11 ms·

Seems like such a simple issue to fix: the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary, say ab

by yholio 8y ago

Seems like such a simple issue to fix: the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary, say above 150K. Doctors included, I see no reason to protect them from competition. Hop jobs at will but need to maintain within 85% of that level. If a company can't find workers, it should pay more up until a level that puts the competitiveness of the economy under question. Below that level, it's the citizen's right to a fair salary without labour dumping from a poor country. Above that level, it's everybody's right to fairly priced services without professional rents.

tejaswiy 8y ago
Needs to be adjusted for cost of living, salary changes over time by profession (Tech salaries are in a bubble rn. which makes 150k reasonable by bay area standards, but they may go significantly up / down in the future) which is complicated enough but there's edge cases like Universities / Non profits etc. that can't pay salaries to compete with the private sector but people work there anyway because of passion.
- yholio 8y ago
  I disagree, if you can find cheap programmers in Des Moines, Iowa, then by all means expand there, spread the love within the country before going for import labour. As for bubbles, that's the point, there shouldn't be any if labour is available and willing to come in.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zeckalpha 8y ago
    Or pay people in Des Moines $150k+
  - tejaswiy 8y ago
    Most IT / h1 roles are not based out of the Bay Area [1]. Significant amounts of H1b population goes to doing cookie cutter consulting projects spread across the country and setting a 150k min on the wage means that you won't be able to hire H1s at all in other parts of the country. Obviously this creates a lot of demand for American programmers and personal experience suggests that this will cause a labor shortage. [1] https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=WS https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.as...
    - akhilcacharya 8y ago
      I think it’ll just be more likely that they’ll hire 5 30k offshore consultants instead of 1 local immigrant.
- jmknoll 8y ago
  That doesn’t seem too hard to solve. You just say that an h1-b job needs to be at the 85th percentile, salary-wise, in a basket of similar jobs by location/position.
  - tejaswiy 8y ago
    That's what the regulations say right now - for each title, there's a prevailing wage level that DOL publishes and a H1 has to meet that wage level. It is however a single level across the country so it tends to be a bit on the lower side.
    - ojbyrne 8y ago
      Actually it isn’t. “The prevailing wage rate is defined as the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment.“ https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/pwscreens.cfm https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/pwscreens.cfm
- chongli 8y ago
  people work there anyway because of passion I don't think that's necessarily the case. A lot of people that work at a university do so because they're an international grad student who has no other way to stay in the country. They're barely scraping by, hoping they can finish and that an advanced degree will land them a job.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
baby 8y ago
This is such a one-sided point of view. Imagine that you're immigrating to a country, and after a few years you get fire, or you want to take a sabbatical, or you want to change industry for a lower paying job. Now under your rules you cannot do that. What do you do? You've created your life in the US, you have friends, perhaps a girlfriend, maybe even a house. Now you have to leave?
- untog 8y ago
  (I say this as someone who lived in the US on a visa for years) That's part of the deal. Any immigrant arriving on a visa knows what they've signed up for, and it doesn't involve taking a sabbatical. It also really should not involve buying a house, if you're being sensible. Being fired 100% sucks, but you can transfer an H1B to a new employer. H1B is at least a dual intent visa, so after some years you can apply for a green card, get one, then take all the sabbaticals you want. (Also, if your life is settled enough to have friends and a girlfriend you don't want to leave, US immigration does offer an answer: marry her!)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - htfy96 8y ago
    The real problem is the path from L1/OPT -> H1B -> green card is purely based on how many years you have worked in the US and performed as some kind of lottery. The transition may take at least 8 years, almost identical for highly-educated Top-N employees & questionably-legal "labors" from IT Consulting Companies (there are lots of fake identities/backgrounds in these companies' H1-B applications).
    - pertymcpert 8y ago
      Why would an L1 want to go to H1-B instead of going straight to green card?
      - airstrike 8y ago
geofft 8y ago
Here's a simpler proposal: anyone from anywhere can come here and take any job. If you leave your job, voluntarily or not, you have 90 days (up from the current grace period of 60 and strict rule of 0) to find another job. If you've been here for a few years you can apply for citizenship, independent of your employer. The primary objection to this is crowding out the labor market, to which I'd say: protectionism doesn't work. If there are people in another country willing to do the same job for cheaper, the invisible hand will figure out how to move the jobs there, perhaps through competition. Fighting the free market isn't going to work: figure out how to work within it. (For instance, offer a UBI for citizens only.)
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  The primary objection to that idea is the complete destruction of your country's culture.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Again, protectionism. If a billion people in India and a billion people in China are competing in global markets, my country's culture isn't going to survive anyway. How is Ottoman culture doing these days? Honestly, how is the British culture of even a century ago doing these days? How long did the Japanese culture so carefully preserved survive Matthew Perry's arrival? (Also as it happens I'm an American-born child of Indian immigrants, so I am actually a carrier of American culture and not Indian, so I have reason to question the implicit assumption that immigrants will destroy culture.)
