10 ms·

The H1B as it is has many problems, but a big salary floor is not the way to go in my opinion. Remember H1B is not just for tech workers. If you want to hire, s

The H1B as it is has many problems, but a big salary floor is not the way to go in my opinion. Remember H1B is not just for tech workers. If you want to hire, say, an interpreter of a specific foreign language to work on a community in rural Alabama temporarily, a $100,000 minimum wage would be absurd. They instead need to go after the companies that learned to game the system. I'm not sure what the solution is here. A point/demand-based system like other countries have is probably wise, but given the share of mind the US still has in potential emigrants worldwide, and the breadth of different positions available, it'd be a pretty complex (and likely unfair) one.

peterchon 10y ago
I think that's an edge case that is < .01% of what the H1-B visa is used for. The problem is that 99% of H1-B is being used as most people have described, which is undercutting the market value of engineers.
jordanb 10y ago
Many nations have special visa categories for native speakers of foreign languages working as teachers. If that's really a problem then having something like that would probably make more sense. Usually when I here someone critique the salary floor it's in reference to poorly paid scientists or biologists, as if it's a law of nature that these people should be poorly paid.
542458 10y ago
> If you want to hire, say, an interpreter of a specific foreign language to work on a community in rural Alabama temporarily, a $100,000 minimum wage would be absurd. Wow, that's a really important point. I'm so in the tech-news bubble that I'd never heard anybody say that before - thanks for pointing that out!
- edge17 10y ago
  http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=OC http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp...
  - LeifCarrotson 10y ago
    Wow. I knew the H1B category was biased towards large companies, but I didn't realize it was so bad. The first cultural, linguistic, or otherwise geographically-constrained job in the list is #84, "Foreign Language And Literature Teachers." "Interpreters and Translators" is down at #131, with a grand total of 268 applicants - practically a rounding error after 300,000 tech applicants. Whatever_dude's example seems so appropriate, that it's shocking to see it so far down the list.
    - edge17 10y ago
      It's like anything, there's a whole ecosystem involved - which includes having a lot of money to pay the right lawyers that know how to navigate the system properly. I've seen companies hire the wrong lawyers and, after promising the individual that everything would come through, end up having to tell the person that the application was denied.
    - bostonpete 10y ago
      > Wow. I knew the H1B category was biased towards large companies, but I didn't realize it was so bad. Where does that page say anything about large companies?
  - sharemywin 10y ago
    sounds like each job class needs it's own minimum.
    - mavelikara 10y ago
      Which is what the current rule - the one based on prevailing wages - tries to address. Minor tweaks to it - for e.g. using the mean of the top 1/3rd of the salaries surveyed - will accomplish what you ask for, IMO.
      - sharemywin 10y ago
        wonder if that shouldn't be by city since salaries very so much by geography.
- secfirstmd 10y ago
  Yeah, or what about those of us in the NGO and non-profit sector who need people with specific regional skills/knowledge/experience and/or folks (including tech people) who prefer to take a slightly lower salary because they want to work with us on important stuff? We've had to sort visas on a number of occasions for people. $100,000 would be like one of the highest ever non-profit salaries!
  - sharemywin 10y ago
    Sounds like each job class needs it's own salary minimum.
  - gnopgnip 10y ago
    The salary floor is when the business does not have to prove they did not first search for openings in the US. If you want to hire someone with extremely specialized skills for under 60k(or $130k as proposed by the new bill) a year you have to at least try to recruit in the US first.
- testUser69 10y ago
  If an interpreter is so rare that one can't be found in the US and they need to be hired internationally, then maybe it's worth it to pay $100,000?
  - whatever_dude 10y ago
    "It's worth it" only applies if a company is directly going to make a ton of money out of that person. Not every company operates like that. I know it's hard to believe, or even comprehend, in the tech world.
  - untog 10y ago
