Comment by pandaman
2 hours ago
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious.
The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work.
This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
It's not just Infosys doing PERM fraud, around 2020 Meta had been barred from filing PERM due to overwhelming fraud. And are there really 85K unique and impossible to find in the US individuals every year? If these exist they will take a small fraction of H-1B allocation and the rest will go to the fresh grads, as it's now.
I’d be fine, as a citizen competing against migrants for jobs, if h1bs were structured so that they
A: were the top end pay, so they pushed the pay scale up
B: were uncoupled from employment. A company could pay the cost to let someone enter, but that person should be able to jump jobs day 0.
I’m not suggesting the specific implementation but I feel like if those two guiding directives were kept, both society and the individual workers would benefit from brain draining the rest of the planet while simultaneously pushing worker comp higher.
Has anyone suggested a significant change to the h1b system like this beyond just a close it all/open it all binary?
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