Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a startup you wanted to underpay people that you import from overseas? There's a lot about Trump immigration policy that I do not like but this one I think is totally appropriate. If you read the articles you'll see that even Microsoft is telling people to get back to the US to avoid this fee. Not even big companies want to pay it. You have forgotten what the H1B visa was supposed to be for. It was to bring in exp…
No, I don't want to underpay imported people. I'm not talking about teams of low-skilled people. You don't know my situation, so I'll explain. I work in a startup that requires a specific ML computer vision skillset. And we are in the surgery space. I found a brilliant person who is a master at computer vision, loves the medical field, and is willing to take a +6 figure salary and equity. I tried to find someone like…
It's really as simple as that. The H-1B visa system has been abused repeatedly by many corporations and you yourself are seeking to abuse it. I have seen many H-1B visa holders and none of them seem to have highly specialized domain-specific knowledge. I'm sure there's a few that do but the vast majority are average computer science graduates from India that get imported. They do average work and there is nothing special about their knowledge or their skills that they're bringing to this country.
So hire people here first. You absolutely are going to need to pay a US citizen a good 30 to 50% more than what you're going to pay that mediocre H-1B person because if you were looking for a highly specialized person with domain-specific knowledge then you would pay the US person or the H1B person the exact same wage. This fee for H1B Visas is now going to make these companies, and yourself, look very seriously about your hiring practices and your abuse of the system. Because if you need the specialized person the cost is insignificant. Because a one-time $100,000 fee is pennies compared to the salary that you should be paying yearly which is $200,000, and that 200k is not including all of the cost of employment and taxations that you have to pay.
So there's massive holes in your entire story. You're either not seeking skilled domain specific knowledge people or you are absolutely underpaying people who are highly skilled with domain-specific knowledge.