    Obviously we can't know what the organisation doing the hiring is like in this fictional scenario, but $100k would be a huge, huge amount for non-senior staff in rural Alabama no matter what. The problem with a hard salary floor is that it doesn't account for differences in cost of living at all. It would very quickly become the visa of coastal cities and little else.
    - googletazer 10y ago
      Then they can't afford to run. I'd also love to bring say professional 3D modellers and animators from Eastern Europe or Brazil and pay then 20k CAD/year, but thats not how reality works. All of these programs (hb1/etc...) are basically wage arbitrage schemes and have little to do with presence/absence of talent.
      - untog 10y ago
        There is no universal H1B salary. Translators do not earn as much as developers, in general. People living in Alabama do not earn as much as those working in Silicon Valley, in general. H1B applications go through a "labor condition application" for this exact reason - the government approves the salary, based on industry and location. Therefore, you can't bring 3D developers to Silicon Valley and pay them $20k. But you might be able to bring a translator to rural Alabama. If the aim of the H1B program was to bring in the highest possible paid workers, you'd be correct. But it isn't. These programs are designed in such a way that all states can benefit from them, and a variety of professions.
- Retric 10y ago
  I disagree. If you are not willing to pay 100k then finding someone is not the problem. You just don't want to pay market rates. The point of H-1B is when salary is not the problem. PS: Remember, someone on an H-1B can leave your employment. Paying market rates is supposed to keep that from happening, thus the intent is to remove a shortage not lower pay.
  - refurb 10y ago
    So you're argument is that it's impossible for their to be an actual shortage of US workers unless the salary exceed $100K?
    - NhanH 10y ago
      I am not the GP, and I do not agree with the statement. However, I have seen it being made numerous times: any shortage of US workers just means the companies are not paying enough (their argument being, try to pay $1mil and you will certainly fill your positions, this is just very minor exaggeration)
      - refurb 10y ago
        I see the thought process, but it's not universally true since you have to account for value the employee brings as well. Consider a company with only 1 employee. That employee can create 1 widget per year which sells for $100,000. The market for widgets is very elastic and at price points above $100,000, the demand is zero. Overhead and cost of goods is $50,000. In that case, the person's salary can't exceed $50,000 or else the company operates at a loss. Even if there is an extreme shortage of skilled workers who can do the job.
        Retric 10y ago
        Suppose you could higher a doctor and at the end of the year get 50k in value. Is that still a viable business? Why or why not? IMO, that's the crux of the issue. Yes, the clearing price for some jobs mean people are expensive; making some business nonviable. But, that does not inherently mean there is a shortage.
bdavisx 10y ago
If the supply of those interpreters is so limited that you have to go outside of the U.S. to find them, then doesn't supply/demand indicate that they should have a high salary?
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  High as compared to what? Supply curves don't operate in a vacuum.
  - bdavisx 10y ago
    High as compared to other jobs. If the demand for programmers is "1,000" and there are "100" programmers available - how is that different from demand of "100" interpreters but supply is "10"?
    - johncolanduoni 10y ago
      If people want twice as many cars as there are, and they want twice as much toilet paper as there are rolls, do you expect rolls of toilet paper to cost as much as a car? Supply and demand curves are (a) curves, not two points on a line (b) curves as a function of price. You can use them to pick a price, but not to come up with one from amounts of X ex nihilo. Even if we're sticking with the most primitive micro-economic theory here, you've discarded a whole dimension.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  No. Supply has a geographic component. They may be very rare in the US, but very common overseas. For example, there may not be many people currently in the United States who are fluent in Northern Kurdish, but there are millions of capable applicants available in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Supply will have an impact on the salary, of course. But in the absence of regulation, it will only be what the native Kurdish speaker would typically earn in their home country plus a some amount for the travel requirement. Edit: This is how H1Bs should operate according to their stated purpose. edge17's link to http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=OC http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp... shows that it's not being used in this way at all.
