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Comment by burnte | Hacker News Reader

You were "forced" to create fake job postings because your company engaged in immigration visa fraud, not because of immigration policy. Immigration policy does NOT state "you must put out a job posting and make up reasons you can't hire Americans." It states that you must look for Americans, and if you can't find them, then you may look at immigration visas. What your company decided to do, as many do, is they've already decided on getting cheaper immigrant workers, and then go through the fraudulent process to get them.

This is why people like me come out so vociferously against H1B caps being raised or removed. Fraud is rampant and I personally know people, US citizens, who have lost jobs to H1B people who get paid half as much.

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If my company has decided to replace me with someone cheaper, and they can't get an H1B, then they'll go for someone overseas, right? At least for tech jobs, it seems likely. With the H1Bs, income taxes are paid in the US, and the consumer base grows too. I'd hate to lose my job but why shouldn't I still prefer removing the H1B cap?

> then they'll go for someone overseas, right?

Yea, and those people can stay living overseas.

When they replace you with an H1B, then wages in America go down. I don't want that for my fellow Americans. When they outsource and the worker stays overseas, there's a lot of issues that crop up, and the company can learn to live with the time lag, potential quality or security issues, etc., or they can hire a local worker. As a citizen, my goal is to maximize my standard of living and the SOL for my fellow Americans. If that means a company has to spend more, I'm fine with that. Living is for human beings, not companies. Corporations exist to enrich people, not the other way around. Corporations have no rights we don't give them, and we can take them away at any time.

Is this maybe short-sighted? Wages for one particular role go down when the labor pool is larger, for sure. But how many new companies could exist given cheaper skilled labor, working on new products? I feel like growing the economy like this would, in the long run, be better for all workers' standard of living. This is an observation I've heard about free trade in general, not just for labor, that free trade benefits everyone but nobody in particular, and so is doomed to be unpopular.

international companies sometimes relocate their overseas staff to work in the US because a job may require very specialised knowledge difficult to get elsewhere. the worker may not agree to take the L1 visa for various reasons and would ask for H1B.

while such worker is indeed somewhat cheaper, the cost of not filling the position while they go through the legal process of obtaining the visa makes it on par.

so it is not all fraud.

Any time you go through motions to fulfill regulatory requirements that you have no intention of ACTUALLY abiding by is fraud. "difficult to get elsewhere" is not a sufficient reason to commit fraud. In fact, the regulations are explicitly there to make sure you can't just bring cheap people all around the world and lower wages elsewhere. If it's difficult to drag workers around, that's the entire point.

Well, it wasn't if they'd (the company) create the posting. It was whether or not GP would say yes, or say no and get fired so someone else can do it. Can't blame the messanger too much.

>they've already decided on getting cheaper immigrant workers, and then go through the fraudulent process to get them.

If it's truly banking talent, it lilely still isn't cheap. It's just talent that can't easily job hop in 1-2 years to a competing bank. It's a soft form of the anti-poaching agreements certain companies had over a decade ago.

Easiest way to mess that up for companies is to simply make a Visa applicable as long as that worker stays in the US sector of that industry. So the company does the work but gets no handcuffs. The idea of H1B's is to attract top talent, not hold them hostage at a single company.

>It was whether or not GP would say yes, or say no and get fired so someone else can do it

you can rationalize anything with this kind of logic

In a world where we live to work, yes. Not everyone can be a whistleblower

Just following orders

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