Comment by thephyber
10 hours 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.
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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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.
"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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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.
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?
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.
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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The O-1 visa exists.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
How about ranking on salary but by profession, so there should be a separate rank for software engineers vs. biomedical researchers.
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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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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> 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.
> 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.