    - fiblye 8y ago
      If you dig in, a lot of cultures have roots going back centuries. People might be wearing tshirts and jeans everywhere you go, but the way they handle family matters and daily routines is very different.
    - SamReidHughes 8y ago
      You're a carrier of American culture (at least in some superficial way) because you grew up surrounded by Americans. If 500 million people moved here, they would not grow up surrounded by Americans.
smb06 8y ago
One big problem with restricting to salaries above 150k is that you’ve disqualified anyone who may be early in their career. Not many who are below a mid-level career role will get that kind of salary. What does that affect? All undergraduate students coming to the U.S. who spend $$$ on a 4 year college degree here and then try to find a job. You’ve just wiped that demographic out because they won’t get 150k salary. Why would they be inclined to come to the US and spend all that money on an education here? They won’t. And if the best talent doesn’t come here to compete intellectually with Americans in a classroom then Americans lose. H1Bs comprise a big chunk of people who come here, get an education here, prove their competence and make the American economy grow. You won’t get them to come here with a high salary cap like 150k.
- briandear 8y ago
  > You won’t get them to come here with a high salary cap like 150k. That's not the purpose of the H1B visa. The purpose is to fill shortage areas with temporary workers; it's not some kind of college recruitment program.
- diogenescynic 8y ago
  >What does that affect? All undergraduate students coming to the U.S. who spend $$$ on a 4 year college degree here and then try to find a job. That’s great... hire locals not foreigners just because they paid for a degree. I don’t care what they paid for. This is supposedly for specialized knowledge—-it shouldn’t be going to ANYONE entry level or undergrad...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
vowelless 8y ago
When I was on an h1b, I was making around 60k in the middle of the country, working for an amazing startup where we were ramen profitable. My skill set was highly specialized for the job. However, I couldn’t be a founder due to my visa status and we couldn’t pay each other even basic salaries. But we did some pretty amazing stuff for DARPA, DOD, and eventually some commercial enterprises. You would price out people like me and make it virtually impossible for me to become a citizen eventually. But maybe that is by design and I don’t mind that opinion. All countries have nativist subsets of society so it is just a normal, natural stance. Historically, america has attracted the best minds. Historically. But maybe now the populace believes the natives need to be protected from outside competition so that they can improve. Fair enough.
- vinay427 8y ago
  > ramen profitable Off topic, but I hadn't heard this expression before so I looked it up and stumbled upon an interesting Paul Graham blog post derived from it: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html Thanks for introducing me to a new phrase!
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  Yes there's nativism, but that's not the only thing here. In purely economic terms h1bn visa holders are potential employess that are extra attractive because they have less power; power they cannot get back and power other classes of residents cannot give up. This is classic artificially divide the market and race to the bottom. > You would price out people like me and make it virtually impossible for me to become a citizen eventually. > Historically, america has attracted the best minds. Historically. You are making the classic mistake of holding the macroeconomics constant. If we had sane immigration policies as proposed in this thread, the going rate might have been different. Maybe you have been payed more, matching the coasts. Maybe we all would have been paid less, matching you. Maybe the incumbents wouldn't have had a competitive advantage such that you all had to be underpaid to be even ramen profitable. The big point is given a skill set (projection of the labor market), residency status shouldn't be economically observable. Policy should be constrained to affecting the residency status distribution accross slices.
tziki 8y ago
That's a very IT/bay area specific view. You can be well respected with a long career in many industries and not make 150k.
- topkai22 8y ago
  Not really- the way H1-bs are sold the general public are that they are for “extremely hard to find” labor and requirements state you must look for us persons to fill your position before getting an H1-b visa to do so. $150k is at the 95th percentile of individual income for the entire US. I’d argue that if a company in any industry/profession isn’t upping their advertised pay to higher than what 1/20 us persons currently make, they aren’t trying sufficiently hard to attract a US person. I generally favor looser immigration in the US, but H1-Bs as written unduly benefit the sponsoring company at the expense of labor generally.
  - tooltalk 8y ago
    Looks like the 95th percentile went up to $235K in 2017/2018. https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
    - tooltalk 8y ago
      my bad. $235K is the 95h percentile for household, not individual.
    - ojbyrne 8y ago
      The 2nd graph on that page shows the 95th percenctile as $153k. The calculator returns a similar result.
my_username_is_ 8y ago
I think there should be a monthly allocation of visas that can be issued, and companies are allowed to bid on the salary that they would pay the worker. Each month, the highest salaries get visas issued. If they don't bid enough, their candidate doesn't get in. If companies really need these specialists, they should pay them enough to secure a visa in a market-based system. I suspect this would create upward pressure on the salaries of these visa workers and prevent some of the abuse that we see today
