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Comment by bokonist | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots. Decide on some number of business/talent based visas to be issued each year. Then do a rolling auction of the visas. If a person gets a visa, comes to America, but then does not like their job and goes home, the company gets a prorated refund. If the person stays more than five years, they get a green card automatically and are free to work wherever they please or start their own company. If a Facebook or YC want the talent, they can bid up the price and pay for the talent. The government doesn't have to worry about in which professions there is a "scarcity" or a talent shortage. If there is a real shortage of valued workers, businesses will bid for visas for those types of workers. It will work itself out. But this system will prevent the body shops from racing to the bottom by using H1-B's as disposable indentured servants.

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The unstated premise behind your comment, and indeed this entire debate, is that there is only so much "room" for immigration in the US. This leads us to arguments about how large the quota should be, how it should be divided, etc.

This is a flawed assumption. The US has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration, and on average every single immigrant we accept would increase the size of our economy. Immigrants are not a "drain on the system" that must be limited. Human brains are the single most valuable resource in the universe, and we should take as many as we can. Not only that, but the people who self-select to move their families across the world are the most motivated, entrepreneurial, and risk-seeking brains in the world.

Our default assumption should be that the walls are down and the gates are open; only in extraordinary cases should we be sending anyone (regardless of skills) away at the border.

Yes, that is the premise. In my comment, I take the assumption of restricted immigration as a given, and then propose how the quota can be most sensibly allocated. There is a completely separate debate over how high or low that quota should be, or if there should be a quota at all. But that would deserve its own long thread.

Yes, see: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.it/2014/06/the-optimal-number-...

But this is all politics, and as such it should probably be flagged.

"Our default assumption should be that the walls are down and the gates are open"

Yeah, bull. Not even.

The U.S. has a fixed capacity to absorb immigrants while integrating them into our culture. In many places in the country, immigration is already too much, resulting in insular immigrant communities and tensions between immigrants and everyone else. Those are bad things.

The unstated assumption underlying the assertion that "the U.S. has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration" is that culture, and institutions arising out of that culture, doesn't matter. That's false. Culture and institutions are what make the U.S. worth immigrating to in the first place.

And I say this as an immigrant. My parents didn't leave their lives half a world away to come here for the weather.

"My parents didn't leave their lives half a world away to come here for the weather."

Agreed. They probably came here for a better life and opportunity just like most immigrants. What is your point though ? Your parents immigrated here and now you think " immigration is already too much". I am not attacking you personally but trying to understand your point. What is this culture and institution that you talk about ?

There is a point when immigration is too much. Resources are finite, defining an immigration limit to maintain a certain standard of living.

My parents came here for various reasons, but one of the straws that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was my dad giving in to paying a bribe just to get telephone service installed at his house. Where I come from, Bangladesh, that is just how you do things. And the institutions you have to deal with were created by people who think that's okay. I think non-immigrants take for granted how amazing, and fragile, it is to have a society where you don't assume you'll have to pay a bribe to get your phone service installed. Or to be able to rely on institutions created by people who don't assume you'll have to pay a bribe to get your phone service installed.

I'm not against immigration. I'm for preserving the virtues of American culture that you don't see in a lot of other places (even among the wealthier and more educated folks in other places): attitudes towards corruption, women, racism, homosexuality, the environment, entrepreneurship, risk, personal happiness, family relationships and hierarchy, etc.

"But I don't want to have so many immigrants that we can't turn them all into Americans. I want immigrants who respect womens' rights, consider racists to be social pariahs, find corruption to be intolerable, embrace gays, etc"

If I understand you correctly, you are making the assumption that things like respecting women's rights etc. are primarily an American virtue and not as much with other cultures ? I would agree with you generally that America is probably the most open country even with its challenges but I am not sure if your point is relevant in the context of immigration. Here is why. Immigrants come to America for many reasons. Your dad's was not wanting to bribe for every little thing and probably many other factors like that. But in my experience, most immigrants are just looking for better opportunity and america provides that. It is hard to objectively quantify their virtues, beliefs etc.

So what I am getting at is that your point seems ok in theory but very difficult to implement in reality. If you want to restrict immigration, it certainly cannot be done based on perceived virtues. Plenty of immigrants assimilate in the local culture while plenty preserve their own at the same time. Nothing wrong with both as long you are not hurting anyone. In fact, what makes America special is you could look different, speak different, eat different but at the end of day, you are American as long as you have some common core beliefs including hard work, take nothing for granted, the drive to succeed and the perception of self independence.

