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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

As a US citizen interested in improving the visa process who regularly interfaces with policymakers, propose an objective rubric that is better and I will get it in front of policymakers. Can't guarantee an outcome, will guarantee the effort. Patent quota is bullshit, but also "I know talent when I see it" (even though I do and how I hire) isn't going to fly. Sorting hats are hard, Goodhart's Law, etc. High level, you are attempting to build a system to encourage the best and brightest to come work (and hopefully make it home) in the US while defending against those who will attempt to find system weakness to exploit.

EDIT: I won't pollute the thread with thank yous for replies, but they are appreciated.

(thoughts and opinions always my own)

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You don't have to look far, Canada has already implemented a point based system for granting permanent residence to skilled workers. It assigns scores to applicants based on education, skills, employment offer, language speaking ability, etc. I believe it can be a good starting point for a more objective selection criteria than the current system which is more based on luck.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

Trump attempted to implement a points based system and was met with fierce resistance:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/17/key-facts...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/08/06/h-1b-...

Yea, companies using H-1B to hire cheap workers fought the changes hard.

Nah democrats fought it hard because it would “reduce diversity”.

The utility of a point system is that it makes the criteria legible—the problem wasn't the fact that it was a points system, the problem was in the details of the system.

The second link you posted lists a large number of anti-immigrant ideas that Trump had. That was the general tenor of his administration as I personally experienced it: rhetoric about unauthorized immigration, actions against legal immigrants.

(I used to be on an H1B and got my green card last year.)

This is a strange comment to read since, as far as I recall, the only details that were ever really shared before the overall plan was killed due to its political backlash are that it would be merits-based considering age, ability to speak English, job offers, and educational background and that it would shift the number of green cards away from being primarily awarded based on family ties to this new merit system. Democrats rejected even discussing the proposal out of hand. Some quotes from https://apple.news/ABYsQ0lE-RFWj_S5pwuFq5w :

On the other side of the aisle, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called Trump’s offering a “dead-on-arrival plan that is not a remotely serious proposal.” And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) slammed it as a “despicable abdication of moral authority” that would have kept Blumenthal’s own immigrant father from entering the United States.

…

Democrats on Thursday also took issue with the White House’s characterization of the kind of immigrants who bring “merit” to the United States.

“It is really a condescending word,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference on Thursday morning. “Are they saying family is without merit?”

Ah, I was going by the RAISE Act:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act#Full_details_of_the_...

The goal of the RAISE Act was to substantially reduce family-based immigration while not increasing employment-based immigration to compensate for that.

I didn't realize Trump had his own plan (that was never going to be law anyway). But based on what I actually personally experienced Trump actually do, my Bayesian prior for it being helpful to immigrants is extraordinarily low.

Same for the UK, the tier-1 visa, which is how I got my first independent visa there. Unfortunately it also gives high points for income, which biases for privileged peoples and origin countries. But if you can get to the UK on a work permit with a high salary for a couple years, then you can apply it as points when you eventually apply.

EDIT: just checked and it’s obsolete. Not sure if there is a post-Brexit equivalent. https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-investor

Isn't Canada full of foreign PhDs driving taxis because they qualify for permanent residence on points but then can't get jobs because employers want "Canadian work experience"?

Canada also has a major housing crisis due to not building enough housing for population growth (which is entirely immigration, Canada's population would shrink without it).

Doesn't seem their system works very well in practice. At least the U.S. employer based green card system mostly guarantees that employment green card recipients already have jobs.

> Isn't Canada full of foreign PhDs driving taxis because they qualify for permanent residence on points but then can't get jobs because employers want "Canadian work experience"?

Canadian here. Nope.

Also Canadian here. PhD might be a stretch but there’s absolutely a large number of Uber drivers with a foreign masters.

And that makes sense, since in some countries Master’s degrees are dime a dozen. PhD still means something

"Canadian work experience" is a generic reason often given to people who the company doesn't want to hire. It has happened to people I know. There can be many reasons:

- Racial bias

- Sexual bias

- Age bias

- Candidate's English / French ability.

- Candidate's actual experience isn't relevant enough.

- Candidate's personality.

- Candidate's appearance.

- Candidate's communication skills.

Why would I give you the real reason when I can provide a generic reason and stay out of trouble?