- Jare 8y ago
  So pretty much only companies in Bay Area or a couple similarly high $ hubs, and candidates wanting to go there specifically. That intuitively feels like promoting an unhealthy environment (not because of Bay Area in particular, but because of promoting concentration).
  - my_username_is_ 8y ago
    Yes, that is probably how it will play out. At least at first. But I think the side-effect of this is that other industries & locales would not get as many workers as they currently do, which would put upward pressure on wages in those areas. Compare this to the current system, where wages for lower paying jobs and areas are kept lower than they would otherwise be by adding worker supply through this visa program.
renholder 8y ago
>the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary Countries in Europe do precisely this but take it slightly further. Take Ireland[0] and Sweden[1], for prime examples. For those of you who don't want to read the links: The company has to have a minimum salary (oft above the standard cost of living) for the employee to obtain (and retain) the permit. (On an aside, in Sweden, they go a step further in that the contract must also be approved by the relevant union that company has agreements with.) [0] - https://dbei.gov.ie/en/What-We-Do/Workplace-and-Skills/Employment-Permits/Permit-Types/Critical-Skills-Employment-Permit/ https://dbei.gov.ie/en/What-We-Do/Workplace-and-Skills/Emplo... [1] - https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/Working-in-Sweden/Employed/Work-permit-requirements.html https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...
- mclightning 8y ago
  It is not really a specialist salary enforced in that law. I've been living in Sweden for 5 years now, as an immigrant, soon to be citizen. The required salary quota, which is 15.000 swedish krona per month, is less than half of an average developer salary. And that thing about union, is not as bureaucratic, as you make it sound. Company has to be part of a Union as a whole, to offer work-visa for immigrants. That's almost all there is to it. They dont really check each individual contract.
  - renholder 8y ago
    (Jag tänka att du inte förstod min svar men jag ska skriver i engelska, så alla kan att läsa.) >It is not really a specialist salary enforced in that law. To which law do you refer? The minimum stated on the original page that I referred? You would be correct that it's not a specialist salary; however, to suggest that it simply does not exist would be fool-hearty. Migrationsverket has documentation specific to that[0]. >The required salary quota, which is 15.000 swedish krona per month, is less than half of an average developer salary. An average developer's salary, where? I can tell you that the average developer's salary in Östergötland, for example, is far less than in other places in Europe. >They dont really check each individual contract. A "check" is vastly different that an approval, yeah? You could've easily found this information[1] yourself, as it's freely available on Migrationsverket's site. [0] - https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/Working-in-Sweden/Employed/If-you-are-in-Sweden/Visiting-an-employer.html https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/... [1] - https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Other-operators-English/Employers/Employing-people-from-non-EU-countries-/Work-permit-requirements.html https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Other-operators-Engl...
marcinzm 8y ago
The problem is that there's two very different things achieved by the H1B process: a) Getting talented entry-level employees who graduate from US schools to stay in the US b) Getting talented experienced employees to move to the US The H1B is actually rather bad for b) due to the long processing time (6 months) during which a candidate cannot work in the US and high chance of not winning the lottery. Revamping the O1 visa makes more sense for that case. So that leaves a) for which salary requirements based around experienced employees make little sense.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  > Revamping the O1 visa makes more sense for that case. Canada has a pretty sane skilled worker visa program that gives you points for academic achievement, proficiency in English, French, age and other factors. I see no reason the US couldn't have that. Having said that, factors that would increase the wish to move to the US would be things like universal healthcare, a sane schooling system (with less inequality between school districts, easy access to higher education), better lablr laws, and overall social security. Without that, I don't think it's that much attractive.
  - marcinzm 8y ago
    >Without that, I don't think it's that much attractive. Given that salaries can be something like 5x what you get in Europe for the same experience level with lower taxes there is a big reason. Probably even more compared to places outside of Europe. If you're working at a large tech company making good money then healthcare doesn't matter (since you got solid medical insurance), school district doesn't matter (since you can afford to live in the good district), labor laws don't matter (in fact their lack is probably why you're making 5x the money) and social security doesn't matter (that's what saving the decent chunk of money you make is for).
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      These are all things that don't matter to me - I was always under some sort of health insurance since before the day I was born and never seriously contemplated needing social security systems. Still, living in a society where everyone can enjoy that makes for a better living experience. Earning 5x what I would earn (which is not what I observe on my compensation level) does not compensate for knowing there are people who were driven out of their homes and now live in tent cities because I could pay more. In fact, I would not want to live in a society that encourages that and, most definitely, don't want to raise my kids to think that's normal, or desirable.

