As an immigrant, I'm all for better and easier immigration system. As a parent of an 11 year old, I can tell you that what your country really needs is not more smart and talented immigrants, but better education.

When I was brought to work here on H-1B visa, I couldn't understand why the US would need so many immigrant software developers. Now that I've had 5 years to see what your schools are teaching kids, this is no longer a mystery to me. Your education is appalling and is the main reason why I'm planing to leave the country eventually.

The U.S. produces many of the world's great intellectuals, inventors and engineers. So how does it do it if the education system is that bad? The answer is that it isn't. This is what I've observed:

Its K-12 education system isn't that great in general, but it's good enough.

Its colleges however do a good job filtering the non-academically inclined and catching up those remaining to the rest of the world in 4 years. U.S. college graduates are no worse than say UK college grads in terms of ability, even in technical disciplines. Elite U.S. colleges arguably produce students of equal or higher quality and the elite universities in most countries.

Taken broadly, U.S. grad schools are on par with the rest of the world. Its elite grad schools however are heads over heels better -- which is why everyone wants to go to grad school at a good US university. The funding is way better too.

Certain European countries like France, and funneling societies like India and China, produce more highly trained technical types at the college level, but these advantages wash out at the graduate level.

Most of the world optimizes education at the K-12 levels. The U.S. optimizes education at the tertiary level.

"The answer, I think, is that in education and in science, as in fast food and popular culture, America is not really worse than the rest of the world, we are merely a few years ahead of the rest of the world. What we are seeing here will happen everywhere soon enough. Our colleagues abroad can take what scant comfort they can find in the promise that our dilemmas in science and education are on the way, along with Big Macs and designer jeans ... Most elementary school teachers are poorly prepared to present even the simplest lessons in scientific or mathematical subjects. In many places, Elementary Education is the only college major that does not require even a single science course, and it is said that many students who choose that major do so precisely to avoid having to take a course in science. To the extent that is true, elementary school teachers are not merely ignorant of science, they are preselected for their hostility to science, and no doubt they transmit that hostility to their pupils, especially young girls for whom elementary school teachers must be powerful role models. Even those teachers who did have at least some science in college are not likely to be well prepared to teach the subject."

[0]http://www.geoffdavis.net/dartmouth/policy/elites.html

At the graduate level (Master/PhD) I'd say it becomes comparable, but there were very few Canadian students compared to Chinese and Iranians.

That is really not that hard to explain. Once you solve hunger, clothing, mobility and housing. You basically take away the most important of human instincts which drive a person to work insanely hard for success.

At that point a person has to call upon his internal human enterprise to succeed. That's hard.

America is just a victim of its own success. This is also called decadence.

I had some good teachers growing up, as well as a number of bad ones. The good ones all fell into one of these categories: 1) they were young and idealistic 2) they were doing a sabbatical or gap-two-years before going back to their day job as a children's book author, radio astronomer, or medical student 3) they were an independently-wealthy trust fund kid on a mission to do good. I also had some Google coworkers that taught CS in elementary school; they also fell into the "independently wealthy and semi-retired" category.

I come from a family of 3 generations of teachers, but when my starting salary as a computer programmer was within $3K of my mom's retirement salary as a teacher and I made more in 7 years of programming than she did in 39 years of teaching, it's very difficult to justify entering the profession.

(My mom also has stories about the cultural differences in how people treat teachers. The parents of her Asian students would bring her gifts, always treat her with respect, and effusively compliment her on the difference she was making in their child's lives. The parents of many - not all - of her native-born students would treat her like a glorified babysitter, yell at her, threaten legal action, and generally take a complete disinterest in their children's lives. You get what you value.)

When they show up at parent-teacher conferences, they're usually mad that little Johnny is failing...even when little Johnny has literally turned in nothing all year, even classwork you gave them time in class to do. And hasn't retaken that test you've given him three times to do it at home. But it's my fault that I just don't get him a straight passing grade, despite all this. Or, their parents don't come/get mad when the kids cheat and get marked for it, etc. And, of course, often the parents of the best students do come, when they're the ones I need to talk to the least!

But, contrast them with my Hispanic students (particularly the Guatemalan ones, and the Mexican ones; the Puerto Rican ones are different). The Guatemalan students themselves are always so focused and wanting to pay attention, and the two Mexican girls usually are. They get frustrated at the Puerto Ricans, who goof off a lot.