SmokyBorbon 10y ago
Then have an exception for interpreters. Foreign workers have displaced the people in costumes at Dianey theme parks. That's absurd.
sidlls 10y ago
Why would that be absurd? A highly specialized skill in an area that we can infer is generally less desirable to live should command a higher than average wage. Much higher if the situation is so desperate that a foreign worker has to be sought. Also: the majority (by far) of H1-B visas are for technology work. It may not technically be "tech only" but in practice it may as well be.
- macintux 10y ago
  Have you been through rural Alabama? I suspect the point is less that it's undesirable to live there, than that a high salary for an interpreter simply isn't going to fit in the budget. Why should Facebook's ad tech needs trump the needs of a poor refugee community? Budget size should not be the only virtue signal.
  - kofejnik 10y ago
    Why should refugee community's desire for a cheap interpreter trump the needs of an engineer who could make 250k at Facebook?
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  I think one of the Dem senators had proposed a plan that had the floor relative to the location and the job, so in this case you'd have to offer 150-200% of what an Ethiopian translator in Alabama would recieve, before you'd be allowed to hire someone via a Visa. That general principal seems reasonable to me, and less Silicon Valley centric than just a flat floor at whatever they think is reasonable for a software dev. Though obviously a single number is less work.
  - coredog64 10y ago
    No doubt that would open the door to all manner of skullduggery. Infosys then opens a new operation in West Armpit, Alabama and their employees now make 150% of the going rate for Java developers there in West Armpit. It is just a weird quirk that said employees wind up doing lots of travel...
nulldevz 10y ago
> They instead need to go after the companies that learned to game the system. I'm not sure if there's a way to prevent global labor arbitrage. Multinational corporations will shift labor to countries with the lowest wages. Perhaps they should put a multiplying factor on payroll taxes that's proportional to the total non-US labor wages paid (directly or indirectly) for producing a product. All expenses should be default considered as foreign labor-based unless proven otherwise. It would introduce a ton of paperwork initially, but then everyone will be incentivized to produce documentation showing US labor-produced products to prevent the increase in taxes.
- adrienne 10y ago
  There absolutely is: free movement of labor. Unfortunately that's the solution capitalists absolutely will not countenance, and they will happily stoke xenophobia and buy off the most reactionary elements of government in order to keep it from becoming a reality.
refurb 10y ago
Agreed. The world is bigger than just tech. Take a look at all the other backgrounds that often get H1Bs. A big one is scientists. If you made the floor $100K, say goodbye to non-PhD (and some PhD) scientists! And since the demand for PhDs isn't that high (you often have 2-3 non-PhDs reporting to a PhD), say goodbye to a lot of scientists using the H1B.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- leakybit 10y ago
  We'll then PhD demand would increase for h1b applicants. You would have to argue that there's a shortage of Bio, Chem,..etc graduates in the US, which there isn't. Any foreigner who posses a high level of skill in their field, shouldn't have a problem getting a PhD either.
- dxhdr 10y ago
  H1Bs are overwhelmingly used for tech: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=OC http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp... That said I do agree that there should be some kind of exception for highly skilled individuals in STEM fields (I believe Japan does something like this).
uppercasenut 10y ago
Maybe allow for waivers, capped at xxx a year, for these essential but not high paying jobs?
paulsutter 10y ago
It's not a salary floor - $130,000 would be a salary that exempts the application from from "non displacement and recruitment attestation requirements"[1]. For your example the employer could easily show a US worker was not being displaced and could not be recruited. Your example may also be exempt from the H1B numerical cap if the role is with a institution of higher education, a related or affiliated nonprofit entity, a nonprofit research organization, or a governmental research organization. [1] https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62Q.pdf https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62Q...
