There’s already a “best and brightest” visa and it’s not H1B. It’s O1.
That said H1B is essentially the only reasonable way for people to immigrate to the United States through employment. Most employers are not going to stick out the convoluted process to obtain an EB2/3 immigrant visa for a worker they haven’t any experience with especially since they can enter the country and immediately work for someone else.
L1 is also harder to qualify for than H1B in terms of job requirements.
H1Bs can stay indefinitely only if they have a pending Green Card application.
This is the proper solution. Ideally, the H1-B program would remove quotas and lotteries and switch to a pure auction program for the fees. E.g, a Dutch auction for the X thousand available slots where the fee can be deducted from federal income taxes. If companies really want the best talent in the world, they should be willing to pay for it.
Hospitals and labs can’t afford to match tech spending to obtain H1Bs.
If there’s going to be an auction then there needs to be an industry or job code cap too.
You can let capitalism do its thing, and you can put your finger on the scale for things that society needs but that are not as profitable.
Most countries identify industry shortages and tailor their immigration needs to bring in people to fulfill those roles.
This makes no sense economically. Auctioning immigrant slots to the highest bidder should allocate those spots to where they'll be most valued in the economy. What the countries you seem to be describing are doing is industry-selective wage suppression.
The INA has a provision that requires all temporary workers to have non-immigration intent. Moreover, it requires UCIS to presume immigrant intent if someone files an application for permanent residency, which would make the H1B deportable. The state department created “dual intent” decades ago as a legal fiction to allow H1 immigrants to skirt this provision of the law.
Congress accommodated that somewhat in 1990 and in 2000 (with AC21). But it’s all a hack on top of a kludge. The statue now exempts UCIS from being required to presume non-immigrant intent if someone files a permanent residency application. And AC21 allows extensions while a green card application is pending.
But nothing stops the administration from deciding a green card application constitutes immigration intent, or denying an extension. Congress has never changed the wording of the law—on paper it’s still a temporary worker program. A future administration could start treating it as such at any time.
If we could measure externalities accurately and tax/subsidize businesses accordingly, visa auctions might lead to even more accurate wage suppression than immigration policy. But because we can't, auctions optimize the wrong measure. Some industries create more value than they can capture, while others create less.
That's the point! You can train Americans to do those jobs. Visas should be reserved for truly exceptional workers that will create enormous value in the U.S., as opposed to those doing mundane skilled work who wills imply drive down wages for Americans.
This is just basic demand-supply. I don't see a problem here.
If hospitals and labs can't afford to match the salaries of other occupations, maybe you have too many American candidates or the end result isn't producing enough value.
Most of the occupations doesn't really need H1B. And that's okay.
The significant shift comes a lot from how this country has massive systems in place to perform wage arbitrage through IT consultancies. Compared to Chinese industrial outsourcing (which requires capex), wage arbitrage is pure profit in that there's almost no overhead. So these IT companies got phenomenally rich. These companies have a US branch, usually having a manager based in the US while the others are based in India. So it's no longer getting the best and brightest through H1B, but just a way to make money off the vast difference in economic conditions between a third and first world country. And there's a direct incentive to depress the economic conditions of workers, because that's money right there. Then this goes into overdrive when many US companies realize it's even cheaper to do it themselves and set up shop in this country.
What happened to the US industrial base/blue collar workers is happening right now to white collar workers, except it'll go much faster because there's no physical equipment to move.
We all know how to solve this problem e.g. ranked by compensations maybe with some restrictions and diversifying occupations a bit. We know which companies abuse it. The number of H1B with their salaries is public.
Yet this article from Bernie grand-stands random stuff.
I am urging you to go into the rest of this comment with an open mind.
H-1B visas require a “prevailing wage” which the foreign worker must be paid at or above in order to get a visa. Prevailing wages are made based on the area the worker will be in and their title, and are published on the DOL website: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/wages
Before being allowed to hire a foreign worker a company must advertise the position in the US. This could be improved as right now you can put the ad in the most obscure newspaper you can find or on TV at 3am. But you do have to do something.
The decision to grant or deny a visa is made by a consular officer - a trained human - who carefully considers all the foreign worker’s case materials (called a “petition”).
All this is to say, they thought of this “bringing in foreign workers depresses wages” problem way back when they created this program and invented prevailing wages to mitigate it. They thought of “bringing in foreign workers denies locals opportunities to apply for those roles” way back when they created the program and invented job ad requirements to mitigate it.
Don’t get me wrong the H-1B is definitely being exploited. Bodyshops are a thing. But it’s not at huge scale. It is a problem to be fixed with better enforcement and targeted reforms, not pitchforks.
Mr. Sanders’ argument needs to be backed up differently. As it stands he is misleading the public. It’s surprisingly out of character.
It provides supply in the market and lowers their bargaining power, so the parity in wages is parity in a lower baseline
Also in practice there are salary ranges and the H1B's usually take the lower of the range AND work longer hours at the fear of visa loss.
In other words, wage suppression.
What causes wages to rise? Shortage of supply.
What's the fix to that pesky problem? Importing tons of people at, let's call it, current wages.
Wages are suppressed. Exactly as intended by the major companies abusing the system for their benefit.
And because the lottery is purely random and not based on category/level, there's little advantage to the sponsoring company to try for anything but the lowest salaried bucket that kinda fits. At least until it gets to the level where the employee is willing to torpedo their own petition by bringing it up.
Anyone working on software in the USA should check the local prevailing wage for a level 1 "computer programmer", or even "software developer", and ask themselves of they would be interested in applying for their current position at that salary.
My point here is that what happens when someone from XYZ country comes over, gets in charge of hiring then decides they want more from their country, and then exploits the system to bring over all their friends and maybe family from their country and this goes on for decades and you're kind of hiding it under the carpet as we seem prone to do in these situations. This goes beyond just enforcement and worker protections into a place that's beyond the scope of the purpose of H1B.
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