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Comment by sharts | Hacker News Reader

"And so we are left with problems like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s recent announcement that it can’t find enough skilled workers to get its new Arizona chip plants ready in time"

Wasn't this shown to be false because skilled workers exists. But just not willing to work for peanuts?

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Personally I always felt H1B visas should be awarded on a monthly auction. Decide how much immigration we want, then let whichever companies will pay the highest salaries get the slots. This guarantees that we get the most valuable immigrants and makes it a lot harder to drive down local wages because low salary bids won’t win visa slot auctions.

Interesting idea. I'd argue that while salary correlates with value, it's not the same though. It seems most likely to me that this mechanism would just reserve the privilege of employing immigrants to a few high income sectors, rather than filter the most skilled immigrants evenly across sectors.

To make it more concrete, it would be nice if NGOs could hire foreign talent just as effectively as Google can.

I don't think NGOs can currently sponsor H1Bs... But maybe I'm wrong...

not every NGOs, only universities and associated non-profities can sponsor any H-1B without going through the lottery

"Universities and related nonprofit entities, nonprofit research organizations and government research organizations are exempt from the cap"

I'm split on this. In the case where they need someone who has specific local knowledge and connections in the foreign locale they're serving, it makes sense. But I fear this would still be used to hire full-stack devs at non-profits for $65,000/year.

Economists have been suggesting that the US should move to an H1B auction for decades.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/h1b-visa-lottery-auction-tech-w...

An auction would be good for everyone aside from companies that are abusing the system to get cheap labor that's basically trapped in the US.

how about nurses and all other specialized professions that are not IT?

Wages for those will rise accordingly, benefitting local nurses (but raising costs for nursing)

You could have auctions per profession.

You could, but the whole point of the auctions is to allocate the visas economically efficiently, which this would undo.

No it would not undo it, it would allocate the visas economically efficient within professions, while also allowing the government to prioritize some professions based on concerns other then economic efficiency.

I like this idea, i always thought a salary floor of 150k-200k was a good idea, but the auction seems even better.

> Personally I always felt H1B visas should be awarded on a monthly auction. Decide how much immigration we want, then let whichever companies will pay the highest salaries get the slots.

H-1B is a non-immigrant (but dual intent) visa capped annually at less than 1/10 the level of the cap on immigrant visas, it has very little to do with “how much immigration we want”.

Thank you for the clarification. I think it’s super important that these facts are presented accurately and I love the correction.

If we switched H-1B to a salary auction system I would additionally love if it came with a streamlined 2-year path to a green card, because if they won the salary auction and stayed on for two years we’d know these are truly the most valuable workers on the planet and we’d benefit from them joining our workforce permanently.

That said, I understand a complicated change like that would be a major uphill battle and not directly related to our subtopic.

Here in Norway we do something similar but for import quotas.

We have high import taxes to protect our national beef production, but we don't produce enough beef locally to satisfy demand. So near the end of the year the government determines how much we need to import to satisfy demand, create quotas for that amount and auctions off the quotas.

Seems to work well enough AFAIK.

Not just low ages.

Insane work hours. Long stretches of unpaid overtime sometimes without weekends. No autonomy. No freedom. No say. Oh and shift work.

TSMC not being able to find workers has nothing in the US has nothing to do with a shortage of workers. They're just terrible to their people.

So they'll get H1B workers who are then basically trapped and can be mistreated.

The current system is terrible for everyone. Bad for the economy by keeping smart hard working people out. Bad for the workers who make it here who need to put up with TSMC. And bad for local Americans because H1B wage lower bounds aren't high enough.

In Singapore they have the following system: if you want to hire a foreign worker you need to pay they more than the local worker for the same position. This ensures foreign workers don't steal jobs from locals. Another good thing is that there is no hard limit on the number of foreign workers you can hire.

They need that extra pay because private housing costs are really high.

Singapore housing costs are comparable to NYC's, SF's, Paris', London's etc... The thing is that you don't need a car (cars are super expensive though) So all in all Singapore is not expensive, average to low, compare with major first world cities

I do recall some soft limits though. Back where I was, they tried to keep a certain number of locals on staff.

For WP (work permit - unskilled jobs) there is ratio of local vs foreigners that needs to be enforced. For EP (employment pass - skilled jobs) there is no limit.

Technically the H1B system is designed to work that way, but in practice people don't believe it does because of the games you can play with titles and job descriptions.

> because of the games you can play

Plus, when the workforce is 99% H1B visa holders, what does "local worker pay" even mean?

When I read a recent article, the US workers were complaining about "too much" freedom and autonomy. TSMC management would say "build this", with no blueprints or milestones.

"They keep saying we're slowing them down, but they're not giving us the information we need. Most of us are capable of doing it if you gave us the correct information."

Also safety was not important.

Well the problem is that Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing workers work long hours for middling wages, so for semiconductor manufacturing in America to be financially viable in a global marketplace, something has to give.

what's moral theory that says if an american refuses the job because they have better options, it's unethical to import a person from a poorer country to do it who doesn't have a better option?

the answer to me seems obvious.

if i lived in honduras and you said i could come to america but i had to work for tsmc, what's the chance i decline?

Aah yes, the renown Honduran semiconductor engineer surplus

What would be the moral justification to deny the better option itself to this hypothetical immigrant? It’s the most obvious question here, there are more.

This is a recurring theme with MattY's work. He takes any statement by a company or government body at face value and turns it into ammo for a certain political agenda. His position as a hot take generator in favor of centrism (in the US political context, so read it as economically neoliberal and culturally soft liberal) means he often avoids criticism due to his banality. But he has no useful insights at all, especially when he is working off of corpo/government propaganda.

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