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Comment by abhayb | Hacker News Reader

Roughly three parts to this. First off, these folks are already "here" . Busy learning to America. Paying tuition to their schools and taxes from their internships/OPTs. Contributing and being contributed to so that there's already a relationship between them, the country, and the country's citizens.

This is also what a lot of other countries do so it's consistent with "the way things are done".

Finally, it seems politically expedient. There are already provisions for prioritizing Masters degrees. This change is a modification of those provisions. That (crucially) doesn't have to go anywhere near the legislature.

These particular masses are not huddled. Nor are they all leading lights (though some will grow into greatness in time) . So there are also plenty of reasonable arguments against this approach.

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F1 is a non immigrant visa. To get f1 visa student needs to convince visa officer that he will promptly return back to home country after completion of education and will not try to seek any immigrant intent visa.

In that sense every f1 student filing for h1b transfer of status in my opinion acting in bad faith. The case about already here makes no sense as many other visa categories loke r2 or h4 are not allowed to work despite having spent years in usa.

> This is also what a lot of other countries do

As an expat for the bigger part of my life I can't think of a country that would prioritize their own institutions when applying for a visa. Generally there's simply a category for advanced degree holders.

Canada's Express Entry system for skilled immigrants gives you more points if you attended college in Canada. Giving priority to people who have already integrated into the society makes perfect sense to me.

You can give priority to people who have integrated into the society in several other, more obvious ways. In this case, they are making the explicit argument that they want "more skilled" workers, and using a US-based degree as the criteria. If they had a points system, and a Masters degree would get you X points, and every year spent in US would give you additional Y points, then this would make sense.

At the same time that kinda cripples the ability to hire highly-skilled foreigners, isn't it? It's artificially limiting the pool of viable candidates.

Just imagine a PhD (or even a Master's degree holder) from Europe, a leader in their field. With this system they are at a huge disadvantage and so are companies that would like to hire them.

As someone mentioned this system will just lead to straight to masters degrees. Those "body shop" outsourcing companies just need their candidates to attend any (does online count?) US-based masters degree and then business as usual.

Having a Masters from "some" university doesn't make anyone highly skilled.

Canada is points-based. These guys you have in mind lose on one category and win on another category. That's why points-based systems work. You get to say "Speaking French in my country is as valuable as if you held a Masters degree from here". There are so many bases to add up to the value that anyone with that skill would almost certainly make it.

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