Now, I don't see a lot of their parents, but that's more because they all work night shift (as do my students). However, if I offered (extra) credit for them to email/call, or show up to parent teacher conferences, every single one of them would be there. And usually they contact us, often through their kid since they don't speak much English, if their grades drop asking what the kid can change. It's very different in the attitude they have towards teachers compared to my American students (in general), and I think anyone who deals with a lot of them daily and gets to know them (one class is solely Hispanic students, so I don't have to worry about balancing language issues between them and American ones).

Edit: You've posted uncivilly to HN before. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.

Never mind the issues with union staff you can't fire despite their rampant ineffectivity...

You do make a good point. Perhaps america is only using 2.5 of it's 5%. Half, in other words.

But that's still tiny compared to the sheer amount of foreign tech talent america has been able to benefit from.

Sure, people might be motivated to immigrate here by your universities. Even when I was a teenager growing up in an Eastern European country, I had heard of MIT and dreamed of studying there. But there's a long road to go down before you arrive at your university's doors.

Another thing I would like to point out is that an important aspect of an education system is the access to it. It's kind of like your health care: some of the most advanced treatments are available here, but there's a huge inequality preventing vast numbers of people from having access to those treatments.

Bottom line is that the overall quality of your education system should not only be measured by the quality and prestige of your universities, but a myriad of other factors that influence the final outcome -- that outcome being an apparent shortage of your own skilled citizens.

The interesting thing is even when we had millions of people out of work who worked in technical fields, SV and other major tech hubs were pushing for even more H1-B's.

It really has nothing to do with skilled citizens and more to do with the salaries they demand which tend to be on the scale of 1-3 times more expensive to hire and keep then the off-shore people they're hiring.

Just an anecdote for you:

I was hired as a contractor on a financial application at a major health care provider here in the states. I was the only US born developer on the entire team. That included developers, project managers, and scrum mangers, On a team of 18 people, I was the only American. Several times I overheard team members talking about salary and what they were getting paid. It was shocking to me that I was getting almost twice as much as they were per hour for virtually the same work.

It's not the skills or education that are lacking, it's the cost of the labor which is considerably lower for off-shore talent or H1-B contractors.

Of course, I don't have any direct experience with the few companies that are famous for pushing the boundaries of the H-1B visa.

You can't pay attention to achievement metrics or school ranking systems either. They are almost all relative to American schools only and fail to measure well across different global education models. You may find your local public school as an "A" grade from some rating agency, but it means nothing. The only reliable metric is how many of the graduates are accepted into top tier liberal arts colleges.

Frankly, I'm not even trying any of that mess with my children. We teach them ourselves.

The k-12 numbers are easy to find. Google Pisa.

I believe I already stated that more immigration is not the solution, in my first comment in this thread.

> especially labor that like you is here to take what they can, selfishly, before they jump ship.

What's with the hostility and personal attacks? I'm paying the same taxes are everyone around me, but without the right to influence the system because I can't vote. So I can't see what makes me selfish, except the fact that I plan to "jump ship", as you put it. I came to this country with high hopes and expectations, with the idea that I can not only enrich my life and that of my family, but also work on marvelous tech and make the world better. What my actual experience turned out to be is out of scope of this discussion, but would certainly be a prerequisite for judging me fairly.

for all the talk of "liberal snowflakes", i do find that americans possess a decent amount of personal responsibility, insofar as they will take action to improve their own lives. as for improving their home country, i don't really see many americans doing much other than talk. the only people i see taking action in this way are members of marginalized groups working to improve things for their group and my white liberal friends taking selfies at protests.

Again, I might be wrong, but every time I've read or heard the word "selfish", it was always used as a judgment.

> ask yourself how you can have a positive impact and make your new home a better place

I was under the impression that having a discussion about how to improve things with a group of people who might be in a better position than average to help improve them was also a way of working towards that goal.

> Perhaps that sense of personal responsibility is an American affectation.

This is the third country I've lived in, including my own country of birth. My experience is limited, but it's still more than the average person gets. From that experience, it seems to me to be a generational thing, much more than cultural. It can be seen in different attitudes that different generations adopt towards their employers: generally older generations see their employer as part of their life and a kind of a "family", whereas younger generations view it as a business transaction with severe imbalance of power. I expect same thing happens with patriotism.

