Comment by thephyber

Comment by thephyber 4 hours ago

This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.

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.

Taek 4 hours ago

That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.

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.

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thephyber 3 hours ago

What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B?
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.

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- Taek 3 hours ago
  
  Or... those other parts of the economy increase salaries for skilled labor?
  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?
  
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  whatever1 2 hours ago
  
  Option 1: you give a visa to a quant with 2M/y today’s salary
  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.
  
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- throwawaymaths an hour ago
  
  exactly wrong. Americans are dissuaded from going into these highly skilled fields because anyone talented enough to do those things realizes they can make much more building SAASes or working on wall street.
  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.
  
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- AbrahamParangi 18 minutes ago
  
  This is just an argument against allowing the market to set wages, which you could make if you wanted to but it is not a strong one.
  
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- WillPostForFood 19 minutes ago
  
  "materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research "
  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
  Google
  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
  Linkedin
  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.
  source: https://www.myvisajobs.com/reports/h1b/
  
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_heimdall 3 hours ago

Can we really consider it the free market when there are already so many regulations in place?

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tziki 4 hours ago

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.

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handoflixue 3 hours ago

Genuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?

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- AuthError 3 hours ago
  
  this also holds true for chemical, biomedical researchers, mechanical engineers working in deep tech, software engineering is such an anomaly that it's hard to do income based lottery without overindexing on swe market
  
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  austhrow743 3 hours ago
  
  What does overindexing on the swe market mean?
  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?
  
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breadwinner 2 hours ago

How about ranking on salary but by profession, so there should be a separate rank for software engineers vs. biomedical researchers.

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malfist 3 hours ago

Does the US have such a shortage of artistic talent we have to hire abroad for it?

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- thephyber 3 hours ago
  
  Why get hung out on the example profession and not the fact that some jobs pay drastically disproportionate rates?
  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.
  
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  sarchertech 2 hours ago
  
  There’s an O1 visa for exceptional talent.
  
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- fooker an hour ago
  
  Short answer - yes.
  There's no long answer.
  
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fakedang 3 hours ago

Top 1% of artists have the O1 route, not the H1B route.
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.

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- scheme271 2 hours ago
  
  L1 employees require that the company employ the person for a year at an international branch so this is only available to multi-national companies.
  
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  fakedang 23 minutes ago
  
  Yes, and the usual suspects already abuse it to move jobs abroad. If you had observed, it's often multinationals, usually Indian consultancies or companies with Indian Capability Centers, which abuse the H1B. They'll just be forced to switch to the L1.
  The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.
  
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- [removed] 3 hours ago
  
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bsder an hour ago

> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.

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.

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