> foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens
This is honestly rare, unless you couple it with a wage level that is lower than the domestic market will bear. Some individuals involved in R&D, but outside of that there are few skills that are not found in the US. I believe the condition isn't not found, but rather, in low supply?
> make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.
This would be a huge boon.
Hence the idea of prevailing wage, and paying somehow above that.
This of course creates an avenue to game the system, because prevailing wage for basically any work in SF or NYC is likely higher than on average over the entire US. You can undercut local markets a bit by bringing in smart people from abroad, and paying them less than they would make in SF or NYC if hired as locals, but more that the country-wide average.
(Smart, hard-working, educated people from underprivileged places get a chance of having a better life while working to improve the US economy! What's not to like?)
How does this not, by definition, depress what would otherwise be the prevailing wage for these "rare" skill sets in the US?
Lots of things if people thought about it for more than 10 seconds. Why do you think the US has such uniquely bad work life balance even in white collar sectors? And those educated people are in the top 1-2% of their home countries. What’s it going to your country to import a bunch of foreign elites with chips on their shoulder?
If what you care about is maximizing profits for Fortune 500 companies, then yeah, maybe it’s a good thing.
I am not satisfied with my job/employer -- bad environment, bad culture, etc.. I have coworkers from all over. Of the non-US native ones that I interact with, they all absolutely love our job and/or employer.
I've asked them about it, and I generally get the sense that I could not survive in the conditions from which they originally came -- both at work and outside of work.
If a dumb drone like me could figure that out, then I am sure plenty of employers found out long before me.
This actually made me giggle a little bit and while I have seen this, what I've seen more of is that a company hiring internally has offshore employees who have a vast amount of company specific info and experience that the company simply can't hire for. That only applies to internal transfers of course but it's what I see the most of.
You hire someone in local office for a year, then arrange L-1B visa which has no numerical issuance limits - but requires at least one year of previous employment with the company sponsoring the visa.
There's also L-1A which IIRC doesn't require time in company but is limited only to upper management in practice.
My dad’s an H1. (Before they created H1B in 1990.) He grew up in a village in Bangladesh. One out of five kids died by the age of five. He came in as a skilled worker and was an elite within our country—but that meant his parents owned land in a third world village and he went to school (but it had no walls). Both my parents sound like Breitbart when Gen Z or work from home or work life balance comes up. (And they’re Democrats!) My dad’s bullish on China “because they know how to work hard like Americans used to.”
And so do I! I didn’t grow up in a village, but I grew up with my dad, who made clear that there’s 16 work-hours in a day. I’m an absolute company man. So is my brother, who was born here. So is his wife, who was born here but whose family fled communism in China. My kids are growing up hearing my dad talk about taking a boat to school during monsoon season.
At some point the memory will fade. Maybe my grandkids. But in the meantime, how many more H1Bs will they have brought over?
The issue is that tech can pay exorbitant salaries compared to physical-world companies as the product they're producing has infinite reach and is often 'evergreen'
It's the same issue as investment banking; when you can almost literally print the money you're paying salaries with you can hire everyone at any price.
The issue is, that leads to the smartest people in the country all ending up at 'virtual' industries and you discover eventually you don't have an economy, you just have a giant video game.
(What we’re seeing now)
Americans are world leaders among chemists, so I don't think you're correct in this case [1].
It looks much more like saturation, with only 7200 openings per year [2]. And over 13000 annual graduates [3].
We have an excess of chemists in the US, as best I can tell, and we should expect pay to reflect that.
[1] https://research.com/news-events/world-ranking-of-top-chemis...
[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/che...
[3] https://cen.acs.org/education/graduate-education/numbers-s-c...
Child care labor is in fact in low demand [2].
I think child care is expensive because insurance is expensive.
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Life-Physical-and-Social-Science/Phy...
[2]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/childcare-...
This is because skilled labor is not fungible and different jobs are on different demand curves.
In your examples, pay and demand are low for all three professions, chemists, child care workers, and astronomers, according to the BoL.
Because industries pay differently. Unless you argue H1Bs all go to big techs.