There does seem to be at least one cultural aspect to it, though. Americans, as well as citizens of other countries where capitalism has advanced to similar extremes, seem to view things with a sense of "personal responsibility" rather than collective or communal responsibility.

> As one of our leaders once said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. That seems even more apropos for those who have made the conscious decision to adopt this place as their home.

Why would it seem "even more apropos" for immigrants? I honestly don't understand this logic: why would you expect guests in your home to take better care of it than you do yourself? And I use the word "guest", rather than "fosterling", because not all immigrants come here immediately convinced that this will be their new home.

Here's a truth about a lot of us immigrants: we come here with a hope, but not with a conviction. We would have preferred to live a happy, fulfilled life in our own country and we tried, but for whatever reason we couldn't and we decided to leave. The definition of insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Besides, we're not talking about what the country can do for me. We're talking about what the country can do for its future generations. I already have an excellent education. But I have a much bigger responsibility to my own son, than to your country or even my own.

that's wrong, what you are referring to is "individualism vs collectivism", there's definitely very developed countries who favor collectivism, the perfect example is Japan.

And if your point isn't race or culture, but of economic disparity, that is sort of my point.

What I'm saying is that if you actually compare people with similar demographically-expected IQ and socioeconomic situations, Americans stack up fine. It's the extenuating circumstances that drag the overall averages down.

All that really means is that overall averages across 300 million people aren't that useful.

For what it's worth, I didn't go to any elite universities and I make less than 35,000 per year, so I don't have a horse in this race.

The US is a uniquely diverse country, and such a diverse country necessarily will have a tough time competing in average performance scores with better countries that are not diverse and, instead, have a quite uniform culture. So, right away on average scores, the US will have a tough time competing with much of Europe and the better Asian countries.

Also understand that the famous, prestigious US universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, MIT, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Columbia, most of the SUNY schools, most of the Big Ten, CMU, Chicago, U. Washington, most of the University of California campuses, Stanford, Caltech, University of Texas, Rice, Georgia Tech, etc. are RESEARCH universities and do not concentrate on technical or vocational training for software developer positions where H1Bs are common.

Okay: We're considering education quality and using test scores as evidence.

Well, it is Social Science 101 (my wife's Ph.D. was in mathematical sociology, and my brother's Ph.D. was in political science) to control on other likely explanatory variables.

So, an obvious candidate alternate explanatory variable is culture of the country of the recent ancestors of the students.

So, to compare education in the US with that in, e.g., Japan, we should see how (A) US students of recent Japanese descent compare with (B) Japanese students in Japan. So, now are holding culture reasonably constant and, thus, doing better comparing the schools and whatever else we have not controlled on.

Not to control on culture would be grade F in Social Science 101 and give total garbage results.

I.e., no fair blaming the education in the US when the real cause of the differences is culture and not the education.

Where did you go to school? How did your education differ from what you've seen in America?

It's not that we don't produce educated people, it's we don't consistently produce educated people across the board and your location and income is a huge factor in your future success.

Those living in West Virginia have almost no chance, and those living in California have much better opportunities. The US, like many countries, falls prey to sweeping generalizations that are at best partly true.

Some state schools in not well known areas of the country are excellent and very affordable (IU, Purdue, Case Western, Carnegie Mellon).

Used to be, at least in my region of the USA, companies made local investments to build the talent pool needed.

Tektronix is a stellar example.

https://watch.opb.org/video/oregon-experience-the-spirit-of-...

People literally walked in off the street, got jobs, got education and went on to do great things.

It costs more to do that, but the benefits are easily seen.

Today, we see much less, and demand for people, largely from places that do continue to invest in people, has grown dramatically.

This was I think also what was envisaged when the EU first wrote free movement into law -- general mixing, rather than one-directional floods.

But my point was that free-movement between near-peer countries seems like almost pure benefit. And this was where the EU started, knocking down walls in benelux... you would struggle to get many people upset about that.

Integration all the way to Romania etc. is more recent, really quite a different thing. The hope was for rapid convergence, and the evidence is mixed I guess.

I do not disagree with your claim about near peer countries.

Granted I acknowledge that has potential to be messy in reality without a whole lot of work to get a framework - let alone one that would be accepted. Perhaps some sort of "social service fee" minimum for benefits in taxes paid to prevent free rider issues for instance.

1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/effs-letter-eus-copyri...

Spain isn't interested in getting an American immigrant just because one of its nationals moved to the US.

