By putting a price on a candidate, companies can then decide how valuable a given person is to them and let free market decide who gets the visa.
This has several advantages, it allows sponsoring truly qualified candidates that otherwise might be harder to find locally (restoring the main purpose of what H1B was for), it would also solve issues of H1B workers being underpaid, or companies using this to obtain a cheaper employees (H1B holders are wiling to work for cheaper, because the visa doesn't allow them switch a company).
If someone made a "tech H-1B" bucket that would work, because the training lag is short(er).
Speciality professions have a long lag before policy changes circle back to results - H-1B's wide reach covers anesthesiologists and radiologists too.
The immediate effect of forcing a price war is that you get folks who are at the end of their careers instead of folks in the middle of their careers.
The way this plays out is that the mid-career gets starved - because you get experts even if you don't nurture the 45 year old into being one.
And you end up with a 55 year old expert working with a 28 year old who's on the verge of going back to do some more research, fully knowing that there aren't any 40 year olds who will stick around there to pass their chair to in a few years.
Money isn't time ... and this is one case, where the supply-side needs to be worked on, not the demand surge.
Except this is already the case?
Hiring a H1B worker isn't free. It costs something like $10K in legal costs alone. Do you really think a lot of companies are indulging in a large-scale conspiracy to avoid paying that $10K to an American instead? If you want the worker to stay longer than a couple years, you'll need to renew the H1B and probably file a PERM application as well. All of this costs something like $20K at the minimum.
Getting a position on a H1B is by no means easy or cheap. If a company could hire an American, they'd much rather do it. And if the H1B thing were all about cheap foreign workers, spouses of H1Bs wouldn't have had so much trouble getting hired in the pre-Obama era. Anecdotally, I know many women with Master's degrees from top-tier US universities who were desperate to find a position, and were willing to take wages well-below par, but couldn't because companies didn't want to pay for the H1B. It's also why if you look at resumes/linkedin profiles for Indians in the US, many will advertise their green cards/citizenship status. They're communicating that employers don't need to file a H1B petition for them.
Yes, it's true there are a few companies which have exploited H1Bs to bring in cheap labor. But from a statistical point of view, this is about as common as the epidemic of violence at Chuck-e-Cheese. In other words, it's a nice news story that plays well as a clickbait headline, in reality, it's a non-issue.
So they only need to be cheaper by $20K over a couple of years for it to be worth it?
That seems like a fairly small cost to overcome.
And if there isn't very much demand for H1Bs, even with "bidding" we'd expect the cost to companies to stay the same.
It isn't clear to me why prioritizing the value of an employee (as measured by how much they are paid) would not be an effective way of prioritizing H1B visas.
http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
No it shouldn't. Top N thousand by salary should be admitted, the rest -- rejected. How are you going to enforce your "geographic location" once the worker is here? We can't even enforce our borders let alone movement of people once they're in the country.
US has never really had a proper immigration program for graduates and skilled workers. H1B is a hackjob, and has outlived its usefulness. Makes no sense that a MIT undergrad is given the same preference as a call-center worker. Sure get rid of H1B, but the problems will still be there if you don't come up with a serious alternative for graduates and skilled workers.
Not that developers are alone in this of course, but it's a profession that allows people to work alone (and often at home/in isolated environments) a lot more than other jobs do.
Its not just that one wants a "computer technology worker", but one wants an individual who can communicate, work hard when needed, take on responsibility, easily read and comprehend instructions and so on.
These are weakly correlated with degrees or how technical a field of study is. An art history undergrad could easily display more of these qualities than a PhD studying the physics of plasma.