The core problem is bribery is both a way of life for more than 1/2 the worlds population and a huge economic drain. If you mix say 200 million people from China and 200 million from India you would quickly end up with yet another society where bribery is the norm.

Granted the cap on immigration is probably well below the cultural assimilation rate, but just because we could accept say 2 million people a year does not mean 20 would not be a huge problem.

On top of that the US has a huge investment in infrastructure roads, bridges, railroads, water, sewage, schools, etc which needs to be expanded when increasing the population. So, while allowing lot's of doctors to emigrate is probably a net gain, adding migrant workers is probably a net loss to the economy on average.

People said the same thing about Italian and Irish immigrants 100 years ago. And yet, things didn't fall apart.

Feel free to look up the crime rates 100 years ago and say that again. Immigration is extremely valuable, but scaling things up tends to create significant issues.

The Italian's might have been more famous, but there where wars fought in US city's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Mob

> In fact, what makes America special is you could look different, speak different, eat different but at the end of day, you are American as long as you have some common core beliefs including hard work, take nothing for granted, the drive to succeed and the perception of self independence.

Why are those the core values? I can think of several off the top of my head that are more important. What makes America a better place to live than Bangladesh is not that we believe in hard work and independence while people in Bangladesh do not. Beliefs are a part of it, but not those specific beliefs.

I think you'd be surprised how much "respecting women's rights", given a broad interpretation of that notion, is localized the US and a few other countries. Surprisingly big swaths of Europe have issues with it.

(A fair critique of what I just said might take into account the attitudes of, say, rural Missouri; however: immigrants don't as a general rule come here from Bangladesh to settle into the Ozarks).

The U.S. has a fixed capacity to absorb immigrants while integrating them into our culture

I've heard this said before but never seen any data on it, though similar rationale was used in the Immigration Act of 1924: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924 , which helped condemn millions to death in Europe.

Bryan Caplan makes the case for open borders here: http://openborders.info/bryan-caplan/ . Separately, his books, The Myth of the Rational Voter and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, are both great, and full of brilliantly contrarian thinking.

Bryan Caplan makes strange arguments sometimes. In this pdf [1], he says if you don't want immigrants to vote or receive benefits, then why not just prohibit them from voting or receiving benefits? That would still be more humane than keeping them out of the country altogether, right? He doesn't even mention that it would create an underclass, which is one of the biggest reasons for crime and other social ills.

[1] http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-...

I don't see why the opponents of open immigration would believe, for an instant, that those people that are let in without benefits would stay in that situation. You paint exactly the arguments ("permanent underclass!") that, after bargaining to get them here without benefits, would be used to get them benefits.

> Act of 1924 ... which helped condemn millions to death in Europe

That is incredibly twisted reasoning.

> And I say this as an immigrant.

...who can easily just think "got mine".

> In many places in the country, immigration is already too much

This makes me wonder if there is anything we could do to better spread out immigrants to improve the pace of assimilation and hence increase our total capacity to accept immigrants without negative cultural impact.

No idea how this might be accomplished but it's got me thinking.

underpopulated Australian territories offer potential immigrants benefits and sponsored accommodation.

> the U.S. has nearly unlimited room to accept immigration

Says who? The permanent ecologically sustainable population of the U.S. is under 200 million. Supporting the current population at the current standard of living involves running down aquifers and top soil and fisheries. We could certainly cram in 600 million at a far lower standard of living. Why should the people favor a reduced lifestyle?

Where exactly are the added millions going to live? There aren't really viable sites for new cities. No, with continued high immigration we're really talking about adding massively to both sprawl and overcrowding in existing cities. Citizens rightly regard both these developments negatively.

The demographic trends in America were set in the 1960s and 70s to level off the population at a pretty comfortable figure around 200 million. With the massively increased immigration of recent decades we're going to hit somewhere well over double that. To what advantage? The parallel America with a much lower population would be a much nicer place to live for the vast majority of people.

What about if we build more Manhattans and put our 600 million people there? Maybe it's time to dig some subway tunnels on the Kansas prairie.

The US has a very low population density. There's tons of room for new housing.