Some people I know went to college to get local credentials. Luckily community college is affordable and respected. Others changed fields. Others started their first business. A few left the country.

Why do you have to give any reason at all. I never got any reason in USA 90% of the time.

I was going to say something similar. I don't believe in points any more. It just reproduces the class prejudices of overeducated people. The US has an abundance of "highly skilled" FAANG workers. It has a shortage of construction workers, plumbers, and electricians. The one "high skill" (really high class) industry where I'd make an exception is medicine, because there are shortages there.

But FAANG stuff? No, these are the companies that just had layoffs.

And we can see exactly how this has played out in Canada. Too many upper class professionals gouging each other's eyes out for $1M starter homes, and not enough people with real physical skills, like building them.

One can just adjust the points towards what you need, like Australia does. Me and then-wife applied about 15 years ago - she studied at the American school in Milan, graduated in the UK, and got a master and PhD in computational chemistry. I'd been living in the UK for a decade, working in IT. They said thanks but no thanks, Melbourne doesn't need you - whereas tradesmen, plumbers, miners etc have no problem whatsoever moving there, year after year.

>They said thanks but no thanks, Melbourne doesn't need you - whereas tradesmen, plumbers, miners etc have no problem whatsoever moving there, year after year.

Well, tradesmen build houses, schools, and hospitals people and a growing society need. There's only so much demand and value for society that (non-SV) programmers add. You could survive in a world with only tradesmen and farmers, but not so much with only JS coders.

Programmers are valued in places like the US because US is the home to big-tech, an industry generating trillions in revenue for the US, but the US is the global outlier here. In other places of the world that don't have big-tech, programmers have much less value to society.

South Park also did an episode on this.

The layoffs were for wage suppression, if anything, they need more H1B to continue that wage suppression. I work in BigTech, we had layoffs and are also hiring like mad.

> Canada also has a major housing crisis due to not building enough housing for population growth (which is entirely immigration, Canada's population would shrink without it).

I am not sure if this logic is accurate. There can be housing shortage if people move to certain part of the country internally too. USA has 'housing crisis' but houses are plenty and cheap in peoria IL.

Canada has many issues.

Housing crisis is because of unsustainably high immigration levels.

In 2023 alone, there was a net inflow of over 1.3 million people. It's a lot for a country of 39 million. Where will they live?

Another major issue is the suppression of wages this causes.

Also there is a serious lack of diversity in the immigrant population (no cap by country as in the US). This is tearing apart the cultural fabric of communities.

I would love to see a revamp of visa system that when someone is sponsored by companies they are required to do a 1:1 match for scholarships on the salary of someone who they are sponsoring. Alternatively make the minimum $100k or max $250k.

As someone who had someone come over on a O-1 visa, I 100% would have been willing to pay double for that person specifically.

It also removes the common issue of people who are hiring people below market rate or are trying to push salaries down for certain industries. It makes companies really make sure they actually need that technical expert from overseas.

Then open it up to everyone else if there are quotas.

Rather than doubling the cost a company has to pay for a foreign employee, which inevitably pushes down wages for high-end talent, why not just rank applicants based on how much they’re actually paid?

If an employee is recruited at $250k, they clearly have skills the market values.

I don't think it would push down wages for high end talent if you keep the requirements they pay prevailing wages. If anything, it would increase the wages for people.

The point would be that we fill and address the talent problem longer term. AKA if you need to hire foreign workers, you have to invest in developing new talent.

I would say that total comp should be taken into account, but we should take a more strategic approach to addressing workforce gaps rather than just relying on importing talent.

If you mean the existing H-1B lottery, see sibling comment linking the Forbes article which says "However, attorneys say attempting to reorder the H-1B lottery from highest to lowest salary by regulation, as the administration has discussed, would be unlikely to survive a legal challenge."

There’s nothing in the constitution preventing legislators from altering H-1B regulations that I know of. What kind of legal challenge are you referring to, exactly?

I guess the rubric depends on whether policymakers view the employment based green card system as zero-sum or non-zero-sum.

My proposal for green cards:

zero-sum - points based system based on your current salary, taxes paid and the occupation shortage list OR straight up auction

non-zero-sum - let people apply for a green card as long as they've stayed in the country for X years without any criminal infractions, have earned above N*min-wage for all those years.

