I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)?
And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?
Option 2: you give a visa to a PhD to work for 150k/year in a small biopharma startup that thinks it has the solution to cancer.
This salary stacked ranking optimizes for today’s worth of work. Not its potential.
the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.
Boeing is full of bean counters now, but they are optimizing things like opening factories in poor non-unions states (the South Carolina factory has had lots of whistleblowers screaming about lack of training and pressure to build faster than is safe), convincing the FAA to let Boeing employees do regulatory review on their own company, etc. few or none of Boeing’s problems are solved by eliminating/reducing H1-Bs for that company/industry, which is why I chose them as the example.
“Americans are dissuaded…”
This has an emotional appeal to intuition, but I don’t think it’s what’s causing Americans not to compete for jobs/industries that heavily use H1-B. If it was, there would simply be a market competition and those programmer salaries would drop. Instead, I think Americans have been convinced by Theil types to avoid US universities (either for cultural reasons or ROI reasons). You seem to be making an argument that the ROI would be better if H1-Bs were scarce, but that wouldn’t change the fact that tuition in elite US institutions is expensive and seats are scarce+competitive. Without also changing either the university system to seat more students or companies to hire from different signals (instead of highly prizing the bland name of the university), American job applicants won’t be dissuaded from getting those degrees.
Arguably H1-Bs have done the most damage to US programmers, but there are several other structural problems regarding programmer hiring in the US. The big tech collusion to reduce employee poaching (not current, but recent past), application process (“resume firewall”, ghost jobs, deluge of automated applications), the interview process (we seem to have optimized for gotcha questions and LeetCoding tests, rather than real world requirements), high interest rates (higher than the recent past) have squeezed VC funding and closed the wallets of employers, and the race to replace/augment salary employees with AI agents. All of these are structural problems that arguably do more dissuading than the visa system.
This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs.
Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero.
Amazon.Com Services
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Ernst & Young
Tata Consultancy Services
Microsoft
Infosys
Meta Platforms
Intel
Hcl America
Amazon Web Services
IBM
Jpmorgan Chase
Walmart
Apple
Accenture
Capgemini
Ltimindtree
Deloitte Consulting
Salesforce
Qualcomm
Tesla
Amazon Development Center
Wipro
Fidelity Technology Group
Tech Mahindra
Compunnel Software Group
Deloitte Touche
Mphasis
Nvidia
Adobe
Bytedance
Goldman, Sachs
Cisco
Pricewaterhousecoopers Advisory Services
Paypal
Ebay
Servicenow
Visa USA
For non-slop jobs, give them a green card and fast track to citizenship. For an IT consultant, no thanks.
A lot of H1Bs are not working on anything you described though.
> hedge fund quants
If they're that necessary, let companies hire them on green card visas.
Overregulation can reduce the effective freedom in a market (usually by increasing costs or reducing choice) but good regulation is there to shepherd this equilibrium of a fair deal between buyers and sellers by doing things like getting externalities priced in (if youre buying x you should pay the cost of x, not your neighbor); preventing monopolies, cartels, other price fixing / choice reducing things that makes one side of the market not have to meet in the middle; and adding standards or visibility so market participants can be more efficient and safe when choosing (instead of having to do things like research all of a company's supply chain and employees to decide if it's safe to eat there or to fly in their planes).
Some things get imposed onto the market intentionally like protection for unions (in theory an alternative/shortcut to grouping up into inefficient passthrough companies), tarrifs to give someone an advantage in what they can offer, subsidies to intentionally prevent the market from contracting to the current size of demand (like if the country wants to maintain a certain ability to produce food or doctors or certain goods), and government programs to effectively set a floor on the price of something (like interest rates so lending/borrowing will never be worse than a certain mark).
All these things are useful tools in a market of self motivated actors trying to maximize their own gain in the short term but, like all tools, they get abused and out maneuvered often so it's a constant game of cat and mouse to keep the system running.
Pros and cons all over the place; most things have a huge downside of vulnerability to truly bad actors having too much control (which is where the idea of democracy comes in but I have to stop myself I already word dumped).
tl;dr yes absolutely call it a free market until people are forced to participate too much
There's a balance though, and as heavily regulated as immigration is I just don't see how it could fall into the range of being a roughly free market. Work-based immigration into the US specifically is heavily regulated and there are a lot of blocks in the way making it infeasible or impossible for one to take part in it.
I mean that on both sides too, both employers and potential employees are heavily burdened by the process and often they just can't take part in the process for any number of regulatory reasons.
But I agree rhat H1B should not be about hiring cheap labour. I'd prefer a system where H1B salaries must be competitive with the top of the field. There are incredibly smart talents around the world, and if you hire someone from outside then it should be because they are the best of the best, so they should get paid accordingly.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.
If these other professions don’t pay as much as swe, then doesn’t that indicate that domestic supply is meeting those industries needs better than it is swe?
A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.
Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.
If their art's got enough value to be valuable in the real sense, they're well above all this. Otherwise they're nothing.
Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.
You can also get an employer sponsored green card similarly to what you’d do if you were on an H-1B.
So you apply for green card and if you don't immediately get it (particularly because of the backlog for some countries), you have to leave the US.
(I'm not an immigration lawyer and these are only my personal interpretation).
“Labor Certification Exception:
Under the doctrine of dual intent, the fact that a U.S. employer has filed a labor certification, or an individual has filed a permanent residence petition on behalf of the non-immigrant, shall not be a basis for denying the O-1 petition, a request for extension of stay, admission to the US, or change of status for that O-1 non-immigrant.”
There's no long answer.
Artistic talent is not important.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
The normal fix for companies that can't afford to hire, is to let them go broke.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.
Nobody has a _right_ to cheap labor! Not attracting enough talent? Offer more!