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Comment by ilarum | Hacker News Reader

In such a system, maybe only experienced hires would get visas and fresh graduates wouldn't.

And that's bad because?

Unless we implement a new visa for graduates of American universities we experience brain drain. We would be exporting American educated individuals to other countries rather than making use of them ourselves.

It also doesn't account for the fact that H1B isn't just for engineers. Not all highly skilled professionals get paid salaries commensurate with the IT and CS industries.

So now we also need to split it by job type.

There's a lot of overhead involved in getting this proposal to just be as good as the current system, and even more to make it better. If we do all that, sure. But I'm not sold on the idea that we would.

Salaries for other fields would rise due to the reduced supply of foreign labor. That is a good thing.

No it’s not. These are skilled positions we’re talking about. Skills that take enormous social and economic contributions to develop. The US economy will always benefit from having more skilled workers.

Yes, those enormous social and economic contributions should be adequately compensated.

Maybe. A lot of these already go unfilled today.

Some industries don't have the cash flow and ability to pay significantly higher like we have the luxury of in tech.

So these industries have unfilled positions but are unable to charge enough to get the cash flow to pay more and fill these positions? That sounds like these industries perhaps aren't all that vital.

Or perhaps the people that can best fill these positions are foreign nationals and the wages have already been driven higher in competition with the number of them coming in for engineering positions? People have mentioned foreign language expertise as a big need for these where the pay is not commensurate to SV-style companies, and this includes positions in education, non-profits, etc.

Even in for-profit industries, margins are not always high enough and competition is often fierce enough that they cannot afford to raise prices to raise salaries.

There are a lot of important industries where margins are quite slim.

I am incredibly grateful for having had the opportunity to participate in the American job market right out of college. I imagine shutting the door on qualified promising foreign candidates for jobs isn’t a good strategy, if only because it would completely bar people like me from the amazing opportunities that I have had.

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