Even better would be a salary auction where US companies get to auction (higher and higher salaries for the best overseas workers.) The highest auction rates would fill the quota first. Overseas workers win bigtime. Companies seeking talent also win. Local workers win as well. Companies trying to underpay lose.
If it was a straight up "who pays the most", then the software industry (mostly FAANG) would end up with 80k H1Bs per year, and other industries would still not be able to hire for jobs they can't fill locally.
I think there is a shortage, so I'm proposing increasing salaries. Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants (lots of accountants go into other fields because they cant find work at a suitable rate.) Their business model should not be to underpay workers, it should be to pay workers high enough to attract them and charge customers appropriately.
Yes, I'm not disagreeing with this. However if you put ALL H1Bs in a single pool, and they go to the highest bidder across all industries, then yes, accounting firms are competing with tech firms.
I think GP's point is that that's the way it's supposed to be. The shortage of accountants could be due to some combination of:
1. There are not enough people with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants in the US
2. People with the physical / mental / psychological capability to be accountants are choosing other jobs; perhaps because they pay better, or are more fun, or have better work/life balance, or whatever.
#1 is a reason to steal^W import capable people from other countries; but I doubt very much that's the source of accounting's problems. It's almost certainly #2. In which case, if accounting firms want more accountants, they should make the job more attractive: pay more, have better hours, etc.
I think there would also be debate around how the quota is split between categories. I highly suspect that are much few Foreign Law advisors or Psychologists attempting to get H1Bs than there are "IT/Computer Professionals" (and many less positions available for them); giving each category an equal split wouldn't be fair either.
I'm not saying there isn't a way, but it would have issues too.
Your company has to declare what industry segment they're in when submitting annual returns anyway (here), not sure if it's the same case in the US.
The sacrifice to the "right now" bit is immense, it destroys incentive to learn pretty much anything.
If I just keep offering to pay more, then yes, I will eventually be able to hire a nurse that was previously employed somewhere else, but now _that_ person needs to hire a nurse. No matter how many times you go around this circle, there are not enough nurses for everyone to hire.
That is a shortage. A shortage doesn't typically come with the asterisk of "but if I wait long enough then maybe there won't be".
Possible solutions are:
-Require the hirer to contribute to scholarship funding in the area of work
- Limit H1B to 75th percentile in salary terms.
Do you mean, cap the amount of money a company is allowed to pay someone on an H1B? The entire change of rules here is because companies were not paying market rate. Requiring them to not pay market rate defeats the purpose here entirely.
If you mean require that companies pay _at least_ the 75th percentile, then yes, I believe that is what the action that this entire thread is about is going.
I would also disagree that H1B destroys the feedback loop of jobs being needed. I don't believe the number of H1Bs issued is any where near large enough to disrupt an entire industry.
I can't find anything specific about the new requirements.
1. It is unfair to the workers
2. The H1B Programme is for top talent, for talent you cannot find locally. If anything you should overpay for such valuable talent.
3. High H1B salaries also come back to the country in the form of taxes just like for all workers, which should improve schools.
Schooling is a shared problem for communities and our country, and should be paid for with taxes -- why would you put the burden of that on immigrant workers?
Finally, if despite taxes, we cannot fix our school system, perhaps instead of blaming/punishing immigrants we should be looking at our municipal and state governments.
College level school funding (state/federal) has basically dried up in the past few decades with budget cuts. The idea is affordable public college education is not realistic for most people. I believe this is what the commenter is talking about needing more funding.
That’s probably not true exclusively anywhere in America, and it's not true predominantly in a number of parts of America.
For instance, in California less than 1/4 comes of K-12 funding comes from local property taxes, and the absolute majority comes from State funds which are derived primarily from state income taxes.
...
> Property based funding of schools is not likely to be a very effective target for school reform since our current system does not actually have large differences in the funding of poor students. I think that it is more likely that the dysfunction in the schools is best explained by a lack of continuity and efficiency within the schools that serve poor students. The property tax debate is mostly just an easy but misguided target for explaining the achievement gap. On top of the pure fact that property based taxes have actually still allowed for the progressive funding of schools, we already have examples of states that fund students without a total reliance on local property taxes. Take Michigan. Michigan has a centralized funding source for their students. The state takes an overall tax and then breaks it up evenly across students within the state (there are extra complexities to this that are addressed in this article). Even with these changes in school funding, it does not appear that the reformed funding strategy had any impact on student outcomes. In general, funding is not a good proxy for educational quality.
https://medium.com/@coreykeyser/why-conventional-wisdom-on-e...