The problem with H1B program is, no matter how it is structured, it WILL be gamed.
H-1B is probably one of the most gamed and abused visa categories, perhaps next to marriage-related stuff.
(and to be super explicit, yes if the US were to choose to allocate 25k annual h1b by ranked wage & thus all 25k were to go to various flavours of computer programmer or financial modeller, that seems totally fine)
To me, an ideal skilled worker system would define quota categories by skill/job at a much finer granularity, i.e. hundreds or thousands of different H1-B sub-categories somehow weighted by policies rooted in national strategic interest.
Maybe some kind of blinded auction process that could minimize abuse. Both potential employer and employee go through some vetting process and post their needs/skills using a standard ontology. Then, a matchmaker assigns job offers that are binding. You might allow either party to reject the offer and go back into the matchmaking pool for a limited period or number of offers before they are evicted with a cooling-off period before they are allowed to reapply.
You would also need some kind of anti-abuse audit. Otherwise, malignant players could establish esoteric job requirements via covert channel and then mislabel both the worker and the position to try to force the matchmaker's hand. How do you distinguish a truly rare skill from covert ear-marking?
I think that academic positions are already exempt from H1-B restrictions. To be more specific, these will be exempted [1]
- a higher educational institution
- a nonprofit entity related to or affiliated with a higher educational institution, or a nonprofit research
- organisation or a government research organisation
Yes, it alters market dynamics and the whole reason it's done is that the same skills are not available domestically for that price (or at all) - but talking about "low-wage labor" and "exploitation" as the whole point of the program is pretty rich.
Since you're apparently so acquainted with the stats, please enlighten us outsiders: what percentage of H-1B employees make $250K a year or more, and what percentage of H-1B employees make $400K+?
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/H1B-Salary--in-Califor...
Considering US DOL didn’t count stock comp for prevailing wage (at least last i checked) it would not surprise me if over 50% do in fact clear 250k in total gross comp
You can even search by company and see how much your colleagues make for each job title (no names though)
Strange but true.
Clearly there has to be either a shortage of the type of worker, or the Americans want a higher pay.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-legal...
- all H1B friends I know obviously are from work; I used to work at one of the FAANGs - these friends are in late 20s and above, so at least SDE 2 if not more senior - you can verify at levels.fyi that 250+ TC is normal for these roles
I'm interviewing a lot for my company and I recall in the height of the hiring boom that peaked around 21, we really are throwing out 200-300 TCs for fresh graduates, Americans or not
Those are real salaries from LCAs, not self reported salaries.
But it is still more credible than self reporting.
Rachelbythebay wrote about this in 2018: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/09/08/visa/ if your company decides they don't want you anymore, you have _ten days_ to get a new sponsored job or be out of the country. If you're being bullied or harassed or otherwise treated badly and your employer knows full well they can have you kicked out of the country in under two weeks, would you really speak up?
For an extreme example, see Susan J Fowler's https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on... . Fowler had the luck to be a US citizen, so she could go public without being deported. (She also says she got another job offer less than a week later.) Would the next person in this situation, but on a H-1B visa be able to do the same?
Secondly, h1b is not just a working visa - it’s officially a “dual intent” visa meaning it’s also a path to immigration. If we do what you are suggesting then 99.99% of applicants will be senior-principal sw engs from china/india. Which, i assume, is not the intention of this program.
Besides, companies already have to pay over prevailing wage for the role in the area. I don’t think you can just conjure expert professionals out of thin air by raising wages despite what folks on hn/reddit seem to believe. We tried that in 2021 - didn’t work too well
A system based entirely on salary would bias towards only senior roles, preventing the handling of that scenario at all.
Basing on salary alone would mean ~100% of visas go to tech talent in major cities, and every other profession is cast aside.
That’s not to say that ranking based on salary within an industry wouldn’t be a potential improvement. Or modifying caps to be industry based. There are definitely options here that could be a bit more surgical.
Because then the acceptance rate would be x% for people from India, y% from China, and 0.001% for everywhere else, which would be politically untenable.
Currently it's a lottery which you can at least argue is fair in the sense that every applicant has an equal chance. If they made it so that only the highest paid were accepted, that would skew the distribution much further.
