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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

I want them auctioned by how much you pay the person hired. Want top talent, a million ensures you win and they get compensated well. Want cheap labor - train someone locally as you won't win the auction.

there is the downsides of what if they treat the emplopee baddly, of the emblopee commits fraud - I'm not sure how to handle that. However I still think the idea is right despite that issue.

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Salary based auctions would also create a perverse incentive to pressure employees for kickbacks.

"We could pay you more and ensure you're able to get that visa, but then we'd need you to pay 20% of your salary back..."

There will always be unscrupulous companies trying to game the system, you just need to sue them into complying. Auctioning is generally the right idea, auction and make kickbacks illegal with regulation etc. My intuition if you auction 85,000 slots in US H1b, the average H1b salary will be around 250,000$. As you reduce the slots, the average will keep going higher. Reducing or increasing the slots can depend on the labor need for the economy.

> make kickbacks illegal with regulation etc

Its already illegal, you just don't know how India behaves. The body shops in the US don't even behave legally in US, how are you going to get the behavior controlled in India?

Use the action to set the fee to the government, set a salary floor, and hold like 50% of the fee money in escrow that gets refunded back to the company after 5 years provided they retained the employee and tax records indicate the employee was paid at least at the floor level (something like 1.5x the median salary for the that position in that area).

I would simply make it illegal for employees to give money to their own employers while receiving nothing in return.

That something is illegal doesn't stop it from happening, especially at unmonitored scale.

How about "behave or you need to move your company elsewhere if you ever want foreign workers of any kind again."

Just ban organizations caught playing games (that is: "I'll know it when I see it" for labeling) and the ban should include not contracting consultancies that hire foreigners and maybe attached to anyone with feduciary duty as well. It would be very effective.

Surely there is a ceiling for talent you can expect from H1-B, since top talent will get an O1 instead.

If you read the article, that’s pretty much what its going to

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