If you're asking about work visas, probably just ranking by location-adjusted-salary and handing them out should do the job.

Who creates the occupation shortage list and how is it protected from companies who want their jobs included on it to drive down wages and suppress workers' rights?

DOL does it. It's called the Schedule A Occupation List.

The problem is they don't update it constantly like Canada does. Needs funding I guess.

https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-e-chapter-...

My very high level wish is that immigration basically gave a free pass to anyone earning more than mean salary, since that by definition makes the nation wealthier.

I think you can derive generic and robust definitions of “exceptional” like this too; eg anyone that is getting paid $1m/yr is clearly exceptional. This is robust to Goodhearting because again, net contributor to the wealth of the country. (1m is an arbitrary number for discussion, obviously you can tune it to get the count you are looking for.)

Trouble is, “exceptional at art” is fundamentally subjective and won’t show up in salary. Similar salary concerns with “exceptionally talented PhD”. I think you need per-industry considerations here. Top N most-cited AI researchers should get a pre-filled green card sent to them.

Personally think we should be allowing any PhD or med school graduate from top institutions to stay indefinitely; so many talented researchers come to the US to study and then get kicked out. We want to keep these people.

I’m an American (born here), but I’ve felt our skilled immigration policies are wrong-headed for a while, especially after dealing with them as a hiring manager. Broadly speaking, I feel we need a better focus on a) getting people who have the skills that our businesses need and b) naturalizing those people as US citizens who are willing to commit their whole careers to our country. The H1-B system seems to be the worst of both worlds…gamified so that bad actors get many of the hires and gamified on the employee side so you get people, say, sacrificing salary for a better green card process.

If I were to propose something different, it would be ratios by job title/salary, with obvious veto ability by government TLA agencies for security risks. Points systems for skilled migration are an in exact proxy and miss out on talented people with less formal educations. I’d rather place the burden of deciding who gets to work here on businesses who are trying to fill actual positions. Let them decide who is actually qualified based on the actual skills they’re looking for. And because they have to hire a requisite number of similar-level Americans, the worst thing that might happen is a sort of jobs program for Americans when companies are forced to employ more Americans to satisfy the ratio needed to hire foreigners.

This would have two other benefits that I can see. First, it would make it much easier for small companies with primarily-American workforces to hire foreigners since they wouldn’t need so much legal help or luck in winning a visa lottery. Second, foreign workers would integrate better because they’d always be working with Americans.

The main weakness that would need to be protected against is companies under-classifying and underpaying foreign workers (i.e. the janitors are American but are up-classified as software engineers and the software engineers are foreign and paid janitorial wages), but I feel these sorts of situations should be addressed by judges when complaints are made against companies trying to game the system.

Most immigration to the U.S. is through "family reunification".

Or wealthier people sending their offsprings to US colleges or universities and from there funneling into the job market I guess.

Degree from a recognized school. Verified work history in the field.

Those wouldn't be perfect metrics, and they might be easy to fudge. So it then becomes a question of if disqualification of the capable is worse than qualification of the incapable.

I personally prefer to let more people in than less. It's not like it's smooth sailing in the US if you can't do skilled work.

Degree and work history are already a significant part of evaluation on L1/L2 and H1B visas.

IIRC 3 years of work experience are considered equivalent to 1 year of college education, which allows those who didn't get a degree but have extensive experience to also have an avenue for obtaining a Visa.

It’s a ridiculous system to value 12 years of experience in the movie industry as on par with a film degree. The software industry makes it even more absurd since historically the very top talent has often skipped college and become world class in their early 20s.

How about any company that is found to have engaged in discrimination against any protected class loses their ability to sponsor visas for a decade.

Not a good punishment as it has workarounds. They'd hire through shell companies and when one becomes tainted they'd use a different one.

US PhD from top 50 institution in your field with a full-time job with salary over 100k/year.

Simple and objective.

100k honestly isn’t that much, and PhDs can be sort of meaningless depending on the field.

Make it 250k for 3 consecutive years and forget about school.

The only thing it would change would be every foreign worker gets a phd instead of a masters.

Professor at top university like MIT should automatically come with green card.

How about: “Has had a job for 3 consecutive years paying $250k or more per year and has paid federal income taxes proving it.”

I know plenty of people in this boat from India who wait 15 years to get a GC because of our idiotic process.

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