The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement. The company is just a shell to win the auction and sponsor them. If an auction system were adopted without safeguards, it could turn the H-1B program from a labor-market tool into a plaything for the ultra-wealthy.
> The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement
If you are wealthy enough to bankroll this kind of a convoluted method to immigrate to the US (back of the napkin math $150k-250k), you are wealthy enough to bankroll an investor visa to the UK or Canada, invest locally in a business AND THEN target an American investment visa, or marry someone within the diaspora.
People are really overestimating the pull the US has on the truly rich. Most Indian H1Bs tend to be middle class Indians who hit a rut in their career in India, and are using the temporary US experience to land a better role back in India or maybe Canada.
If you are already earning $30-60K TC in the Indian market, the pull factor to earn $90-140k base on an H1B doesn't exist, especially because Green Card backlogs are multidecade long now.
There's a reason most of the H1B abuse is coming from consultancies - they tend to pay in the $3k-20k range. For someone in that bracket, the math of working as a low paid H1B works out.
That's why the H1B market is so bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups.
As a skilled immigration system, you want to optimize for the right half of the distribution and minimize the left hand side, but if you are too draconian in nature, you disincentivize people who you actually want to attract from coming to the US. India has already started trying to build something similar to the Thousand Talents program for NRIs and PIOs.
IMO, the current changes proposed are a good middle ground, but everything else on HN seems dumb.