pizzetta 10y ago
With technology today, do we need interpreters in-situ (e-mail, voice, video, etc.)? Also, as we have Americans volunteer abroad for different missions, we too can look for overseas volunteers who could contribute to help in edge-case causes like this.
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  It's a bigger problem that can be hardly solved by online/video interpreters. There are many immigrant/refugee communities in the US that are in dire needs of certain services. No matter how well intended the members of that communities are, they run into many a lot of problems during integration. One I've heard about from a friend (who's a teacher) is that once their children starts going to school, because of the language difficulty and even some cultural differences, they usually fall behind and are treated as "special needs" because teachers don't want to deal with them. This creates a vicious cycle. They wanted to hire a teacher with knowledge of the community and the language, to serve as much as a liaison as to make the community more comfortable. They can't immediately hire anyone from the community because of the requirements for the job - they'd need a degree and about 2 years training. Now, he knows for a fact there's capable people in the country the community came from willing to reallocate to help with integration. But they can't hire them, even as a part of any special program; the uncertainties about the visa process, its cost, and its duration make it impossible. Everybody loses.
elastic_church 10y ago
> If you want to hire, say, an interpreter of a specific foreign language to work on a community in rural Alabama temporarily, a $100,000 minimum wage would be absurd. Thats the POINT. Today it would be absurd, but a successful multipronged plan to bring both manufacturing as well as constricting supply of people with specialized skills, would raise the salary demands of the whole US population. The H1B salary part of the system hasn't been modified since 1989. $60,000 in 1989 is equivalent to $120,000 in today's dollars. Does that influence your opinion at all? Congress created a rationale back then, the industry merely used the tools available since then. Congress' rationale did not change, they are both adjusting for inflation as well as responding to the direction the industry actually went. The industry's adaptation is incongruent with the will of Congress. In 1989 salary increases were still keeping up with the cost of housing. Or were still expecting to. For example. And a protectionist America really could do that again.
btilly 10y ago
Just line up the incentives. For example require the company bringing the worker in to post a bond, make it trivial for the imported worker to switch companies, and make the original company to pay the difference between what the worker's salary winds up being and what their new salary is after 2 years if they can't hold on to said worker. If you're a company that really needs that skill, really can't hire it, and is paying above market wages, then this will not slow your hiring. But if you're trying to hire below market, it would backfire badly on you.
byteprogrammer 10y ago
I think a minimum wage of 100K for all H1-Bs may not work for all roles, it should be a certain percentage above the prevailing market wage specific to that role.
gumby 10y ago
Hear hear, it was a nightmare getting teachers for my kid's German school in SV: so much H1 uncertainty and they usually all vanished at the wrong time (i.e. all taken before the time when teachers change jobs).
thinkcontext 10y ago
What about the idea of having an auction for the H1B slots?
leakybit 10y ago
There should be more specific classification of the h1b job function. Example: look at the h1b data at any of the big 4 accounting firms ex: PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS LLP TAX ASSOCIATE - 200 Records, Median Salary $56,181 ASSOCIATE - 243 Records, Median Salary $53,000 ASSURANCE ASSOCIATE - 700 Records, Median Salary $59,000 What exactly do these associates do?
comments_db 10y ago
I used to agree with hungrygs' response. It appears right in many ways until I put TN and E3 visa in perspective. They tuk-tuk-tur is apt.
xiaoma 10y ago
The previous H-1B minimum wage of $60,000, which was established in 1989, is the equivalent of $117,000 in today's dollars.
caseymarquis 10y ago
Maybe some sort of waiver would solve that within the context of the H1B? Exceptions based on regional needs or organizational focus?

