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US residency and citizenship is in extremely high demand, so whatever immigration system is put in place will ultimately be gamed. Creating a visa category that
by pnw 2y ago
US residency and citizenship is in extremely high demand, so whatever immigration system is put in place will ultimately be gamed. Creating a visa category that is solely based on salary would be attractive to some cohort of people who want to live in the US regardless of the costs.
We saw similar things with previous "investor visas" where there was no intention to start a business and the USCIS had to stop issuing them for many years because of the pervasive fraud on both sides of the equation. I can guarantee that some creative lawyer out there was already thinking about how to game the US "startup visa" when that was proposed a few years back.
- kccqzy 2y agoA salary-based requirement is a lot less easy to game. After all salaries are reported to the IRS on W-2s. Any fraud in the amount of salary can be easily detected without sophisticated investigation. The only difficulty I see is that salary isn't necessarily proportional to a person's usefulness to the economy or the country. A person can start a company and pay himself a million dollars a year while the person and the company does nothing at all. Sure the IRS gets to collect a bunch, but at that point we might as well create a class of visas that are sold in an auction.
- pnw 2y agoSalary based requirements are the easiest to game. Create shell company, inject enough cash to cover salaries, hire people who want to live in the US and charge them a margin on the cash they gave you. Lots of people will happily pay the IRS taxes on a phony salary for the option to live in the US. Far easier than gaming an H1B or even an E3 which requires an LCA.