Republican donors enjoy the labor of illegal immigration which is much cheaper than domestic labor. Any crack down on unauthorized workers in agriculture or hospitality, for example, would disrupt lots of big donors.
Democratic donors have openly stated that demographic changes would help them win more elections. These are the "demographics are destiny" folks that noted that increasing hispanic populations are good for them in elections. (If you're not winning enough votes, change the voters.) There was a lot of truth here -- just look at California, New Mexico, and Arizona elections from the 80s and 90s vs today. Recent polling suggests this may be changing.
So you end up in a strange situation where policies supported by the vast majority of Americans from all political stripes is (mostly) ignored by the parties.
How does "illegal immigration" impact this? You know undocumented workers cannot vote, right? Hell, you know documented, legal, residents also cannot vote? The only people who get to vote in US elections are US citizens.
Demographics shifts obviously help the modern DNC, for the same reason it helped the GOP a century ago: Conservatism is definitionally rooted in having minimal demographic variance (be it race, gender, religion, or whatever), so if you have two parties one of which says "only this group matters" and the other says "more than that one group matters", then increasing the demographic variation will always favor the latter, because for anyone not in the ideal conservative demographic will see that party as actively targeting them.
It's also important to be careful when saying "look at elections from the past", because a lot of laws were passed in many countries in the late 20th century to address a variety of biased laws that impacted the voting power of targeted blocks. In the US there was redlining which prevented specific demographics from voting in specific areas of the country, coupled with extensive gerrymandering this allows large scale disenfranchisement that is still being undone by the courts today, even though redlining itself became "illegal" in the 80s. There are a wide array of actions that occurred in the states you're talking about through the decades you referenced and onwards to now, that both made it possible for demographics to shift where previously people were functionally banned, and to reduce the disenfranchisement of demographics that were already present. None of that resulted in "illegal immigrants" impacting elections though, because again, non-citizens cannot vote in US elections (even though they pay taxes in the country that produced "no taxation without representation").
As an additional note, because of US government representation being determined by total population, and not "legal voters" the abuse of biased law enforcement is hits multiple times: first off victims of that bias lose representation, but then regions that get prisons get increased voting power. If you're in a region with 1000 people, but have a prison that has 5000 prisoners, then you get the congressional representation that comes from 6000 people, but only 1000 of them get to vote. Again, prisoners should be able to vote. Felons should be able to vote. Ex-cons should be allowed to vote. If there are enough of those groups to impact election outcomes, then it's a reasonable assumption that law enforcement is being used as a tool to restrict voting rights (Something that multiple people from the Nixon and Reagan administrations have explicitly stated was the reason for how the "war on drugs" was set up).
Secondly, the children of illegal immigrants are citizens and can vote. It takes decades for this strategy to pan out obviously. It can be sped up by family unification policies once an immigrant has a child citizen.
Much like prisoners and legal non-citizen residents.
> Secondly, the children of illegal immigrants are citizens and can vote.
People born in the US - children of citizens, of legal residents, and of undocumented are all citizens because that's the only how the colonies justified their right to govern the territory they colonized. If you remove birthright citizenship the overwhelming majority of people in the US would not have any right to citizenship, and in fact most "illegal immigrants" would have a much stronger claim to governance and/or citizenship than pretty much every other group.
The fact that some people now find it inconvenient that the rules that were helpful to them now help a different group is irrelevant to that.
Moreover arguing that illegal immigrants are human (let's be clear here, the DNC is anti-immigrants as well, Obama deported more people than bush or trump), is not the same as being "pro-illegal immigrant".
You could make the same argument that conservative states weakening penalties for assault, removing women's bodily autonomy, fighting against actual sex ed, defunding education, etc are similarly a grand plan to increase the representation for conservative states.
The solution to the "apparent" scourge of undocumented workers is to make it so that the people running companies the use that undocumented labor are the ones who go to jail, and in the event ICE finds undocumented labor the minimum fine for the company should be a significantly greater than one multiple of the amount the company would have had to pay a documented worker, in addition to ensuring the undocumented workers are fully compensated at the amount a documented worker would have been paid. Threatening to report them to immigration, underpaying, and wage theft are all clear evidence that the company knows they were employing people who were not allowed to work.