Are you deliberately missing the point? The ecological impacts of sustaining human settlements go far beyond housing sites. The American west is overstretched for water. Much of the land west of the Mississippi is effectively already overpopulated.

Beyond ecological concerns, you can't add people without compromising the lifestyle of people already here. Go ahead and ask people in most cities if they want their town to be a lot more like Los Angeles. The answer 90% of the time will be No. But that's what's happening anyway.

This idea that there is a ton of land for new urbanization is obviously wrong. The good land is all in use. What's left is semi-arid, flood plain, or unsuitable in other ways. You can't just stick people out in a prairie or desert or on an Appalachian hill top. You have to ship in food and pipe out the sewage. That's not economically viable most places.

The one area of the country that could actually support a higher population density is the great lakes region, but it's in fact slowly depopulating at the moment. Immigrants are not moving to Erie, PA. They are moving to places like NYC and cities in California. So this point that there is available land is a pointless academic discussion unless you want to impose soviet style internal passports.

I think this is a very short-sighted view. The US has a long history of immigration, and of having insular cultures slowly integrate into some vague "mainstream" culture. Philadelphia had widely circulated German language newspapers well into the 20th century.

Arguably, what has kept the US culture so vibrant is the very aggressive assimilation and acceptance of foreign cultures.

I think the very notion of some sort of "American culture" that needs to be "protected" to be a fantasy; at best just a rose-tinted glasses view of the past, and at worst shorthand for "I want immigrants who agree with my views so that the candidates I support win more elections".

You can probably fit more people in your house, who are you to say someone shouldn't move into those rooms?

The current US population is 7 billion, US population is 300 million. How many of the 6.5 billion non-Americans do you think could be rapidly absorbed, both terms of infrastructure (roads, water, sewers) as well as housing, culture, and government subsidies?

Your answer MUST be expressed a NUMBER, not some vapid BS platitude.

Just put skyscrapers everywhere! Cut down those national forests. Dam all the rivers. Build baby build!

Current "World" Populatation

ftfy

Increasing the size of the economy isn't the best choice, though. We have too many people in the US as it is. More people, more money, more stuff isn't always better. (Using a throwaway since it seems most people think more people and skyscrapers and traffic and higher taxes to compensate for the dwindling resources is wonderful.)

No, we don't have unlimited room, unless you're planning to not feed or provide water to these people long term.

> We have too many people in the US as it is.

Do you know how many children are born every day in the US?

Not offhand, but how is that relevant?

If you want to complain about "too many people", don't you think babies factor into that, somehow?

Sure they do. I didn't suggest otherwise.

> (Using a throwaway since it seems most people think more people and skyscrapers and traffic and higher taxes to compensate for the dwindling resources is wonderful.)

Are you sure that's a throwaway? Take a look at my username. That's a throwaway!

Ha! Yes, this account is for going against the hive mind. Maybe I'd get less downvotes if I had "throwaway" in the name? Hmmm.

The U.S. only has unlimited capacity for immigration if the composition of the immigrants already closely resembles the overall U.S economy and culture.

If 100% of immigrants are neurosurgeons, that simultaneously gluts the domestic labor market for neurosurgery and creates shortages in all the other jobs that typically support neurosurgeons, down to the cafe baristas and hairdressers.

What you want is to import the right immigrants at the right time. If you get an unbalanced mix, the economy will be disrupted as surely as a washing machine with socks on one side and jeans on the other.

Limiting the absolute number per year allows the economy to adjust as the new participants come in. Being a little smarter about the different skill sets that come in would allow greater absolute numbers to immigrate and assimilate.

But I don't particularly trust the bureaucracy to calculate the numbers that would provide the greatest overall economic benefits, either, so perhaps a stupider and simpler system that largely eliminates the need for bureaucratic decision-making would be best.

> The unstated premise behind your comment, and indeed this entire debate, is that there is only so much "room" for immigration in the US. This leads us to arguments about how large the quota should be, how it should be divided, etc.

No, the actual assumption is that the US wants to bias its flow of immigrants towards high-skilled, high-value people working in high-value-add positions. If human brains are a valuable resource, he is proposing that the government should issue visas to the best and brightest resources it can get.

A rather obvious premise is that there is some limit of immigration that is in the best interest of current US citizens.

Average human brains are not a scarce resource as seen by all practical evidence - globally, they're being manufactured at near-record numbers, they're a sustainable resource that we can make more in the future, they're not fully used (9 million of them unemployed) and we're okay with deliberately throwing away many of them (e.g. incarcerating 2 million).

