Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
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.
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.
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...