by yholio 8y ago

tejaswiy 8y ago

Needs to be adjusted for cost of living, salary changes over time by profession (Tech salaries are in a bubble rn. which makes 150k reasonable by bay area standards, but they may go significantly up / down in the future) which is complicated enough but there's edge cases like Universities / Non profits etc. that can't pay salaries to compete with the private sector but people work there anyway because of passion.

yholio 8y ago
I disagree, if you can find cheap programmers in Des Moines, Iowa, then by all means expand there, spread the love within the country before going for import labour. As for bubbles, that's the point, there shouldn't be any if labour is available and willing to come in.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zeckalpha 8y ago
  Or pay people in Des Moines $150k+
- tejaswiy 8y ago
  Most IT / h1 roles are not based out of the Bay Area [1]. Significant amounts of H1b population goes to doing cookie cutter consulting projects spread across the country and setting a 150k min on the wage means that you won't be able to hire H1s at all in other parts of the country. Obviously this creates a lot of demand for American programmers and personal experience suggests that this will cause a labor shortage. [1] https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=WS https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.as...
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    I think it’ll just be more likely that they’ll hire 5 30k offshore consultants instead of 1 local immigrant.
jmknoll 8y ago
That doesn’t seem too hard to solve. You just say that an h1-b job needs to be at the 85th percentile, salary-wise, in a basket of similar jobs by location/position.
- tejaswiy 8y ago
  That's what the regulations say right now - for each title, there's a prevailing wage level that DOL publishes and a H1 has to meet that wage level. It is however a single level across the country so it tends to be a bit on the lower side.
  - ojbyrne 8y ago
    Actually it isn’t. “The prevailing wage rate is defined as the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment.“ https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/pwscreens.cfm https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/pwscreens.cfm
chongli 8y ago
people work there anyway because of passion I don't think that's necessarily the case. A lot of people that work at a university do so because they're an international grad student who has no other way to stay in the country. They're barely scraping by, hoping they can finish and that an advanced degree will land them a job.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

baby 8y ago

This is such a one-sided point of view. Imagine that you're immigrating to a country, and after a few years you get fire, or you want to take a sabbatical, or you want to change industry for a lower paying job. Now under your rules you cannot do that. What do you do? You've created your life in the US, you have friends, perhaps a girlfriend, maybe even a house. Now you have to leave?