In addition, there is significant unequality between the regions of the world. Simply equalizing the global wealth per capita would be a very unwanted change for most of the first world, simply being pushed down to the average would be a catastrophic decrease. Equal opportunities for everyone worldwide would also hurt current first world citizens, who right now do have significantly above average opportunities. You can charge an order of magnitude more for the same job or service simply because you are here and "they" are not. It is rather obvious that there are some practical reasons why they would vote to preserve the status quo.

Arguably the incarcerated, and more tenuously then unemployed, are not "average human brains". I'm not sure I'd actually argue that but it seems worth addressing.

Incarceration is much more highly correlated to your parents income level than their genetics. Unemployment is primarily a skillset mismatch problem. Becoming a newspaper pressman looked like a solid career choice in 1995, not so much twenty years later when those 18 year olds are 38 and unemployed. Not foreseeing the rise of the internet is hardly strong evidence that their brains are defective.

"Incarceration is much more highly correlated to your parents income level than their genetics."

Nothing requires any stipulation that these minds be genetically inferior.

If the problem is nurture rather than nature then shouldn't we be sending them to school rather than prison?

Presented with an individual, it actually doesn't matter whether the problem was nature or nurture. What matters is what you can do about it now.

Bear in mind that I brought this up as a possible objection that needed addressing, to the argument "we don't need more average minds - look at all the average minds we're not using".

> Presented with an individual, it actually doesn't matter whether the problem was nature or nurture. What matters is what you can do about it now.

But that's the problem. Doing something with the late 30s unskilled laborer with no job is something we might be able to just break even on, or at least not lose too much in retraining for humanitarian reasons, and doing that is arguably better than abandoning those people to a life of crime and prison. But importing a significant number of new people who are already in that situation is not an economically positive proposition.

Letting people take the jobs that best fit them, the world over, means more jobs are better done sooner, which means more resources available to do things like retrain.

None of this has much to do, anymore, with the question of whether there is "demand for average human brains", incidentally.

> Letting people take the jobs that best fit them, the world over, means more jobs are better done sooner, which means more resources available to do things like retrain.

But we're not talking about the world over. Allowing unlimited immigration is good for the immigrants but bad for the existing citizens.

And you're running straight into equality fallacy. Equality is not an unambiguous good. When most people are poor, making everyone equal just makes everyone poor. There is a threshold past which people can stop worrying about where their next meal is coming from and instead make investments in the future of the world. The ideal eventual outcome is for everyone to be above that level, but if you flatten the world-wide income graph today then nobody is and the people who are are the only ones who can drag everyone else up. In the meantime the distinction between who gets to be a citizen of a first world country and who doesn't is inherently arbitrary and unfair, but it's still a choice that has to be made.

The reasoning you quoted has nothing to do with equality. Don't make things up just because you find them easier to argue against.

The reasoning was: If you force jobs to be filled by people who are not as good at them, we collectively get less work done. Assuming that work tends to be useful, that means we collectively have fewer resources available.

> The reasoning was: If you force jobs to be filled by people who are not as good at them, we collectively get less work done. Assuming that work tends to be useful, that means we collectively have fewer resources available.

Now you're changing your argument. The people who are the "best fit" for a job aren't necessarily better at it. They may be worse at it but willing to work for less money. Which is where equality enters into it: You're making the assumption that it's better to transfer that money from the workers to producers or customers. But for something that done at scale leads to the destruction of the middle class, that assumption is false.

While there is an income discrepancy, western countries and companies are hungry for developing markets.

You can't have entry into those markets while putting up barriers of your own. Go to any street corner in India or Mexico and you will see US and other western brands everywhere.

Trade protectionism is a completely different issue from immigration and I don't see how it's relevant here.

That being said, you definitely can have entry into those markets while putting up barriers of your own, there are many historical examples when this was successfully done, e.g. 19th century was probably a peak of such practices. The only question is if you should, and if it's worthwhile right now - you can go to any place in USA and you'll see lots of things that are manufactured in Mexico.

And the relationship is exactly the opposite of what is implied by your comment - a large wage disparity means that the developing markets aren't as "useful" as is their cheap labor; if wages would become more equal, then this change would generally reduce the outsourcing of labor to the third world and increase the export of goods made in USA to India or Mexico.

