That’s true, but in reality, the US chains the engineers and doctors with the specter of losing their visa and arduous paperwork over their head so that they are coerced into selling their labor at an even lower price.
I'm the first to admit it isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean there is no net benefit. hundreds of thousands of people are paid market wages on H1B visas and many get green cards. On balance, this is good for consumers and citizens.
I feel like people have a gut reaction to injustice and harm where they want to trash the whole system, not realizing that would be an even greater injustice and harm.
It is a counterproductive distraction to real change and improvement. It just scratches the emotional itch of moral outrage and superiority.
I do not want to "trash the whole system", but when I see laws crafted specifically and solely to depress labor prices, it is reasonable to get emotional and feel morally superior. Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B?
See also lower minimum wages and separate labor standards for poorer Mexican immigrants in agriculture, not to mention the complete lack of requirement for employers to ensure legal work authorization, and complete lack of consequences for employers that employ people without work authorization.
> Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B?
H1B visas are not restricted to a single employer. The catch is that the new employer is required to demonstrate the new role is valid for H1B work.
This is a control to make sure that H1-B visa holders are not underpaid or doing abusing the system.
It is a genuinely tough problem. You could decouple the H1B visa from the employer position, but then you have people entering for one type of work at market rate, and doing any type of work and undercutting salaries.
The whole employer requirement is an attempt to protect native workers. Letting H1B workers enter decoupled from a job and salary requirement would be much better for employers. They could pay them minimum wage and hire them into any role they want.
Im curious to hear ideas for how it could be structured that is better. Im sure there are options. Maybe the workers themselves could submit the info for change of employment, but I dont know how they would prove the work is at prevailing wage.
not to dispute but rather to refine.. go to a third order effect. Imagine that Injustice is remedied (somehow involving policy), negotiations with the growing remedy system rely on growth of remedy so cleverly take advantage of the shared desire for remedy and easy public political speech win of emphasizing remedy, such that negotiations then stretch out the timeline, and add a tax, and some supervisory positions with regulatory oversight in yet another group, to be fair.. the remedy system is less remedy and more frameworks.. the Iron Law of Bureaucracy sets in.. other noise or inefficiencies or internal contradictions, grow.
Private companies play their part in implementing this remedy of Injustice and Good Policy, yet private companies exist to profit first and foremost. Management practices of labor have a sordid history, going way back.. A worker in a private company with a lottery work permit must play out the life under management in that company, whatever that may be.. And that management will also change, not always for the better.
I think I would be harder to make such a cynical zing about the net benefit of allowing 10,000 doctors to immigrate.