What instead needs to happen is that visa officials need to be trained to understand the meaning of terms like "speciality occupation", "highly specialized knowledge", "extraordinary skill" and "lack of qualified applicants". This would automatically filter out the hundreds of thousands of H-1B applications put in by companies like Cognizant, Infosys, TCS and Wipro every year. I'm willing to bet we wouldn't even need a visa lottery if applications were just required to meet the minimum bar that the law already prescribes.
All tech O1s that I know of are PhDs and many PhDs have been denied O1 because they worked in an applied role, in industry or immigration officials woke up on the wrong side of bed. On the other hand, even the most mundane TV actor will get an O1 without much issue.
A PhD exists for a certain kind of person, and can feel like mind killer to many others...that sentiment is not new in tech. Mining papers and patents until you're O1 worthy is not impossible. It just feels like a useless detour to life, that you'd take only so you could get an O1. As someone with a couple of tier 1 papers and a decent amount of industry work, the best research is never allowed to be published.
The problem is that it also biases towards much more senior roles.
One scenario we generally want to handle is: a person comes to the US, gets an advanced degree in a high-demand field at a US university... and then is immediately kicked back to their country of origin. H1Bs can help that person stay here and put down roots. But a fresh college grad is never going to be able to compete in a salary-based auction like you're describing, so pretty much all young, ambitious, well-educated people will get the boot.
Fine print: qualified applicant must be willing to work at lower salaries and than their experience would otherwise demand on the open market.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-20/h-1b-work...
https://www.businessinsider.com/h-1b-visa-rejects-moving-to-...
That'd be turbocharged if there's actual H1B restrictions or bans.
Canada even started a program recently that directly targets H1B workers being pushed out of the US and it was oversubscribed very soon.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2023/07/02/canad...
2/ this would mean only bigger software companies would get a chance and people would willing to work in startups will stand lower chance.
What we need is a way to avoid abuse by body shops.
> 1/ this will incentive IT and software jobs and marginalize other fields with lower pay (physics, mechanical, chemical, etc).
Why!? If those people are important they can be paid well too. There are plenty of chemical engineers that make good money.
> 2/ this would mean only bigger software companies would get a chance and people would willing to work in startups will stand lower chance.
Startups can pay too. In any case, most startups don't sponsor H1Bs because of the uncertainty associated with the process.
Not all industries can pay as much as software. A PhD with an extra 5-10 years of industrial experience may get a 200K salary in biotech, often less. A CS bachelor with 1-2 years of experience would get that 200K. Pay doesn't always equal the value of your contribution, especially if you compare them across different fields.
The government shouldn't fight for lower paying jobs at the expense of higher paying ones. There are a limited number of visas granted each year, and higher pay is a signal from the market that a particular position is _actually_ more difficult to fill. If startups can't afford top talent, then surely they can hire American workers instead?
Value and pay aren't the same across industries. Someone can still contribute the same value but the field they are in simply doesn't have the economic profitability required to pay them the same way software does. In fact, software is the anomaly in compensation. Making a policy that benefits only one type of industry over everything else is simply bad policy.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec...
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Originally H1Bs required $60k/year salary, which was in 1990 and indexed to inflation would be $140k. I don't think there's any need at all for a bidding process, the minimum salary just needs to be raised to $140k and indexed to inflation. (As it should have been to begin with.)
I was on the board of a school that teaches in a foreign language. We used to recruit teachers from countries where that language is used, because we followed a foreign curriculum too.
Teachers look for new jobs in April/May to start in August. We used to get them H-1s. But once the H-1s were exhausted in October it became impossible to bring teachers over.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/08/news/economy/immigrant-doct...
Many emigrating doctors are choosing to go to Canada instead to avoid this nonsense.