>Trade protectionism is a completely different issue from immigration and I don't see how it's relevant here.

This has gone into both immigration and outsourcing, so it does become relevant.

>there are many historical examples when this was successfully done

This was to the detriment of those who were blocked from trade. The power balance between the west and the rest of the world isn't as skewed today so such would not be possible.

>a large wage disparity means that the developing markets aren't as "useful" as is their cheap labor;

This is a fundamental flaw in your logic and most in this thread. A person is both a worker and consumer. The same person that is working for money is going to consume with that money.

When an immigrant arrives to the US, they become both worker and consumer. Their consumption drives the creation of more products, including software products.

Along similar lines, the cost of sponsoring H-1Bs should grow exponentially with the fraction of the company's workforce that is on H-1B, beyond a small threshold.

I like this idea. It allows for the super-talented to succeed across international lines while preventing cost-cutting at the expense of the locals.

It is an interesting idea for changing how H1Bs are limited, although it doesn't take much thinking to come up with some ways to game such a system. It would get complex, and fast.

That would unfairly target small specialist businesses unless you also take into account the revenue/workforce size.

When I came to the US on H1B I made up 25% of the company, at the time the cost was already significant enough to prevent any "abuse".

I'm imagining large companies spawning multiple smaller entities to game the system and get around this.

Seems fair enough.

However, this would also mean that startups would likely find it impossible to earn H1-B's in competitive fields, as a fair amount of the compensation is future-loaded.

Or, to put it another way: who's going to win a bidding war for Employee X, Microsoft or {Startup Working to Become Microsoft}?

Smaller companies benefit later, after the initial five years, when an employee brought in by Microsoft is free to join a startup. And also indirectly due to generally increased supply.

Personally, if I were Microsoft, I'd kill for the opportunity to limit foreign startup talent hires to a five year perked timetable.

Over time, yes, engineers are engineers, and those perking will be a continuous opportunity for startups to hire. However, it doesn't help at all if you want to hire the world's top talent in {insert new technology that didn't exist 2 years ago}. And isn't that ideally what this is about?

Maybe there is something I'm missing due to having little knowledge about all the legal subtitles. It seems like startups could come out ahead by realizing that in the modern world, there is no reason for a talented developer to be on-site 365 days of the year. They could save money by not getting on getting an H1B by having the developer work remotely and only need to obtain more limited visas for occasional on-site visits?

Im afraid that is a different debate on remote v/s local. There are both advantages and disadvantages to either. In this specific case, it is quite clear they really wanted their team to be together (i.e. on site) and went to extraordinary length to do that.

BTW there are few visa's (if any) for "limited" or occasional visits to the US.

I'm pretty sure such visas exist, as my team has employees in four countries and we try to meet in person every quarter.

"Meeting" is different from "working". You can, of course, get a tourist Visa and meet and talk about stuff, and maybe even work out of a US office for a couple of weeks. But I think that working for a couple of months would not be permitted...

Actually, I'm not sure of the law here. As long as you're not employed by the US division, are not paid by them and are just using the US as a place to work for their overseas subsidiary....I'm not sure how that pans out, legality wise.

I'm sure it's not allowed, otherwise American companies could hire unlimited immigrants through an overseas subsidiary.

Startups already lose a lot of bidding wars to bigger companies for domestic employees. This wouldn't be any different. Big companies pay more money in salary & bonus, generally have better benefits, more stability, and these days many of the side perks that startups have.

Almost all of the money 'startups' are raising is destined for employee compensation. This would just be another form of it.

I would prefer a system where the candidate can leave the job immediately, or worst case, after 3-6 months of arriving in the US. The company that does the sponsoring should not have the power to hold on to the employee. If the candidate can stay employed in his/her field and average[1] the salary filled on the non immigrant application sheet for 4 out of the 5 year period, then, regardless of company, the green card should be reachable. It is certainly a risk for the sponsoring company but that is known ahead of time and not unlike the risk of hiring a local candidate. There certainly should be no compensation for losing an employee (local or via H1). Employee mobility should not be different just because of your visa status.

Summary: Open work permits that segue into GC's are my preferred approach.

[1] Verified via IRS filings. The applicant gives permission to DHS to check the IRS filings.

Once you're on an H1-B visa, transferring it to another company is quite a bit easier, and NOT subject to the quotas.