Its going to be a infinitesimally small fraction compared to the number of people from those regions that want to work here.

For really dodgy areas not soft postings like UAE / KSA you also get a premium. I remember a colleague who was on +80% for Angola (he got robed twice on the trip from airport to town)

If you set a quota and give to the highest bidder, you're going to see private sector executives and financial roles being filled in cities with high costs of living and competitive wages. Salary is a function not only of demand but also location and industry.

This will discriminate against rural and middle America by depriving them of the skilled labor that they need to survive.

That's kind of already happened. Since the recession almost all new jobs created were in cities and metro areas, and mostly to educated workers.

Rural and middle America have this problem all on their own: skilled labor does not want to live in rural and middle America. Especially young skilled workers. There's even the concept of rural brain drain, as the top 5 % are sure to leave right after they're done high school.

I'm unsure about this, and think it's kind of a chicken and the egg problem. I know tons of people who are from the midwest that would prefer to be there, but tend to flock to the coast simply because it's hard to find as rigorous of a professional environment back home.

Edit: Now that I'm thinking about it a little more I can maybe sympathize a little bit. I prefer to live in rural areas in some ways due to my hobbies, but I'm never going to as the economics of a tech company, or even a company that needs skilled, educated workers makes no sense in rural areas. So there's something to the want vs. choice angle, but what one fantasizes about has little to do with economic realities. Plenty of people want high paying low skilled manufacturing jobs to be a thing again, that doesn't mean it's realistically going to happen.

I'm not suggesting that a headquarters needs to be in these smaller cities either, but often times right now, there isn't even a satellite office with any engineering.

Yes, that's the point. Skilled labor immigration is for skilled labor.

It should not by a subsidy to companies that cannot afford to pay prevailing wages and/or are unwilling to invest in their workforce.

> This will deprive rural and middle America of the skilled labor that they need to survive.

Middle America will be fine; Chicago, KC, Pittsburgh, etc. can and do compete with the coasts for skilled labor!

That said, I could get behind a rule that adjusts for cost of living so that e.g. 100k in Pittsburgh or KC == 200k in SF. That seems fair.

As for rural America, there's a reason these areas can't attract companies or talent.

  > As for rural America, there's a reason these areas 
  > can't attract companies or talent.

The fact that the concerns of rural communities are summarily dismissed when making policy was one of the big contributing factors to the election victories of both Brexit and Trump. (Possibly more due to resentment rather than as a rational response, but that's irrelevant.) Urban vs Rural is becoming one of the more significant divisions in this country, as wealth consolidation favors urban.

And, more fundamentally, there are people who live there. The actions of a democratic government are supposed to be for the benefit of its people. That includes the people who live in rural communities. Policy that lets the economic advantage of urban areas snowball more is something that should be given more thought than "it wouldn't matter anyways, those places suck."

Maybe there isn't a solution, or maybe this policy in particular isn't the best place to address it, but it deserves at least a modicum of thought rather than a dismissal that is, frankly, disdainful. Those places do suck, but we should treat that as a problem to be addressed rather than avoided.

[edit]: Let me clarify: I am not saying the urban-rural divide is caused specifically by the lack of high-skill immigrant labor. I am saying the urban-rural divide is exacerbated generally by dismissing the concerns of rural communities when making policy. I don't think this policy suggestion in particular is the highest-value one, but I also think that no individual snowflake is responsible for the avalanche.

This is, of course, an intentional behavior of our system of government. You can even make an argument that it's a positive one. (I would disagree.) It is not, however, "democratic", nor does it point at some kind of underrepresentation.

It would be much better if more small towns had similar offerings such that the 10% aren't overrun by people looking to get away from the city.

I am sure that many of these places would be very happy to have less H1Bs living there.

Do you think that an influx of underpaid skilled labor is going to ease the tensions that created Brexit and Trump?

Your assertion here appears to be that Trump voters were pissed off that more immigrants weren't making it to their hometowns. I find that assertion... highly implausible.

> Policy that lets the economic advantage of urban areas snowball more is something that should be given more thought than "it wouldn't matter anyways, those places suck."... Those places do suck, but we should treat that as a problem to be addressed rather than avoided.

Oy.

1. IMO they don't suck. They have many advantages. But they aren't particularly good locations for doing highly skilled labor.

2. There are a lot of policy levers that can be used to help rural areas. Trying to turn them into immigration-fueled discount tech/med hubs is doomed to fail and is therefore definitely not the right lever.

