Or that H1B holders pay taxes for benefits they cannot receive like Medicare, social security, and a sleuth of federal gov programs?
Or that H1B holders typically have english as a second language and surely pay a productivity and optionality penalty for that?
Requiring equal wages is almost like banning it. I want none of that.
It's not designed to be "equal". It never was. It's (nominally) for importing highly skilled workforce, which, naturally, would be earning somewhere in the upper quantiles, their ESL English notwithstanding. Instead it's mostly used to depress entry level wages for recent grads as well as to reduce overall cost of labor by dramatically boosting supply.
> I want none of that.
Why? Seems like fresh grads could use help getting started, and so could the folks recently laid off due to COVID. And so, by the way, could US citizens from disadvantaged backgrounds, a lot of whom would be competing for entry level positions. What's so bad about increasing wages in the entry level segment, and increasing demand for native talent in that segment? Remember, some of the companies in question are inching towards multi-trillion dollar valuations.
I'll grant you that immigration depresses the wages of the field they get in to: but thats true of any importation. Immigration restrictions are like tariffs, just on people instead of goods. Importing iphones from china also depresses wages of those who would manufacture them in the US.
Its the wrong way to look at it, its really not economics. If an immigrant produces X and gets paid X - Y, the country gets richer, period. And if the X-Y is used within the united states it becomes a virtuous cycle: if instead the immigrant works from outside and exports into the us, americans lose on demand and the American governments gift taxes to other governments.
If there are good reasons for immigration, they are not going to be economic, and this is so widely accepted in economics that its truly absurd to argue otherwise.
> Why? Seems like fresh grads could use...
Whatever conceptualization you make about the economic effect of immigration will have to be backed by the limitations of imports which have the exact same effect. Unemployment is not caused by immigration at all, it's even the other way around: any immigrant spends in the US creating demand for other jobs.
H1B holders can actually receive social security benefits. See https://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html
H1B's did not get the relief funds for COVID, and definitely don't have unemployment benefits.