1. Let H1B be independent of the employer. Current H1B rules are modern day equivalent of bonded labor. Let a person obtain H1B from the employer for the first time, after that make it independent of the employer. For example a person on H1B may resign on day 1 and simply join another American company.
Remove all the nonsense about salary limits and so on.
H-1B employees are currently quite mobile. I have many friends who've switched jobs repeatedly during their H-1B period because it's so easy to transfer the visa. I honestly don't know where this whole "indentured servitude" idea comes from.
The part of the system that's fubared is the green card process, which can stretch for up to 10 years if you're from India or China. During a part of that time (not the entire duration), you can't switch jobs unless you want the green card process to be restarted, which affects mobility. But that is not related to the H-1B, and the solution to that is to fix the green card process.
But the company was also founded by immigrants so this may be an exception rather than the rule.
You're completely right that H-1B portability was implemented, which happened in 2008 with the America COMPETES Act.
The indentured servitude view is lingering, but it's also still unfortunately valid when it comes to the H-1B dual-intent EB-2/3 green card applications, as many try to follow that pathway.
Aside from that, this wouldn't be simple at all because changing the visas available would in many cases involve renegotiating the deals that they made with other countries that got those visas created in the first place. Sure, it would likely be possible to tell all the other countries to get stuffed, but good luck getting US citizens a visa to travel anywhere if you keep doing that.
This was in response to a suggestion about what the government would do if it was interested in serving its citizens. If you would be paying the fees, serving you is very much not the point.
Though I'll point out that, by moving from employee sponsorship and charges (and pay limits, etc.) on employers for things like H-1B to charges to the prospective entrant, it means that the entrant has substantially more freedom (and potentially greater net income after charges, too, since instead of the employer paying a fee and dealing with wage limits, the employee pays a flat fee and a share of income, but isn't burdened by salary limits.)
> Aside from that, this wouldn't be simple at all because changing the visas available would in many cases involve renegotiating the deals that they made with other countries that got those visas created in the first place.
By definition, changing the non-treaty visas, as I specified, would not require that, and many economic visas (including the H-1B) are not treaty-based.
Obviously treaty-based econonmic visas like the H-1B1 (Singapore or Chile), TN/TD (NAFTA), E-1/E-2 (Treaty Trader/Treaty Investor) etc. are a separate issue, but at least in theory the government is serving citizens interests with those because of the reciprocal benefit US citizens have with regard to economic entry to the countries involved.
edit: actually, there is of course also O, L, P and I. I'm not sure how much you'd gain by folding them into a single category - there's very little relationship between,e eg, whether Nadal should be here for the US Open and how many programmers should be coming here. L perhaps has some overlap.
> edit: actually, there is of course also O, L, P and I.
And the immigrant E series Employment-related ones. There's a few others that might fit into the general description I laid out depending on exactly where you draw the line on transitory (non-immigrant H-2A, for instance, could be argued either way.)
(I specify immigrant/non-immigrant, because there's a handful of categories designations used for both immigrant and non-immigrant classes where the use between the two classes has no real relationship; E is one of these.)
> I'm not sure how much you'd gain by folding them into a single category - there's very little relationship between,e eg, whether Nadal should be here for the US Open and how many programmers should be coming here.
"How many" isn't really an issue, since the whole idea of folding it into one class is that its a class that is open to any non-banned entrant and isn't numerically limited, instead its open-for-pay.
Anyhow, I'd think Nadal for the US Open be a non-immigrant B-1, which is transitory by any reasonable definition, and certainly isn't in the scope of what I was proposing.
I thought increasing the risk in the H-1B process (and thus making not choosing that over spending resources retraining domestic workers) was exactly the point of the suggestion.
- She walks out searching for a job, she finds a job that pays 120k. This means you hired her because you found her "cheaper" than American counterparts. So you are penalized. Hence next time you wont hire a employee worth $120k for $100k. You will prefer a $120k American girl over $100k Indian girl.
However, if the idea is to have it survive and, dare I say it, be used for the beneficial purpose of bringing vital new blood to the country's workforce instead of being a cheap source of labor, then employers need strong incentive to spend the money needed to get someone into US without fear that they will simply walk off.
It's not what I want as a US employee (my self-interest is to have as few people of the same skill as possible in order to command highest salary), but it is something that would be needed in order to get some sort of a chance at having such rules pass.