3. It's also worth noting that even rural economic development tends to be geographically concentrated. Just as wealth concentrates in cities with 10M people compared to cities with 100,000 people, wealth also concentrates in cities with 100,000 people compared to cities with 1,000 people. And BTW, those 100,000 person towns where skilled labor would invariably concentrate are in many cases already doing quite well.

Even rural development -- and ESPECIALLY rural development based on skilled labor immigration -- isn't going to help the rural places that have been hardest hit in the past two decades, which tend to be in the 1,000 to 10,000 range.

The argument isn't that policy should benefit urban America. The argument is that trying to bootstrap tiny local economies with skilled labor immigration is doomed to fail.

H1B visas are only granted to people who are paid more than the prevailing wages of citizens working the same SOC code job in the same area. There have been consultancies in the past who have gamed this, but USCIS has cracked down severely on this in the past year or so.

These cities may as well be "coastal" relative to their regions. There are a lot of hurting small PA towns less than 100 miles away from Pittsburgh experiencing a brain drain, for example.

IF KC and Pittsburgh aren't "middle america", then the term ceases to have much of a meaning and we might as well stick with "rural".

There are a lot of smaller metro areas that are far rural, but aren't big cities - for example, my hometown - Erie, PA, which has a metro population of just over 275k - is very much a city - but is too far from Pittsburgh to benefit from their economic growth. Pittsburgh is fine, but Erie is in decline.

If "middle america" refers to every non-rural city between the coasts, then it is a meaningless term. There is too much economic variation to lump them all together for a single analysis.

That leaves nobody to complain.

If you insist on deciding what is best for rural and middle America, I sure hope you don't object when they return the favor, deciding on your behalf that cities would be best off without any immigration.

Salary is a function of location, industry, and demand. Discriminating against American businesses that need skilled labor and are not in the most competitive industries or locations is not the purpose of the H1B program.

>There is no reason Tata and Infosys should be hiring 70k contractors to do shitty jobs.

This is a different problem, which is being solved as USCIS is cracking down on consultants who are registered in one region but work in another.

The point is that switching to an auction with the H1B causes more problems without really solving any, at least within the scope of the program's purpose.

Bringing in a lot of foreign civil engineers may be more total economic value brought in, but in a way that doesn't justify the cost in unassimilated people.

An "auction" by how much employers are willing to pay is indeed much closer to what the policy is trying to optimize for.

The lower-paid high-skill jobs should not be using the scarce H1-B spots, but should raise wages to draw more Americans, since the premium is much lower than you'd need to hire an American for the higher-paid jobs.

The choice is instead between 20 low paid engineers and 20 high paid executives/engineers/employees.

This makes the answer to this choice much more clear.

Again, auctioning H1B with quotas doesn't solve a problem, it just creates new ones.

If you're paying 20x what a civil engineer gets then you might as well go with E5 Investor Visas. Its true that auctions have issues, but we could go with (for example) second price (aka Vickrey) auctions for salaries.

I'm not sure why you are turning to hostilities. Please review the legislation.

Rural and middle America needs to get off its collective ass. I have seriously considered moving to one of those places -- alas, while I can get a house cheap and have what I need to survive inexpensively, I cannot get high speed internet even if I pay $1,000.00 per month.

What jobs are rural American companies hiring H1Bs?

The H1-B system seems designed to allow big companies to exploit foreign labor to drive down wages and hold those foreigners hostage while they're here. Ratios better allow mobility of foreign workers and allow them to seek market rate salaries. If I were in control of immigration policies, I'd set a 3:1 American-to-foreigner ratio based on job classification/salary bands and make it apply to any company with more than 50 employees. Any immigrant who passes a DHS background check and can get an offer from an eligible company should be able to get a work permit, regardless of their home country, with no time limit when they'd be sent home. Only failing to find employment at an eligible employer within, say, 6 months should force someone to leave. And after a 5-year working period, they should be able to apply for citizenship. At worst, it becomes a jobs program that forces employers to employ American citizens to get the workers they need.

The remaining concern is distorted markets like foreign language teachers (brought up elsewhere in the thread), where it may be politically infeasible to raise compensation to match the value workers create.

The purpose is not to give visas to the wealthiest bidder in the wealthiest locations and industries.

Prevailing wage requirement already solves the problem of wage velocity, so this is just creating more issues without solving any.

