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Comment by relyio | Hacker News Reader

The process is ridiculously complicated and not worth the time and effort, when it is possible at all.

I say that as someone who lived in the Bay area for almost a year and loved it. I had a great job, generated tons of wealth, got full-time offers with generous signing bonuses that I would have accepted in a heartbeat if it was not for the fact that not having a degree makes it impossible for me to get a visa.

The process would be a lot better for me if the work visa were simply allocated to the top N people in a priority queue where the weight of each entry is the salary.

Zurich, Toronto, and Montreal are my top choices now.

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Optimizing just for salary doesn't add incentives for lower-pay but higher-reward-to-economy jobs (e.g. public-sector, research, etc.). Any sorting criteria is probably going to throw incentives way off.

What seems fair is to ban arbitrary "top-N" quotas. If you can get a job that pays you a living wage (such that you don't have to draw from subsidies), then you can stay without hassle. Tax forms generally give all the information needed to make this decision.

>What seems fair is to ban arbitrary "top-N" quotas. If you can get a job that pays you a living wage (such that you don't have to draw from subsidies), then you can stay without hassle.

Ok. I just know that this won't happen anytime soon. My top-N solution feels like something the current administration would not be too reluctant to implement. It also address the concern that foreign labor pressure downs salaries for US citizens.

Isn't the rationale of the current administration rather the opposite ? E.g., the proposed merit based system explicitly wants to only get the 'top-N' in, whereas your alternative would just deprive upstanding americans from those jobs. I'm not judging either approach, I just want to understand what you propose and how to square it with the conservative viewpoint.

> Isn't the rationale of the current administration rather the opposite ?

Current US admin seems to strongly prefer giving opportunities based on citizenship (which is arbitrary) rather than saying anybody who wants to work an economic-net-positive job can do so.

> whereas your alternative would just deprive upstanding americans from those jobs

My stance is to not treat 'american citizens' as being more (or less!) deserving of US jobs. Anybody who contributes to the economy in a positive way deserves the same opportunity.

This is a rather extreme stance since it would probably lead to wages going down short-term as there's more job-supply than job-demand. The "gamble" in this ideology is that since you're requiring everyone to be a net-positive to the economy, the economy will thus grow and there will be more jobs as a result.

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