peterchon 10y ago

I think that's an edge case that is < .01% of what the H1-B visa is used for. The problem is that 99% of H1-B is being used as most people have described, which is undercutting the market value of engineers.

jordanb 10y ago

Many nations have special visa categories for native speakers of foreign languages working as teachers. If that's really a problem then having something like that would probably make more sense. Usually when I here someone critique the salary floor it's in reference to poorly paid scientists or biologists, as if it's a law of nature that these people should be poorly paid.

542458 10y ago

> If you want to hire, say, an interpreter of a specific foreign language to work on a community in rural Alabama temporarily, a $100,000 minimum wage would be absurd. Wow, that's a really important point. I'm so in the tech-news bubble that I'd never heard anybody say that before - thanks for pointing that out!

edge17 10y ago
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=OC http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp...
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  Wow. I knew the H1B category was biased towards large companies, but I didn't realize it was so bad. The first cultural, linguistic, or otherwise geographically-constrained job in the list is #84, "Foreign Language And Literature Teachers." "Interpreters and Translators" is down at #131, with a grand total of 268 applicants - practically a rounding error after 300,000 tech applicants. Whatever_dude's example seems so appropriate, that it's shocking to see it so far down the list.
  - edge17 10y ago
    It's like anything, there's a whole ecosystem involved - which includes having a lot of money to pay the right lawyers that know how to navigate the system properly. I've seen companies hire the wrong lawyers and, after promising the individual that everything would come through, end up having to tell the person that the application was denied.
  - bostonpete 10y ago
    > Wow. I knew the H1B category was biased towards large companies, but I didn't realize it was so bad. Where does that page say anything about large companies?
- sharemywin 10y ago
  sounds like each job class needs it's own minimum.
  - mavelikara 10y ago
    Which is what the current rule - the one based on prevailing wages - tries to address. Minor tweaks to it - for e.g. using the mean of the top 1/3rd of the salaries surveyed - will accomplish what you ask for, IMO.
    - sharemywin 10y ago
      wonder if that shouldn't be by city since salaries very so much by geography.
secfirstmd 10y ago
Yeah, or what about those of us in the NGO and non-profit sector who need people with specific regional skills/knowledge/experience and/or folks (including tech people) who prefer to take a slightly lower salary because they want to work with us on important stuff? We've had to sort visas on a number of occasions for people. $100,000 would be like one of the highest ever non-profit salaries!
- sharemywin 10y ago
  Sounds like each job class needs it's own salary minimum.
- gnopgnip 10y ago
  The salary floor is when the business does not have to prove they did not first search for openings in the US. If you want to hire someone with extremely specialized skills for under 60k(or $130k as proposed by the new bill) a year you have to at least try to recruit in the US first.
testUser69 10y ago
If an interpreter is so rare that one can't be found in the US and they need to be hired internationally, then maybe it's worth it to pay $100,000?
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  "It's worth it" only applies if a company is directly going to make a ton of money out of that person. Not every company operates like that. I know it's hard to believe, or even comprehend, in the tech world.
- untog 10y ago
  Obviously we can't know what the organisation doing the hiring is like in this fictional scenario, but $100k would be a huge, huge amount for non-senior staff in rural Alabama no matter what. The problem with a hard salary floor is that it doesn't account for differences in cost of living at all. It would very quickly become the visa of coastal cities and little else.
  - googletazer 10y ago
    Then they can't afford to run. I'd also love to bring say professional 3D modellers and animators from Eastern Europe or Brazil and pay then 20k CAD/year, but thats not how reality works. All of these programs (hb1/etc...) are basically wage arbitrage schemes and have little to do with presence/absence of talent.
    - untog 10y ago
      There is no universal H1B salary. Translators do not earn as much as developers, in general. People living in Alabama do not earn as much as those working in Silicon Valley, in general. H1B applications go through a "labor condition application" for this exact reason - the government approves the salary, based on industry and location. Therefore, you can't bring 3D developers to Silicon Valley and pay them $20k. But you might be able to bring a translator to rural Alabama. If the aim of the H1B program was to bring in the highest possible paid workers, you'd be correct. But it isn't. These programs are designed in such a way that all states can benefit from them, and a variety of professions.
Retric 10y ago
I disagree. If you are not willing to pay 100k then finding someone is not the problem. You just don't want to pay market rates. The point of H-1B is when salary is not the problem. PS: Remember, someone on an H-1B can leave your employment. Paying market rates is supposed to keep that from happening, thus the intent is to remove a shortage not lower pay.
- refurb 10y ago
  So you're argument is that it's impossible for their to be an actual shortage of US workers unless the salary exceed $100K?
  - NhanH 10y ago
    I am not the GP, and I do not agree with the statement. However, I have seen it being made numerous times: any shortage of US workers just means the companies are not paying enough (their argument being, try to pay $1mil and you will certainly fill your positions, this is just very minor exaggeration)
    - refurb 10y ago
      I see the thought process, but it's not universally true since you have to account for value the employee brings as well. Consider a company with only 1 employee. That employee can create 1 widget per year which sells for $100,000. The market for widgets is very elastic and at price points above $100,000, the demand is zero. Overhead and cost of goods is $50,000. In that case, the person's salary can't exceed $50,000 or else the company operates at a loss. Even if there is an extreme shortage of skilled workers who can do the job.
      - Retric 10y ago
        Suppose you could higher a doctor and at the end of the year get 50k in value. Is that still a viable business? Why or why not? IMO, that's the crux of the issue. Yes, the clearing price for some jobs mean people are expensive; making some business nonviable. But, that does not inherently mean there is a shortage.

bdavisx 10y ago

If the supply of those interpreters is so limited that you have to go outside of the U.S. to find them, then doesn't supply/demand indicate that they should have a high salary?