H1B and similar programs should be used to fill in the holes that are on the national level - i.e. where there's no labor force anywhere else in the country that could be enticed to move.

[0]: https://www.federalpay.org/gs/locality

Having higher paid workers push out the lower paid ones, is kinda the whole point. I want more skilled labor to move to where they are in demand.

Would need to be artfully worded so that sign-on bonuses and short-term employment is not used to game the system by permitting averaging down over time.

What do you think is actually is the problem if highly compensated employment is used as a fast track to immigration and perhaps even citizenship?

If the salary ever drops the visa is invalidated and becomes available for bidding by other companies.

I was looking through online records and found folks being brought in for sub 50k jobs that looked like low level ... customer service roles.

I'll see if I can find it later.

This also addresses the concerns about salary differences between different industries and regions.

In practice you're right though. Most companies have limited experience with this process and just don't want to get into it.

- The green card process doesn't completely transfer over.

- Filing a petition to transfer an H1B puts the employee at risk of getting a denial. Every petition sent to USCIS is risking an audit, denial, and at the very least, many headaches.

People are making offers to candidates with undefined start dates many months in the future. The candidate has to commit to switching jobs when the transfer is submitted. If current job gives them a promotion in the interim and they decide to stay, they can’t just cancel the transfer. Their current employer (who didn’t know a transfer was happening) has to file a reverse transfer with the same delay that puts them in some kind of limbo.

It’s a complete clusterfuck and is making it really hard to hire for some positions.

I went through 2 H1B "transfers" (so in total I have been employed by 3 different employers as a H1B) 7-ish years ago so I'm very familiar with this process. At least, the way it was working at that time.

It’s difficult already as teachers switch jobs over the summer which over the past couple of decades has been when the supply is already used up.

[+] English teachers are recruited from the California system. Unfortunately CA schools are so terrible that if the kids go back to their jobs,encountry they are frequently behind in English!

The problem with this approach, of course, is that you need a judge/executive who follows the spirit of the law so that I can't get a bunch of cheap tech workers by saying "oh, job ABC in town XYZ is its own industry/sector and not comparable to SWEs at Google".

The RAND institute, among others, concluded that the reason US citizens have turned away from graduate degrees in the sciences is a rational market response to poor pay and working conditions in favor of fields that offer better salaries and career stability. In short, there is no shortage, just a desire to pay extremely low salaries and establish exploitive working conditions - which you can do when you control someone's right to live and work in the US when these rights are difficult to come by.

Not only do I think that there's no reason to prop up a system that suppresses salaries outside tech/finance/med (or within those fields, that happens too, especially in tech), I think there's real harm in the market distortions these schemes produce.

Arguably by making postdocs underpaid, the US as a nation is getting cheap scientific advancement, in exchange for dangling the promise of eventual American citizenship (and the American dream) in front of said postdocs.

Money is a very good proxy for demand after all. If company's can easily place people for 350+k jobs that's going to lower the pay of those 350k jobs.

PS: Effectively, your describing a planned economy where someone picks the level of expected pay for each job with more foreign workers available for overpaid jobs.

You basically described a green card (except it's nominally five years to citizenship, not six).

After some years of high demand and high prices, I imagine that the price would drop to some stable level. When that happened, we might have an opportunity to bring some sanity to the illegal immigration problem in the US. In some more sane world, both parties might agree that a person that can prove they have been in the US for some number of years can pay for a green card at the auction rate (gov financing available).

I'm not sure the first change is a good idea. Wouldn't it give a huge advantage to bigger companies? Haven't really thought this one through.

An auction based allocation would favor ad selling companies that can pay juniors 200k to do A/B testing.

Then sure, it would partially solve the abuse from cheap IT consultancies, and that's better than nothing. But there would definitely be adverse effects.

Outside of the west coast and FAANG companies, salaries aren’t that crazy. I haven’t seen any difference in comp based on company size in most of the US. They all have to compete for the same talent pool.

of course "the US" is not a monolith. it's a collection of competing interests. big corporations, consumers, and the existing stock of US-based workers each claim to be "the US."

So, making hiring these employees based on salary only means that places with a higher cost of living will be able to hire these employees for more typical rates, where-as companies in lower cost of living areas will have to pay well above average for the same employee. If actual salary wasn't a requirement, then midwest companies could still be competitive even while offering lower salaries.

This is a separate argument from allowing economic refugees asylum into a country.