation is probably an okay proxy for how selective the interview process is.

Apart from the people abusing the system, who is against a market rate/inflation adjustment? I have no stake in this, but I really don't understand.

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>"What I don't get is why they don't just raise the minimum pay for H1-B visas."

That was a key part of Trump's proposed bill. IRRC, the proposal is to increase the minimum from $60k to $130k. Interestingly $60k in 1989 was worth what $117k is in 2017. In other words, given current inflation rates, it's very likely that the new minimum will be the 2020 or 2021 equivalent of the original minimum.

That would suck for low-end outsourcing body shops, be good for the giant SV tech companies and probably remain about equally sucky for young start-ups as it is now.

Startups have never really benefited from the H-1B system anyways -- they rarely have the resources to discover and interview candidates from outside the country, nor are they willing to wait 6+ months for a visa application to be reviewed, especially when there's a good chance that it may be randomly rejected.

I think you might be ignoring the international students who graduate from US universities? They also need to go through the H1-B process.

This ignores the wild disparity in wages across the US.

Not every company is in a place where they can find enough local customers to support a 2x increase in their salary costs. While that has been made somewhat better by the reach of the Internet it's still going to be a powerful force to move companies from lower density areas where it's almost impossible to recruit, and into high density areas that already have the bulk of the talent and customers.

You're effectively fucking middle America into relocating both their people and businesses.

> You're effectively fucking middle America into relocating both their people and businesses.

Some Australian visas have a condition that you must spend 2 years in a regional area, maybe the US and its states can have the condition that you must work in some certain regions for X years.

>"You're effectively fucking middle America into relocating both their people and businesses."

I haven't taken anyone's job, I'm sensitive to wage disparities, I support companies letting people work remotely and I'm not doing anything at all to middle America.

Most of the problem with middle America not having jobs is brain drain.

There's no jobs because it's very hard to find people to fill key roles.

But there's no people to fill key roles because there's no longer any jobs, and they're in more populous centers.

If you're pushing policy that prices the few businesses there out of the remaining pools they can hire from, you might as well just close up the middle of the country and admit defeat.

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