H1 does not lower employee power. I came on H1, got laid off within one year and then had to change companies again in 6 months. I could do it just fine.
Specifically, the structure of H1 visas limit the prospects of highly-skilled employees to a subset of all possible domestic employers, since not all employers in the US have the financial means and/or legal expertise to sponsor visas.
If, rather than forcing recently-graduated PhD students (to take one example) to consider only companies that sponsor visas, we could allow them to apply and receive their I-140s with a high probability and at a low cost. Under this system:
- they can take more time to search for jobs and prepare for interviews
- they can afford to negotiate more aggressively with offers, since they won't be expelled from the country if they reject the first offer that comes their way
- they can switch companies, or start their own companies, with no external restrictions beyond the obvious financial ones
In general, their prospects as employees would be greatly expanded, and their base of negotiation with employers on the whole would improve.
Hope this makes sense.
Edit: The above reasoning may not apply to employees from countries with reciprocity agreements with the US who do not wish to give up their permanent residency in their home countries (if those countries' reciprocity agreements would require that). I'm not aware of any that are like this, however.
- they can leave change professions and apply to law, medical, dental, or nursing school.
- they can save up, quit their job, and travel around the country, try to write a novel, paint, play music, or become a surf bum.
- they can leave the tech industry and open their own flower, hot dog, crepe stand, film production company, or record label.
- I've heard there are other things free people also do (that Silicon Valley employers consider less valuable than writing code in a giant open office at a wage the employers have decided is "fair"), but I forget them all right now.
In short, they can do any of those things that people who are allowed to participate in free labor markets are allowed to do.
Silicon Valley asked the labor market what it would take to get highly competent and intelligent people with freedom to become developers in the valley rather than doing any of those things you or I mentioned above, and the market answered.
Silicon Valley didn't like the answer, so they had the government ask again for them. The government responded by creating a shadow immigration system under which high tech employers control the circumstances under which would-be immigrants are allowed to come to the US and the conditions under which they would be allowed to remain.
That they would defend this as "skilled immigration", or think there is any pro-immigrant or libertarian argument for it, is bewildering to me.
It's hardly the most egregious installment in the US's grim history of allowing employers to control a workers right to be in the US, but it's still a shame we haven't learned that workers (who we might want to refer to as "people") should have the freedom to chose who they will marry, where they will work, and what they will do, in response to their own interests and market signals.
Especially in today's socio-political environment.
Seems easy.
Do you feel like it wouldn't be a violation of your rights if someone seized your house, handed you a pile of cash and told you to get out of the country?
That's more extreme then what's being talked about but not by much. When it comes to freedoms "technically not slavery" is not one that I value as particularly free.
A person is moving their life to this country, they are becoming a resident and joining a community. If they behave well I think the process for them to become a full PR should be easy, and the threat of losing their job shouldn't be bundled with losing everything that currently makes their life stable.
The objection is essentially that the US is imposing fairly-arbitrary restrictions on H-1B holders that make it difficult and stressful to live and work in the US... for no good reason.
You can say stuff like "they should have known the limitations of the visa and what they were getting into", and that's correct. But my position is one of empathy. Sure, the US government is certainly within its rights to create a visa program like this. My position, fundamentally, is that it shouldn't. It should treat people like people, not interchangeable worker cogs that should feel blessed just to be allowed to spend time in the US. It's incredibly arrogant and heartless, and I object to the entire thing on moral and ethical grounds. The US is one of the few developed nations that has such a strict, heartless immigration system, and frankly it makes me ashamed as a natural-born US citizen to see how we treat citizens of other nations who enrich our economy and lives.