It's completely doable. The only downside is that processing the visa transfer takes time. Nowhere near the amount of time it takes to get a new visa, of course, but it's still longer than a two week notice.

You are also very limited in the kind of jobs you can take. I think that part of the appeal of the H1B is that it creates a pool of programmers who are only allowed to be programmers. Keep in mind, the biggest competition for programmers may come from outside the field. In my opinion, being a programmer is actually very difficult. Even the much derided "crud" apps require a substantial amount of reading of dense material, tremendous persistence in the face of strange and obscure bugs and errors, the ability to communicate with (and negotiate with) non-technical stakeholders under deadline pressure… really, people who can do this are able to take jobs that often pay better with more stability in other fields, provided that they are free to do so.

For instance, registered nurses and dental hygienists in the bay area earn a bit more and a bit less than application developers, respectively. Under the H1B terms, it would be difficult for a programmer to become a physician, lawyer, nurse, dental hygienist, mortgage broker, or many other jobs. As a result a salary and prospects gap can emerge between programming and these fields - increasing the probability that those people with freedom and choice will avoid programming (and ensuring that the "shortage" continues decade after decade).

Truth is, visa programs that are designed to target specific jobs or industries by allowing workers only to work for a specific employer or in a specific field are likely to end up badly distorting labor markets.

Why do people assume the H1-B's are always cheap. MS pays their H1B's incredibly well. Yes its true H1B makes the employee loyal to the company for a long time until greencard. Working crazy long hours are the very norm.

But on the other side every good dev I know from my uni in Aus is sucked up by MS, GOOG or FB. They had offers before they even graduated. The most they could get in Aus was 50-80k AUD. In US 120k+ is easy.

From the Australian side they legitimately have a talent issue as talent gets sucked to US. From the US side, I see a huge income gap. Tech pays so well the guys are buying big cars and being lavish with their inflated egos. The average american is still on 50k. They can't keep up with the rent rises.

Careful what you wish for. I wish other parts of the world could achieve the size of tech the US west coast has.

>Seems like the sensible solution would be to auction off the immigration quota slots

Sounds like a great way to skew immigration in favour of big business and completely screw over start ups and SMBs.

Pricing a scarce resource doesn't "screw over" anyone.

Pricing an artificially scarce resource does.

Its going to be a scare resource regardless of bidding. At least bidding will allocate to some correlation to real need since people pay more for critical skills.

Sure it does. At least when that scarce resource is artificially constrained.

Now that doesn't mean it shouldn't have restraints. But it does mean there are winners and losers and it is perfectly fair and reasonable to call them out.

(Edit: Who the hell is downvoting the artificial scarcity comments? That's absurd. Care to have an actual discussion?)

It's not artificial scarcity. The US doesn't have an unlimited capacity for immigration. We can argue around the edges of what the correct number is, but whatever number we pick, there are still going to be more people than that who want to be US citizens and we still need to choose between them somehow.

Of course it does

Tata can rake the auction price up because even though their worker doesn't have a great salary, they're being billed a lot. 10k, 20k for a H1B? NO PROBLEM!

You're just shutting the small players out.

As an example, Red Hat hires a lot of H1Bs, now, since they know how to work remotely this is not such a big issue, still.

> Pricing a scarce resource doesn't "screw over" anyone.

Citation needed!

For reference, here's a toy model where pricing a scarce resource screws someone over:

- There are two people in the model, Alice and Bob.

- Alice is very rich, Bob is very poor.

- Each of them needs a loaf of bread per day to survive (100 utility), and would also enjoy eating a second loaf (1 utility).

- Initially, each of them gets a loaf from the government for free. There are only two loaves available per day.

- Now let's price the scarce resource, and have the government sell the loaves instead! Alice buys both loaves and enjoys life. Bob doesn't get anything and dies.

Right?

Not being able to afford the market price of a resource is not "getting screwed" and you're just being inflammatory by making it a matter of life and death. H1B visas are not a matter of life and death; we're talking about people who want to make more money, not people seeking political asylum.

Suppose we make your exact scenario about a rare/endangered species of caviar. Bob can still buy bread for one credit but you're arguing that the government should ensure the equitable distribution of caviar because the market price isn't fair to Bob who can't afford it. Bob is not getting screwed, Bob just can't afford caviar.

Pricing didn't screw Bob, being poor did.

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