Employers pay as little as they can. If it's possible to hire someone for minimum wage, you hire for minimum wage.
If it's possible to import and indenture a guy for whom a crowded shared house with an actual bathroom looks like a palace, you'll do that. If you don't, your competitor will.
>why would you put the burden of that on immigrant workers
You don't put it on immigrant workers, you put it on industries whose demand exceeds supply.
Also remember that immigrant workers don't come out of nowhere. You imported 100 nurses, India and Pakistan have 100 nurses less. Vacuuming up the brightest people from everywhere doesn't help global development.
From my comment. Nurses require training. I did not assume a finite number of nurses. If I am sick and need a nurse, I need one _right now_. There not being enough of them is a shortage. It may not be a shortage in the future, but right now, it is.
Or are you suggesting that you would wait around and be homeless for 4 years until someone local built up enough training and experience in order to build your house? If you're going to suggest that you would wait and "live somewhere else", I would point out that people who are trying to hire, for example, nurses, often don't have that luxury. If they wait 4 years, they'll be dead.
No one is suggesting that high skill work status are used for people with no training or experience; they explicitly require training and/or experience in order to qualify. If think you're proving my point; if you need to hire someone right now, and there is no one available locally to do it right now, then there is a shortage, and you need to look outside of your local market.
The point is that if someone you need to hire is not available, you're going to try to find them elsewhere. You're not going to wait 4 (or whatever number of) years for someone to go to school, train, gain experience, and be available for you to hire.
Demand for nurses doesn't change abruptly and before importing people became a fad it was largely followed by supply.
The Market works. Pay fair wages and your personnel problems go away.
Or stay more pedestrian. Grocery baggers in the US basically went away for a while. I assuume they came back based in part on what grocery stores had to pay for them to work.
Suppose I want a new BMW and I want to pay no more than $300 for it. This doesn't mean that we should force BMW workers to work for free -- it means that my expectations are not rational.
Similiar, if I want a 10km Uber ride for $1, which costs less than even gas, the desire is irrational. Why should workers have to work for free to satisfy this consumer's irrational desire?
Same thing for grocery baggers "disappearing" -- of course they disappeared, there was a pandemic. They werent being paid for the risks of bagging groceries.
I'm talking about in the 80s or so when a lot of things started switching to more self-service. My local supermarkets have baggers today and you're literally not allowed to bag yourself.
I don't see there being anything irrational about not wanting to pay the price for certain services. And I don't expect either individuals or companies to sell me things on terms that aren't attractive to them. But that doesn't mean I don't want those things even if I accept that I can't have them on terms acceptable to both myself and the person providing them.
And when you reach 80k (or whatever the number was), you'll also be able to get H1B nurses.
There are some states that have a compact and getting a multi-state license for those compact states will let you switch practice in multiple states - https://www.ncsbn.org/nurse-licensure-compact.htm
However, Illinois isn't part of that compact so its a new exam for anyone licensed elsewhere.
Aside from all of this... (as related to H1Bs) - nursing isn't a specialized occupation and doesn't qualify for the H1B. A specialist nurse, however, may. https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-visa/h-1b-nurses/ ... and that is a different license (in addition to) the RN.
It's not a binary "oh no not enough people" type of deal. It's a sliding scale and the closer you get to each side, the higher the incentives are to revert to some sort of equilibrium.
It really is quite one-sided (and potentially suspicious) to just try figure out "how can we get more of these people from other countries" instead of looking at all the other locally-available solutions. The same "circle" you speak of will happen regardless, even with plenty of immigration, with the double-whammy being that it'll affect the poorer countries that can't afford to keep those skilled immigrants.
A hybrid monster that takes the worst of both a private market (heavily benefiting the richest incumbents) and government regulations (broad and non targeted rules).
I'm just proposing we auction to increasingly higher salaries so all those people get nice high wages. The H1b system is to get the best and brightest for talent we cannot find locally, so paying these immigrants handsomely seems like the right thing to do. Its also good business, because high end R&D facilities should not be crossing their fingers for luck in hiring, they should be able to purchase talent by bidding for it.
I'm not sure how this benefits the richest incumbents -- the pool of workers continues to be the same. It benefits companies who desperately need the most talented workers by making them pay fairly for that top talent.
Frankly, if some company thinks they need the best-of-the-best and cant pay fairly for it, do they really need the best of the best?