untog 8y ago
(I say this as someone who lived in the US on a visa for years) That's part of the deal. Any immigrant arriving on a visa knows what they've signed up for, and it doesn't involve taking a sabbatical. It also really should not involve buying a house, if you're being sensible. Being fired 100% sucks, but you can transfer an H1B to a new employer. H1B is at least a dual intent visa, so after some years you can apply for a green card, get one, then take all the sabbaticals you want. (Also, if your life is settled enough to have friends and a girlfriend you don't want to leave, US immigration does offer an answer: marry her!)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- htfy96 8y ago
  The real problem is the path from L1/OPT -> H1B -> green card is purely based on how many years you have worked in the US and performed as some kind of lottery. The transition may take at least 8 years, almost identical for highly-educated Top-N employees & questionably-legal "labors" from IT Consulting Companies (there are lots of fake identities/backgrounds in these companies' H1-B applications).
  - pertymcpert 8y ago
    Why would an L1 want to go to H1-B instead of going straight to green card?
    - airstrike 8y ago

geofft 8y ago

Here's a simpler proposal: anyone from anywhere can come here and take any job. If you leave your job, voluntarily or not, you have 90 days (up from the current grace period of 60 and strict rule of 0) to find another job. If you've been here for a few years you can apply for citizenship, independent of your employer. The primary objection to this is crowding out the labor market, to which I'd say: protectionism doesn't work. If there are people in another country willing to do the same job for cheaper, the invisible hand will figure out how to move the jobs there, perhaps through competition. Fighting the free market isn't going to work: figure out how to work within it. (For instance, offer a UBI for citizens only.)

SamReidHughes 8y ago
The primary objection to that idea is the complete destruction of your country's culture.
- geofft 8y ago
  Again, protectionism. If a billion people in India and a billion people in China are competing in global markets, my country's culture isn't going to survive anyway. How is Ottoman culture doing these days? Honestly, how is the British culture of even a century ago doing these days? How long did the Japanese culture so carefully preserved survive Matthew Perry's arrival? (Also as it happens I'm an American-born child of Indian immigrants, so I am actually a carrier of American culture and not Indian, so I have reason to question the implicit assumption that immigrants will destroy culture.)
  - fiblye 8y ago
    If you dig in, a lot of cultures have roots going back centuries. People might be wearing tshirts and jeans everywhere you go, but the way they handle family matters and daily routines is very different.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    You're a carrier of American culture (at least in some superficial way) because you grew up surrounded by Americans. If 500 million people moved here, they would not grow up surrounded by Americans.

smb06 8y ago

One big problem with restricting to salaries above 150k is that you’ve disqualified anyone who may be early in their career. Not many who are below a mid-level career role will get that kind of salary. What does that affect? All undergraduate students coming to the U.S. who spend $$$ on a 4 year college degree here and then try to find a job. You’ve just wiped that demographic out because they won’t get 150k salary. Why would they be inclined to come to the US and spend all that money on an education here? They won’t. And if the best talent doesn’t come here to compete intellectually with Americans in a classroom then Americans lose. H1Bs comprise a big chunk of people who come here, get an education here, prove their competence and make the American economy grow. You won’t get them to come here with a high salary cap like 150k.