That's all that would be needed. Instead of ever more draconian penalties for the undocumented workers - many of whom have lived in the US for essentially their entire lives at this point, and simply don't have a choice - the penalties that should be being increased are the ones that apply to the employers. It's great because it will stop all that evil undocumented labor people claim to hate, because now these employers have to pay the undocumented labor if anything more than documented labor, because undocumented labor can report unsafe or illegal working conditions, come out fully compensated and in addition to those costs the employer has to pay even more in fines, while the managers and executives who knowingly employed said laborers go to jail.
That said as we've seen in Florida, plenty of businesses in America have set themselves up to be unable to operate without violating the law, so when Florida started passing its various "lets punish the workers, but not those that employ them" laws a whole bunch of businesses couldn't handle the idea of capitalism and complained about how they couldn't get any workers.
Now, it'll probably be a shock to you, but these family sponsorship visas actually make America's immigrant pool way less white. It may not feel like it if you're trying to get an immigrant visa on an employment basis, but America is actually one of the easiest countries to immigrate to if you have relatives here. Other developed countries are far more selective and bureaucratic.
The trick is to recognize that nobody agrees on what part of the system is actually broken. The DNC said the quiet part out loud[0], but the GOP has been thinking for decades that immigration was just a way to dilute Republican voters. A good chunk of the GOP thinks the problem is that it's too easy to immigrate and we need to become like Japan[1]. Another chunk doesn't care about immigrants, but they want to end illegal immigration by any means necessary. The DNC wants, at a minimum, immigration amnesty with a path to citizenship[3]. And then you have business interests that maximally exploit immigrants, legal or otherwise. None of those positions are reconcilable in a way that will produce an immigration bill that will pass the House, Senate, and President Biden.
[0] "Demographics is destiny", which was DNC-speak for "Hillary Clinton can't possibly lose because we have enough Mexicans in California".
[1] As a massive weeaboo[2] I do not understand why anyone would want to adopt Japanese immigration standards.
[2] "Japanophile", but a different, derogatory term I won't use; wordfiltered by 4chan to a word they stole from https://pbfcomics.com/comics/weeaboo/
[3] Keep in mind that there are two classes of illegal immigration:
- People who just moved in without the proper visa, have been here for decades, have no intention of going back, and are already integrated with their local communities. Deporting them would be needlessly cruel.
- Agricultural companies who are importing massive amounts of day laborers from Mexico to avoid having to pay minimum wage
You can argue that the former should have amnesty while still wanting to have a functional minimum wage law by stopping the latter.
As others have pointed out, you're assuming highest salary == most valuable, but what your idea will lead to is a bunch of talented people working on new ways to get people to click ads or write yet-another trading algorithm.
IMHO, you'd fix the H1-B program by doing two things:
1. Eliminate the requirement that the visa-holder have a sponsor past the start date, so the they can quit immediately and take a different job if they are underpaid or the working conditions are poor. That will eliminate any potential exploitation enforced by the program.
2. Limit the sponsors to legitimate US-based companies who will employ the workers for in-house work. Working out a precise definition may be hard, but it should be possible because it's pretty clear when we see it. Basically, something to prevent foreign contracting/outsourcing companies from even using the program.
A lot of the appeal of an immigrant is that they can't quit or take a better deal.
Exactly, the whole point of my proposal is to undermine that appeal. An H1-B program structured like I propose would mean that employers would only sponsor immigrants when they truly can't get employees with the needed skills domestically at the real market rate.
I'm surprised even in HN we are taking PR at face value.
We need to abolish the program completely.
So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?
Let any company apply and list a salary which they have to agree to pay for at least two years, and then just issue them highest salary first until they hit the quota for the year. No country based quotas or any other kind. Just straight up salary. And make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.
If people are so skilled then they must be valuable, right? This would be good for both the employee and the country, bringing in the most highly paid people.
The only ones that would get hurt in this process are the companies that abuse the system to underpay people and then get them beholden to the company.