johncolanduoni 10y ago
High as compared to what? Supply curves don't operate in a vacuum.
- bdavisx 10y ago
  High as compared to other jobs. If the demand for programmers is "1,000" and there are "100" programmers available - how is that different from demand of "100" interpreters but supply is "10"?
  - johncolanduoni 10y ago
    If people want twice as many cars as there are, and they want twice as much toilet paper as there are rolls, do you expect rolls of toilet paper to cost as much as a car? Supply and demand curves are (a) curves, not two points on a line (b) curves as a function of price. You can use them to pick a price, but not to come up with one from amounts of X ex nihilo. Even if we're sticking with the most primitive micro-economic theory here, you've discarded a whole dimension.
LeifCarrotson 10y ago
No. Supply has a geographic component. They may be very rare in the US, but very common overseas. For example, there may not be many people currently in the United States who are fluent in Northern Kurdish, but there are millions of capable applicants available in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Supply will have an impact on the salary, of course. But in the absence of regulation, it will only be what the native Kurdish speaker would typically earn in their home country plus a some amount for the travel requirement. Edit: This is how H1Bs should operate according to their stated purpose. edge17's link to http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=OC http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp... shows that it's not being used in this way at all.

SmokyBorbon 10y ago

Then have an exception for interpreters. Foreign workers have displaced the people in costumes at Dianey theme parks. That's absurd.

sidlls 10y ago

Why would that be absurd? A highly specialized skill in an area that we can infer is generally less desirable to live should command a higher than average wage. Much higher if the situation is so desperate that a foreign worker has to be sought. Also: the majority (by far) of H1-B visas are for technology work. It may not technically be "tech only" but in practice it may as well be.

macintux 10y ago
Have you been through rural Alabama? I suspect the point is less that it's undesirable to live there, than that a high salary for an interpreter simply isn't going to fit in the budget. Why should Facebook's ad tech needs trump the needs of a poor refugee community? Budget size should not be the only virtue signal.
- kofejnik 10y ago
  Why should refugee community's desire for a cheap interpreter trump the needs of an engineer who could make 250k at Facebook?
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
I think one of the Dem senators had proposed a plan that had the floor relative to the location and the job, so in this case you'd have to offer 150-200% of what an Ethiopian translator in Alabama would recieve, before you'd be allowed to hire someone via a Visa. That general principal seems reasonable to me, and less Silicon Valley centric than just a flat floor at whatever they think is reasonable for a software dev. Though obviously a single number is less work.
- coredog64 10y ago
  No doubt that would open the door to all manner of skullduggery. Infosys then opens a new operation in West Armpit, Alabama and their employees now make 150% of the going rate for Java developers there in West Armpit. It is just a weird quirk that said employees wind up doing lots of travel...

nulldevz 10y ago

> They instead need to go after the companies that learned to game the system. I'm not sure if there's a way to prevent global labor arbitrage. Multinational corporations will shift labor to countries with the lowest wages. Perhaps they should put a multiplying factor on payroll taxes that's proportional to the total non-US labor wages paid (directly or indirectly) for producing a product. All expenses should be default considered as foreign labor-based unless proven otherwise. It would introduce a ton of paperwork initially, but then everyone will be incentivized to produce documentation showing US labor-produced products to prevent the increase in taxes.

adrienne 10y ago
There absolutely is: free movement of labor. Unfortunately that's the solution capitalists absolutely will not countenance, and they will happily stoke xenophobia and buy off the most reactionary elements of government in order to keep it from becoming a reality.

refurb 10y ago

Agreed. The world is bigger than just tech. Take a look at all the other backgrounds that often get H1Bs. A big one is scientists. If you made the floor $100K, say goodbye to non-PhD (and some PhD) scientists! And since the demand for PhDs isn't that high (you often have 2-3 non-PhDs reporting to a PhD), say goodbye to a lot of scientists using the H1B.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
leakybit 10y ago
We'll then PhD demand would increase for h1b applicants. You would have to argue that there's a shortage of Bio, Chem,..etc graduates in the US, which there isn't. Any foreigner who posses a high level of skill in their field, shouldn't have a problem getting a PhD either.
dxhdr 10y ago
H1Bs are overwhelmingly used for tech: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=OC http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp... That said I do agree that there should be some kind of exception for highly skilled individuals in STEM fields (I believe Japan does something like this).

