Comment by tziki
6 hours ago
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.
6 hours ago
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.
The O-1 visa exists.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
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
What does overindexing on the swe market mean?
If these other professions don’t pay as much as swe, then doesn’t that indicate that domestic supply is meeting those industries needs better than it is swe?
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.
There’s an O1 visa for exceptional talent.
Short answer - yes.
There's no long answer.
Where are the H1-Bs working in the arts at the moment?
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.
Yes, and the usual suspects already abuse it to move jobs abroad. If you had observed, it's often multinationals, usually Indian consultancies or companies with Indian Capability Centers, which abuse the H1B. They'll just be forced to switch to the L1.
The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.