<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>wing-_-nuts</author><text>If it were up to me there wouldn&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;be&lt;/i&gt; an h1b.  People would be admitted via a points based system like Canada (but stricter) and would then be on a green card path and be granted perm residency after 5y, citizenship after 10.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s of course my pie in the sky &amp;#x27;we can get congress to agree on things&amp;#x27; version.  If I were president, I would simply make the h1b go to the highest bidder, so the people that enter the US are, supposedly, the cream of the crop.  Yeah, that &lt;i&gt;would&lt;/i&gt; make students return home vs someone with more skills and experience.  The whole point of the h1b is to bring over people with skills we can&amp;#x27;t find here in the US.</text><parent_chain><item><author>pkoiralap</author><text>Something that I personally feel unfair about the H1B lottery is that it doesn&amp;#x27;t consider where you live and what you are currently doing. Students that graduate through a STEM degree get to work for 3 years in their OPT (Optional Practical Training). This extends then to them having 3 chances (one per year) at getting the H1B. Now what&amp;#x27;s unfair is that an employer in the US can apply H1B for employees living oversees. That application then goes to the same pool where H1B application of the employees that are already living in the US go. The very same people that already hold a college or graduate degree, are already living in the US, and are contributing to the US economy. Unfortunately, the lottery is fair. So those that don&amp;#x27;t get picked up even after their third attempt are kicked out. They leave their life that they were trying to build in the US, potentially their girlfriends and partners, their friends, and their possessions. While that happens, someone who has never stepped foot in the US soil gets to go to the US. So in a sense it&amp;#x27;s fair for them. And while there is no real metric to measure this, when compared, between the fairness people oversees get and the unfairness people already living in the US experience, I personally think that the later tips the scale by a huge margin.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>H-1B visa fraud alive and well amid anti-abuse efforts</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/09/h1b_visa_fraud/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>rtkwe</author><text>I would expect that to be partially counter balanced by companies being more willing to sponsor someone already in the US over someone currently overseas? Haven&amp;#x27;t had to go through that process fortunately but seems likely from a practical standpoint.</text><parent_chain><item><author>pkoiralap</author><text>Something that I personally feel unfair about the H1B lottery is that it doesn&amp;#x27;t consider where you live and what you are currently doing. Students that graduate through a STEM degree get to work for 3 years in their OPT (Optional Practical Training). This extends then to them having 3 chances (one per year) at getting the H1B. Now what&amp;#x27;s unfair is that an employer in the US can apply H1B for employees living oversees. That application then goes to the same pool where H1B application of the employees that are already living in the US go. The very same people that already hold a college or graduate degree, are already living in the US, and are contributing to the US economy. Unfortunately, the lottery is fair. So those that don&amp;#x27;t get picked up even after their third attempt are kicked out. They leave their life that they were trying to build in the US, potentially their girlfriends and partners, their friends, and their possessions. While that happens, someone who has never stepped foot in the US soil gets to go to the US. So in a sense it&amp;#x27;s fair for them. And while there is no real metric to measure this, when compared, between the fairness people oversees get and the unfairness people already living in the US experience, I personally think that the later tips the scale by a huge margin.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>H-1B visa fraud alive and well amid anti-abuse efforts</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/09/h1b_visa_fraud/</url></story>