uppercasenut 10y ago

Maybe allow for waivers, capped at xxx a year, for these essential but not high paying jobs?

paulsutter 10y ago

It's not a salary floor - $130,000 would be a salary that exempts the application from from "non displacement and recruitment attestation requirements"[1]. For your example the employer could easily show a US worker was not being displaced and could not be recruited. Your example may also be exempt from the H1B numerical cap if the role is with a institution of higher education, a related or affiliated nonprofit entity, a nonprofit research organization, or a governmental research organization. [1] https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62Q.pdf https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62Q...

pizzetta 10y ago

With technology today, do we need interpreters in-situ (e-mail, voice, video, etc.)? Also, as we have Americans volunteer abroad for different missions, we too can look for overseas volunteers who could contribute to help in edge-case causes like this.

whatever_dude 10y ago
It's a bigger problem that can be hardly solved by online/video interpreters. There are many immigrant/refugee communities in the US that are in dire needs of certain services. No matter how well intended the members of that communities are, they run into many a lot of problems during integration. One I've heard about from a friend (who's a teacher) is that once their children starts going to school, because of the language difficulty and even some cultural differences, they usually fall behind and are treated as "special needs" because teachers don't want to deal with them. This creates a vicious cycle. They wanted to hire a teacher with knowledge of the community and the language, to serve as much as a liaison as to make the community more comfortable. They can't immediately hire anyone from the community because of the requirements for the job - they'd need a degree and about 2 years training. Now, he knows for a fact there's capable people in the country the community came from willing to reallocate to help with integration. But they can't hire them, even as a part of any special program; the uncertainties about the visa process, its cost, and its duration make it impossible. Everybody loses.

elastic_church 10y ago

> If you want to hire, say, an interpreter of a specific foreign language to work on a community in rural Alabama temporarily, a $100,000 minimum wage would be absurd. Thats the POINT. Today it would be absurd, but a successful multipronged plan to bring both manufacturing as well as constricting supply of people with specialized skills, would raise the salary demands of the whole US population. The H1B salary part of the system hasn't been modified since 1989. $60,000 in 1989 is equivalent to $120,000 in today's dollars. Does that influence your opinion at all? Congress created a rationale back then, the industry merely used the tools available since then. Congress' rationale did not change, they are both adjusting for inflation as well as responding to the direction the industry actually went. The industry's adaptation is incongruent with the will of Congress. In 1989 salary increases were still keeping up with the cost of housing. Or were still expecting to. For example. And a protectionist America really could do that again.

btilly 10y ago

Just line up the incentives. For example require the company bringing the worker in to post a bond, make it trivial for the imported worker to switch companies, and make the original company to pay the difference between what the worker's salary winds up being and what their new salary is after 2 years if they can't hold on to said worker. If you're a company that really needs that skill, really can't hire it, and is paying above market wages, then this will not slow your hiring. But if you're trying to hire below market, it would backfire badly on you.

byteprogrammer 10y ago

I think a minimum wage of 100K for all H1-Bs may not work for all roles, it should be a certain percentage above the prevailing market wage specific to that role.

gumby 10y ago

Hear hear, it was a nightmare getting teachers for my kid's German school in SV: so much H1 uncertainty and they usually all vanished at the wrong time (i.e. all taken before the time when teachers change jobs).

thinkcontext 10y ago

What about the idea of having an auction for the H1B slots?

leakybit 10y ago

There should be more specific classification of the h1b job function. Example: look at the h1b data at any of the big 4 accounting firms ex: PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS LLP TAX ASSOCIATE - 200 Records, Median Salary $56,181 ASSOCIATE - 243 Records, Median Salary $53,000 ASSURANCE ASSOCIATE - 700 Records, Median Salary $59,000 What exactly do these associates do?

comments_db 10y ago

I used to agree with hungrygs' response. It appears right in many ways until I put TN and E3 visa in perspective. They tuk-tuk-tur is apt.

xiaoma 10y ago

The previous H-1B minimum wage of $60,000, which was established in 1989, is the equivalent of $117,000 in today's dollars.

caseymarquis 10y ago

Maybe some sort of waiver would solve that within the context of the H1B? Exceptions based on regional needs or organizational focus?