This rule was long in coming. Low wage body shops wasn't doing anyone any good.
I would wager a great deal that not only will all slots still be allocated but that demand will continue to far outstrip supply. The number of workers excluded from the US will be identical as to that under the previous rules but those granted H-1B visas will be paid closer to what their American colleagues are.
Almost 199k applications for 90k slots.
Correction, all countries that have ever existed restrict trade, and all of the most prosperous nations today heavily control their trade across nearly every industrial segment. The sole variance is the level of restriction or tariff that they utilize depending on their context or skill at trade & production.
That includes present day Germany (a big restrictor of trade, heavily tilting their export/import ratio to a $300 billion trade surplus), France, Britain, Japan. Even while the US market is more free than most when it comes to trade, it also heavily controls & restricts trade using tariffs and global trade bodies.
That particularly includes China, which has dramatically restricted trade into their nation. They've done so on purpose in order to buy time to build up their domestic giants, which has worked extremely well for them. They've been allowed to have their cake and eat it too for decades.
By itself, China proves that you can get extraordinarily prosperous utilizing trade restriction policies under the right circumstances.
All the richest countries we have today have been among the list of richest since before and after great changes in their protectionist policies.
This sentence feels dogmatic to me. I would like to see a bunch of citations, and even then it would be hard to prove the negative.
In any case(!), the economic principle at work here is the law of comparative advantage.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as...
To claim that protectionism improves prosperity is to claim that the law of comparative advantage is incorrect.
Of all the purported liberal ideas the U.S. thinks it embraces, restriction of immigration is one of the most baffling.
It has been seen time and time again. It would be great is this meme were put to rest.
That's true. That doesn't mean it produces prosperity. Consider that those same countries impose sanctions on other countries to punish them.
How is a sanction different from protectionism?
Consider also a more comprehensive implementation of protectionism - Smoot-Hawley, which is credited as being a major cause of the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...
This has been one of the ways in which China has improved technological innovation at an incredibly fast pace.
Protectionism is building prosperity in China today.
I'm not saying protectionism is always right, I'm saying do what gets results. Sometimes that's free trade. Sometimes that's protectionism.
Did you know that New York City was founded to get out from under protectionism, and became the economic capital of the world?
Of course they aren't making too much of a noise about it as they're smart.
These policies are already backfiring.
If that means companies discover that you don't have to be in California to do tech that would be a good thing . Bring on the foolishness I say .
I would like to add that I'm not talking about this policy in particular but the growing sentiment against even skilled immigration.
I think that the main benefit is to have higher quality H1Bs. There are many talented temp stays who lose the lottery to less talented people and have to leave the US. Salary can be used as a heuristic for talent.
what makes you think they aren't? I work for Red Hat. It is an amazing company to work for. But our main technology center is in the Czech Republic, where the cost of living is 40% lower than the US. Those are absolutely great engineers to work with, and despite some of the alarming comments here they are absolutely as high quality as any US engineer if not more so. But the fact remains that their salaries are spent overseas and not here in the US.
This is why the point of free trade is to raise the standard of living in those nations so that not only does life get better for everyone around the world, but also other nations no longer act as a cheap drain for jobs that pay artificially higher wages domestically. It's a huge idea that has worked in many ways, raising US GDP vastly beyond what it could be under heavy protectionism (think: the whole world as your customer base as well as your production base vs. just the US). But it also failed spectacularly in that it isolated low skilled workers in the US who became even more resentful of foreigners than they already were, who then went ahead and elected a facist government. Whoops.
Id take it for granted that eliminating H1B visas would increase wages for software engineers: obviously at a cost for everyone else. Anything else in the middle to that will have a proportionate effect.
There are plenty of very good people who can't get an H-1 because the quota is used for cheap people. I came here on an H-1 myself and it was quite difficult because the quota got used by bodyshops. My life would have been easier if they had set a minimum salary.
One way or another, those workers will be competing with US workers regardless.