> eliminate the lottery and sort applications by salary and take the top N
This is exactly what should happen.
This is exactly what should happen.
As a foreign prospective employee you are willing to let go of almost anything to get your nominal salary up high enough to be on the list. Its still a perverse incentive.
Companies can make second class citizens within: higher intensity and time of labor + lower benefits.
You can reduce PTO, you can reduce the quality of the healthcare plan, you can increase working times (ex. be on call on saturdays), you can assign the even worse and worse quality job opportunities (lots of current H1B's do bank-jobs, maintenance and dying tech jobs) etc.
If it were just the same, then what you need to pass is a law that bans all these other instruments like bonuses and equity. Id like to see americans in general say "it doesnt really matter, because I always looked at total compensation".
This just harms the poorer immigration in favor of the richer immigration. Its an active ingredient of inequality. For whose benefit?
It would increase inequality (marginally, H1B pool is still small), but I only think inequality is bad insofar as the poor are worse off. This just creates more wealth since in theory Google would only pay $200k+ if they're at least that productive at developing new useful things people want to pay Google money for. The US also gets more tax dollars, and more "innovation" insofar as that is a thing.
You could still argue it's better to give the large salary increases to poorer people though. I wrote another comment elsewhere with a list of reasonable potential arguments against top N sorting and this was one of them.
>I wouldn't take a high-stress poor quality job even if it paid really well
isn't really an option when doing so risks upending our lives. Even if we don't plan to stay here permanently (I don't), the risk of having the application denied creates an enormous pressure for us to maximize the salary number.
Another angle that is overlooked is that the H1B program isn't just for tech and finance people. I have friends in the creative industry who are on H1B too, and their salary is never as high as ours. In that sense, abolishing the lottery and prioritizing by salary would absolutely deny them any chance of working in the US. Now, if you take the absolutist position that the H1B program is only there to fill positions that are not filled by Americans, then perhaps you'd be OK with that scenario, but I think the diversity (in terms of industry and skillsets, not demographics) provided by the lottery scheme is an important benefit of the program.
I was writing what you quoted from my perspective, I'm a Canadian student who would like to emigrate to the US after I graduate. I have offers from companies in the US that are significantly larger than the still quite good amounts I could earn in Canada.
These offers are already large enough they could probably win a top N salary sort, if the bonus/stock was reallocated as salary. But, if they tried to make the job high-stress or low-quality in order to compensate for additional salary to win the sort, I'd just not take the job and stay in Canada. I imagine most people who could win top N salary sorts are also in enough demand in their home country that they could do well there (if not as well as in the US).
Like I said though, top N sorts would be politically unpopular , because among other reasons, people like me aren't good humanitarian targets for charity, and fair enough.
Ideally I'd say decide who immigrates based purely on economic reasons and use the marginal tax revenue of approving higher-paid people to increase aid. Back of the envelope math suggests that if you did that you could save ~7 children from dying horrible deaths by malaria every year of their career for every marginal top N immigrant rather than lottery immigrant. That helps a lot more poor people. But, I know this kind of thing also isn't politically feasible.
It's the other side of that.
I can't help but think that the H-1B VISA program should be tightly restricted by industry and time-limited.
If we can't find programmers, our immigration policy should be to recruit them abroad and then find a way to put them onto a fast-track to citizenship. NAY...we should COMPEL them towards the process of citizenship lest they forfeit some amount of tribute.
In no way or shape should our immigration policy serve to distort the labor market here to corporate benefit. We should be seeking every possible mechanism to help our economy grow via the increasing demand for skilled labor here in the USA. That doesn't happen when you collapse demand for entry-level positions in the USA like H-1B has ben demonstrated to do.
We should also BAN in the strongest possible terms the practice of forcing an employee to train their replacement or put it under such onerous terms that no corporation would do it. I'm talking about the equivalent of a years salary in severance or more. If you can't do the job on day one, you have no business replacing a native worker who is doing the job.
Universities, for instance, would have real problems. Universities can often use other visa classes, but not always -- eg the J1 visa can't be renewed after five years.
The whole point of restricting immigration is to avoid the sort of race to the bottom that accompanies the corporate directive to get the best possible labor at the cheapest possible price. You only get that when you're able to cast a very wide net and allow in a population of people who can exploit geographic arbitrage to earn money in one area while planning to spend it in another. I'm specifically talking about people who have zero intention of ever relocating to the USA long-term.
It only makes sense to reserve the benefits of this country to those who invest in it. I'm specifically including corporations in that calculus. The goal of our immigration policy is to balance the needs of private industry against the interest of the state to compete on a global basis.