One idea to replace the H1-B lottery that I've seen on HN is to sort the applications by salary and let in the top XX highest paid.
Do you have any thoughts on that? Is this one of those "why don't they just..." type of ideas that people with first hand knowledge know is majorly flawed?
I just don't see how the value - from a benefit to the U.S. economy perspective - is tied to salary so that doesn't make sense to me as a line to draw. If the H-1B program were to be limited in any way (which is not something I necessarily agree with), one option is to list occupations that are in short supply each year and to prioritize those. Many countries do this.
To my eye, there is zero rationality in the process.
As far as I can see, the and the only effect of the visa programme is that there is a limited number of visas, and so this acts to prevent businesses from hiring the people they want to hire, and that's not freedom; and in the process of doing so, causing untold disruption to lives and businesses and direct and indirect costs to businesses, individuals and economy as a whole.
Perfectly said. It's so insane that most people don't understand how poorly designed the system is and how much unintended negative consequences it engenders.
But ironically it's also the only thing that prevents the number of international students from truly exploding. It's already a travesty that many big name public universities have more people from Shanghai or Mumbai than the next town over. Universities are behaving like corporations in trying to maximize revenue
Because universities have a duty first and foremost to their community. That is the citizens of their country and increasing duty to those local to them in their country.
The United States is not an economic zone that belongs to the world in short.
I suspect that the real problem with prioritizing by pay is that it shows that a lot of employers are using H1-B workers to put downward pressure on wages.
Wasn't Trump's proposal few years ago "95th percentile salary for their profession"? So you still have room for farmers and scientists provided that they are exceptional (or at least exceptionally well paid) farmers and scientists.
Who defines “profession” though? Is “farmer” all encompassing, or is “chicken farmer” different from “cattle farmer”? Is “battery chicken farmer” different to “free range chicken farmer”? Do I need to be top 5% US-wide or just the city/state I would be hired in?
I don't disagree there's a lot of complications in the actual implementation, but this approach is a better-than-status-quo way to achieve some fairness IMO. Currently the US Dept of Labor has a system of determining the fair wage that should be paid to a certain job description at a certain geographic location. In the green card process this is called "prevailing wage determination". Why not use it for H1b too?
This is not ideal, because within the same occupation, not every industry can afford paying the same salaries. Such policy would disproportionally favor high margin companies: adtech, tobacco, oil, finance, ... Arguably not the ones you should help get access to top engineering talent.
If Indian IT consultancies abuse the system, maybe the US should try to understand why there's such amount of unmet demand for cheap IT labor that cannot be offshored.
Doesn't salary at least set a floor on what a company thinks that employee is going to add in value? They wouldn't spend dollars on salary to get dimes of extra revenue.
I would also argue that prioritizing the highest paid jobs makes displacement of US workers less likely. It would raise the bar for everyone.
US residency and citizenship is in extremely high demand, so whatever immigration system is put in place will ultimately be gamed. Creating a visa category that is solely based on salary would be attractive to some cohort of people who want to live in the US regardless of the costs.
We saw similar things with previous "investor visas" where there was no intention to start a business and the USCIS had to stop issuing them for many years because of the pervasive fraud on both sides of the equation. I can guarantee that some creative lawyer out there was already thinking about how to game the US "startup visa" when that was proposed a few years back.
A salary-based requirement is a lot less easy to game. After all salaries are reported to the IRS on W-2s. Any fraud in the amount of salary can be easily detected without sophisticated investigation.
The only difficulty I see is that salary isn't necessarily proportional to a person's usefulness to the economy or the country. A person can start a company and pay himself a million dollars a year while the person and the company does nothing at all. Sure the IRS gets to collect a bunch, but at that point we might as well create a class of visas that are sold in an auction.
Salary based requirements are the easiest to game. Create shell company, inject enough cash to cover salaries, hire people who want to live in the US and charge them a margin on the cash they gave you. Lots of people will happily pay the IRS taxes on a phony salary for the option to live in the US. Far easier than gaming an H1B or even an E3 which requires an LCA.
If you sorted H1B applications by salary and only let in the top XX highest paid, then the allocation would simply skew heavily towards tech in Silicon Valley, TX, WA, MA and finance in NYC, and almost none would be allocated to Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, etc., and not much in lower-paid sectors. And if you only compared to median wages by state (not county, or metro area), then lower cost-of-living areas like Folsom CA would get hugely penalized for being stuck in the same bucket as SF/SV. (Also by the way now employers would have to compete against each other on raw salary, not stock grants, so you're removing the incentive component for early-stage startups, and raising their effective tax rate, which breaks how they're set up.) Arguably instead H1B should enforce some reasonable minimum salary, based on metro area. (don't confuse that with minimum wage).
So if you want to reform things you need to construct something less simplistic which can't easily be gamed. (What you're describing is like Canada's Provincial Nominee Program, which is ~35% of their economic admissions, but it grants permanent residence, not just a work visa.)
Anyway a less-discussed backstop solution to prevent abuse in H1B is to shorten (legislate) the maximum time to acquire (employment-based) Green Card - it originally used to be <6mths, now it can easily be 10+ years (from the date the employee first arrived on F1/H1B/L1, not the date the GC petition was finally raised, which can itself be 5+ years after that if the employer drags things out, which happens).
Do you have any thoughts on that? Is this one of those "why don't they just..." type of ideas that people with first hand knowledge know is majorly flawed?