Comment by thephyber
1 day ago
This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
I don't think it's that fair. IT jobs are exceptionally well paid and this system may starve other domains of talent, domains that don't have that kind of fuck-it money that IT has.
But I agree rhat H1B should not be about hiring cheap labour. I'd prefer a system where H1B salaries must be competitive with the top of the field. There are incredibly smart talents around the world, and if you hire someone from outside then it should be because they are the best of the best, so they should get paid accordingly.
What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B?
Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
exactly wrong. Americans are dissuaded from going into these highly skilled fields because anyone talented enough to do those things realizes they can make much more building SAASes or working on wall street.
the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.
Are there 85,000 new hedge fund quants that need to be hired each year? I guess it is more like 1,000. The number of people employed as quants at hedge funds is incredibly small.
Or... those other parts of the economy increase salaries for skilled labor?
If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)?
And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?
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You could make multiple pools, having separate ones carved out for research and advanced technology.
A lot of H1Bs are not working on anything you described though.
> Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
If they're that necessary, let companies hire them on green card visas.
"materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research "
This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs.
Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero.
Amazon.Com Services
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Ernst & Young
Tata Consultancy Services
Google
Microsoft
Infosys
Meta Platforms
Intel
Hcl America
Amazon Web Services
IBM
Jpmorgan Chase
Walmart
Apple
Accenture
Capgemini
Ltimindtree
Deloitte Consulting
Salesforce
Qualcomm
Tesla
Amazon Development Center
Wipro
Fidelity Technology Group
Tech Mahindra
Compunnel Software Group
Deloitte Touche
Mphasis
Nvidia
Adobe
Bytedance
Goldman, Sachs
Cisco
Linkedin
Pricewaterhousecoopers Advisory Services
Paypal
Ebay
Servicenow
Visa USA
For non-slop jobs, give them a green card and fast track to citizenship. For an IT consultant, no thanks.
source: https://www.myvisajobs.com/reports/h1b/
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This is just an argument against allowing the market to set wages, which you could make if you wanted to but it is not a strong one.
Yes and no. That's going to benefit wall street, at the expense of R&D labs where PhD researchers are paid in whip lashes.
Can we really consider it the free market when there are already so many regulations in place?
I don't think the "free" in free market is supposed to mean no rules. I think the "free" is supposed to mean both sides of the transactions get to choose to participate or not which means they are pressured to "meet in the middle" and optimize for mutually beneficial deals. The idea is that this is going to provide better outcomes than trying to plan out what everyone makes and buys from the top.
Overregulation can reduce the effective freedom in a market (usually by increasing costs or reducing choice) but good regulation is there to shepherd this equilibrium of a fair deal between buyers and sellers by doing things like getting externalities priced in (if youre buying x you should pay the cost of x, not your neighbor); preventing monopolies, cartels, other price fixing / choice reducing things that makes one side of the market not have to meet in the middle; and adding standards or visibility so market participants can be more efficient and safe when choosing (instead of having to do things like research all of a company's supply chain and employees to decide if it's safe to eat there or to fly in their planes).
Some things get imposed onto the market intentionally like protection for unions (in theory an alternative/shortcut to grouping up into inefficient passthrough companies), tarrifs to give someone an advantage in what they can offer, subsidies to intentionally prevent the market from contracting to the current size of demand (like if the country wants to maintain a certain ability to produce food or doctors or certain goods), and government programs to effectively set a floor on the price of something (like interest rates so lending/borrowing will never be worse than a certain mark).
All these things are useful tools in a market of self motivated actors trying to maximize their own gain in the short term but, like all tools, they get abused and out maneuvered often so it's a constant game of cat and mouse to keep the system running.
Pros and cons all over the place; most things have a huge downside of vulnerability to truly bad actors having too much control (which is where the idea of democracy comes in but I have to stop myself I already word dumped).
tl;dr yes absolutely call it a free market until people are forced to participate too much
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If you have a high skill role and aren't willing to pay for those skills, it's natural you have a "shortage of workers". But, the problem is just the pay.
The normal fix for companies that can't afford to hire, is to let them go broke.
What if there are 100 people for a job and there are only 50 qualified workers in the country? (Assume the constraints in this hypothetical are true.) There is no amount of money the employers can pay to reach equilibrium.
Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
Genuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?
Interestingly, there's a whole category of H1B visas just for fashion models. H-1B3, which is for models with "distinguished merit and ability".
A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.
Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.
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this also holds true for chemical, biomedical researchers, mechanical engineers working in deep tech, software engineering is such an anomaly that it's hard to do income based lottery without overindexing on swe market
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You're not genuinely curious because it's obviously stupid that we'd need H1B visas for artists.
If their art's got enough value to be valuable in the real sense, they're well above all this. Otherwise they're nothing.
The O-1 visa exists.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Does the US have such a shortage of artistic talent we have to hire abroad for it?
Why get hung out on the example profession and not the fact that some jobs pay drastically disproportionate rates?
Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.
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Short answer - yes.
There's no long answer.
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AI literally produces more mesmerising art, for pennies, than an artist ever could, because their whole shtick was "out-there visual concepts", which was a wide open space of anything that's "not normal", which now and AI can pump out copiously.
Artistic talent is not important.
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How about ranking on salary but by profession, so there should be a separate rank for software engineers vs. biomedical researchers.
I now write code related to biomedical research. Checkmate
Top 1% of artists have the O1 route, not the H1B route.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
L1 employees require that the company employ the person for a year at an international branch so this is only available to multi-national companies.
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> starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
Nobody has a _right_ to cheap labor! Not attracting enough talent? Offer more!
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.