I'd argue with the 100% - we all know the companies that do it. They get about half of H1B visas. So 50% :)
The blanket $100K (instead of say tiering it like raising fee $50K for each next 20K tier of visas with the $250K fee visas no subject to the cap - if only Tramp knew anything about business and specifically price differentiation :) would definitely revive outsourcing to offshore.
This time, with AI agents, the outsourcing would work much better though.
What do you mean exactly by that. I do not follow...
The benefits were legendary but the pay was 20-30% lower than what was around.
I don’t have evidence of wrongdoing but I’ve occasionally wondered if it was some kind of scheme.
Even if you try to pin it to the median that does not include H-1Bs, you still are letting the market compete on labor cost and that competition can still affect the local median. Companies decide all the time that they could hire, for example, 2 H-1Bs for the cost of one "senior" local developer, encouraging that local developer to maybe only ask for 1.5x "an H-1B" to remain competitive in that market. Iterate that enough in hiring decisions and companies still have more control of that local median than labor does.
I don't know if there is a "fair" way to set the cost of labor for an H-1B, but "local median" or any other average-based math is probably not it.
Stock compensation is completely ignored. Since stock compensation can be a large fraction if not the majority of the compensation, this means that many H1-Bs may be underpaid compared to their coworkers, while appearing to the government to be the highest paid in that company and job role.
The other ignored aspect is effective hourly pay. Software engineers are nearly always exempt employees, so they don't receive hourly pay. But a manager can demand more from H1Bs, even if it would mean work during nights or weekends, and there's little the H1B can do. Local employees can more easily change jobs if that happens, and moreover, the threat that they can change jobs disincentivizes such abuse.
And yet, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta and Amazon would never be where they are without folks who are or who started on H-1B. A ton of their senior staff were once 20-something hired on H1B
Crackdown on the abuse of outsourcing companies, let actual tech workers who are (or will be) good at their jobs come here, it’s obvious policy. The US has benefited immensely from that brain drain.
Much of my presentation included things that most of my unemployed American colleagues, all of whom were actively looking for work, already knew how to do implicitly. Because it literally was just basic, "This is how flexbox works"-type of stuff.
Maybe the H-1B program is a great program for hospitals. For tech, it is 100% being used to import cheap, disposable labor in a way that harms U.S. citizens economically.