Temporary Visas, Meant to Import Talent, Help Ship Jobs Abroad

The ideal solution which has been proposed by several people, but will probably never see the light of day in legislation due to entrenched lobbying interests is very simple – separate the visa from the employer. If an employer sponsors an H1B once, that person should be automatically be free to work for any company he/she pleases for six years. This will make H1Bs more of a realistic "high skill level" visa and less of a captive labor pool for the industry.

And the police had powers to deport --double the fun (meaning you had to have papers)

That said, I don't think progressives who propose easing immigration from poor countries would allow competition for "high-skilled" jobs like doctors, engineers, lawyers because it would suffer pressure from professional pushback.

Long ago when I was in digital medical imaging we observed radiologists reading X-rays and figured we could make many times our engineer wages by just saying "Normal chest" and pressing the "advance" button. We'd be right almost all the time!

If a company wants to offshore jobs out the country, they shouldn't be helped by our own government to do it.

I do too. There are two Indian families in my apartment complex who have a breadwinner here on a work visa. I like them and their kids are my son's best friends. I don't see them as the problem here.

> Why should Americans make more money than Indians for the same work?

I don't know about you, but I probably pay more for rent and a lot of other things here in the States than a corresponding tech worker in India does.

I don't think that makes me better than someone in India, but it does mean that the almighty Free Market is certainly not my friend. If we could lower my expenses to the levels you see in India then I think I'd be okay with the Free Market.

Updated: clarification.

Your idea that Indians (or perhaps Chinese) should be the only ones coming in sounds a bit racist to my ears actually. Why should it be Indians coming in, when so many Syrians are fleeing their homes, much due to the US invasion of Iraq (and undermining of Assad - so that now ISIS runs much of Syria).

I don't see how India providing its citizens with free IIT educations, only to be brought to the US and work like coolies, chained to an H1-B visa, is some wonderful thing. We should be giving out citizenship, and that's it, the foreign worker programs are only used to screw over American workers.

You have this racist attitude of wanting Indians, and excluding Syrians etc. You want them chained them chained as coolies to H1-B visas to exploit them. Then you accuse anyone opposed to your scheme to exploit people for a buck "racist" like you're some kind of humanitarian.

Our ancestors built this nation. We current citizens are their heirs. Whatever benefits there are to having been born here, those benefits should accrue only to citizens.

America is ours, we and our ancestors built it. If there are any benefits to living here, they belong to us, and not to foregners. Likewise, my nice house belongs to me and not to you, despite the fact that it was purchased with money willed to me by my parents.

That's to say nation states are selfish and are at the service of its people. That's how we've got things set up. That's why Bangladeshis aren't allowed to work in India, or why any state adopts tariffs, etc. All selfish self interest. That is why.

It's also not racist, unless you use the old definition of race meaning nationality. If these were going to the English or to the Russians, you'd see similar backlash.

This is actually possible for a LOT of jobs that Americans do, modulo edge cases. Most of what nurse practitioners do, for instance, can very easily be replicated by a random forest. Try telling the nurse practitioners they don't have a real job. Hell, by that metric, most of crud isn't a real job either. In fact, the whole point of "work experience" is that the newhire with zero work experience mimics the more experienced worker until he passes the Turing test ie. the Boss, given the work output, can no longer distinguish if the work was performed by the newhire or the oldhand. Its turtles/strike/mimicry all the way down.

Here's the thing. Not everyone in this country can be a CEO. The WALL-E premise of everyone living the fat life (pun intended) while the robots do the work is not viable. The truth is that this country is made up of people with a broad spectrum of capabilities and talents. Furthermore, these people are not fungible resources that can easily relocate to whatever third world country that has now usurped their former job functions. We have already seen large parts of this country's population essentially permanently displaced with the mass outsourcing of manufacturing. These were good paying, stable blue-collar jobs that people who were not born to be CEOs could rely on, live a good life, and raise families. Now look at the former manufacturing cities. They did not all magically retrain to be knowledge workers. Instead, entire communities were laid to waste. Now extend what happened to manufacturing to skilled labor under your "every job to the cheapest bidder" philosophy. What happens? Maybe plastic crap at Toys-R-Us is 3 cents cheaper. But eventually a large enough percentage of this country is displaced to where society itself becomes unstable. When this destabilization eats away at enough of foundations of our society, even the wealthy will be affected.

Government's job is (supposed to be) to take the longview on what is good for a healthy American society, not to facilitate multi-national corporations in their quest to cut every cost they can.

Because America is not India. All those American workers have bills to pay in America, where the bills are higher the same way their wages are higher.

In a certain popular city in the US that starts with S, that is not far from truth right now.

Instead of H1B, we should update our immigration laws and policies to prefer educated people of means who have a desire to come here and contribute to our country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Only if that pursuit can be realized, which in the reality of our current world and for the workers being displaced, it usually cannot.

Is laying off Americans in a poor job market with few opportunities because most of the interesting work has been moved overseas really a judicious use of resources and talent? If it costs X amount of dollars to live in a certain area of the planet, and companies don't employ workers in that area of the planet, how can the company continue to have sales in that area over the long term?

Employers are really not all that serious about hiring. The economy really isn't in good shape when compared to before 2008. They'll hire people with very specialized skills at a bargain pay rate, but that's it.

There are two ways out of this. In the best case, the cost of living will decrease in first world countries and meet the third world counties in the middle. In the worst case, there will be war on a scale similar to World War II at the end of the Great Depression. War is a good stimulus for the economy and it puts people to work. I'm hoping for the former and not the latter.