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.

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...

All of a sudden TechInfoSys opens up a new branch in West Armpit to support the operations of their San Francisco main office and West Armpit is where all of the new developer/analysts are to be employed...

There's a few fixes to that too. Make the pay scaling regional or put in provisions that increase the floor based on percentage travel or where the visa job would work.

This is how laws get really complicated. Wouldn't a more complex solution end up costing more (to the companies you are trying to help) than a simple solution?

It depends on what you're trying to do. Outwardly H1-Bs are supposed to be about bringing in talent that can't be filled with a US worker which should fetch a premium. To that end having just a blanket floor doesn't really make sense because a premium wage in Small Town, USA is a rounding error to large corporations in Big Tech Hub, USA. But you can't make the sliding scale too location sensitive because then you just open a new way to game the system with having big contractor sweat boxes all operating out of the middle of North Dakota or somewhere with market so tiny prices. I don't think a simple law could ever really run H1-B if the goal is 'bring in premium talent' for hard to fill positions especially in tech positions where location is becoming less and less critical.

You realise H1B's are location specific right? All these "fixes" everyone keeps bringing up are actually a part of the law as it stands.

Floor relative to the location and the job--is very easy to abuse. You can abuse both location and job via indirection: indirection through layers of contracting companies. Similar strategy is used now to abuse: Some Mega corp contacts out to TCS, which further contracts out to some mom and pop consulting co, and so on.

> Why would that be absurd?

There's more about specialization than just the area. To stay with the example, there may be many reasons why someone would want to hire an interpreter for a given language, and for someone to be willing to do the job, without it ever making sense to pay twice what a good average living wage is on the area. The "pay higher if it's high demand" excuse is cutthroat capitalism, IMO, and ignores the fact that the employer might not actually be trying to exploit someone but actually bring something that their customer base/community needs, something they wouldn't get otherwise. It's not about being "desperate enough" to hire a foreigner - in many cases, as in certain niche skills, a foreigner might be the best option.

Also remember the H1B is supposed to be a temporary. It's classified as a non-immigrant visa. Temporary need for a foreigner also exists.

> 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.

That's exactly my point, and it's one of the many problems with H1B. Tech workers flood the request and suddenly everyone is just thinking about a salary floor cap because tech has higher salaries than other roles. But there are other roles and businesses that could actually benefit from foreign workers, but they're all crushed by how large tech is instead.

> Also remember the H1B is supposed to be a temporary. It's classified as a non-immigrant visa

Technically, it is a "dual-intent" visa.

It's both.

> Even though the H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa, it is one of the few temporary visa categories recognized as dual intent, meaning an H-1B holder can have legal immigration intent (apply for and obtain the green card) while still a holder of the H-1B visa

It means you can apply for immigrant status while holding an H1B. Differently from most other visas, which means you lose them automatically as soon as you apply for residency.

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.

Why should refugee community's desire for a cheap interpreter trump the needs of an engineer who could make 250k at Facebook?

>an area that we can infer is generally less desirable to live

Lower cost of living does not mean the area is undesirable to live. Building adequate housing supply (I know, unheard of in the Bay, but some cities do it) can cause cost of living to stay low.

A major weakness of this policy is that it doesn't scale by regional median salary. Under exigency a company in SF could easily pay $130k to bring in a foreign worker with a needed rare skill. A company in Alabama could not.

Then require some multiple (> 1) of the average or median salary in the region.

What is a reasonable higher than average salary completely depends on the market. But you really, really need to step out of the tech bubble before thinking about wages... tech people are reeeally out of touch when it comes to what money the rest of the country has to live off of.