briandear 8y ago
> You won’t get them to come here with a high salary cap like 150k. That's not the purpose of the H1B visa. The purpose is to fill shortage areas with temporary workers; it's not some kind of college recruitment program.
diogenescynic 8y ago
>What does that affect? All undergraduate students coming to the U.S. who spend $$$ on a 4 year college degree here and then try to find a job. That’s great... hire locals not foreigners just because they paid for a degree. I don’t care what they paid for. This is supposedly for specialized knowledge—-it shouldn’t be going to ANYONE entry level or undergrad...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

vowelless 8y ago

When I was on an h1b, I was making around 60k in the middle of the country, working for an amazing startup where we were ramen profitable. My skill set was highly specialized for the job. However, I couldn’t be a founder due to my visa status and we couldn’t pay each other even basic salaries. But we did some pretty amazing stuff for DARPA, DOD, and eventually some commercial enterprises. You would price out people like me and make it virtually impossible for me to become a citizen eventually. But maybe that is by design and I don’t mind that opinion. All countries have nativist subsets of society so it is just a normal, natural stance. Historically, america has attracted the best minds. Historically. But maybe now the populace believes the natives need to be protected from outside competition so that they can improve. Fair enough.

vinay427 8y ago
> ramen profitable Off topic, but I hadn't heard this expression before so I looked it up and stumbled upon an interesting Paul Graham blog post derived from it: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html Thanks for introducing me to a new phrase!
Ericson2314 8y ago
Yes there's nativism, but that's not the only thing here. In purely economic terms h1bn visa holders are potential employess that are extra attractive because they have less power; power they cannot get back and power other classes of residents cannot give up. This is classic artificially divide the market and race to the bottom. > You would price out people like me and make it virtually impossible for me to become a citizen eventually. > Historically, america has attracted the best minds. Historically. You are making the classic mistake of holding the macroeconomics constant. If we had sane immigration policies as proposed in this thread, the going rate might have been different. Maybe you have been payed more, matching the coasts. Maybe we all would have been paid less, matching you. Maybe the incumbents wouldn't have had a competitive advantage such that you all had to be underpaid to be even ramen profitable. The big point is given a skill set (projection of the labor market), residency status shouldn't be economically observable. Policy should be constrained to affecting the residency status distribution accross slices.

tziki 8y ago

That's a very IT/bay area specific view. You can be well respected with a long career in many industries and not make 150k.

topkai22 8y ago
Not really- the way H1-bs are sold the general public are that they are for “extremely hard to find” labor and requirements state you must look for us persons to fill your position before getting an H1-b visa to do so. $150k is at the 95th percentile of individual income for the entire US. I’d argue that if a company in any industry/profession isn’t upping their advertised pay to higher than what 1/20 us persons currently make, they aren’t trying sufficiently hard to attract a US person. I generally favor looser immigration in the US, but H1-Bs as written unduly benefit the sponsoring company at the expense of labor generally.
- tooltalk 8y ago
  Looks like the 95th percentile went up to $235K in 2017/2018. https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
  - tooltalk 8y ago
    my bad. $235K is the 95h percentile for household, not individual.
  - ojbyrne 8y ago
    The 2nd graph on that page shows the 95th percenctile as $153k. The calculator returns a similar result.

my_username_is_ 8y ago

I think there should be a monthly allocation of visas that can be issued, and companies are allowed to bid on the salary that they would pay the worker. Each month, the highest salaries get visas issued. If they don't bid enough, their candidate doesn't get in. If companies really need these specialists, they should pay them enough to secure a visa in a market-based system. I suspect this would create upward pressure on the salaries of these visa workers and prevent some of the abuse that we see today

Jare 8y ago
So pretty much only companies in Bay Area or a couple similarly high $ hubs, and candidates wanting to go there specifically. That intuitively feels like promoting an unhealthy environment (not because of Bay Area in particular, but because of promoting concentration).
- my_username_is_ 8y ago
  Yes, that is probably how it will play out. At least at first. But I think the side-effect of this is that other industries & locales would not get as many workers as they currently do, which would put upward pressure on wages in those areas. Compare this to the current system, where wages for lower paying jobs and areas are kept lower than they would otherwise be by adding worker supply through this visa program.

renholder 8y ago

>the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary Countries in Europe do precisely this but take it slightly further. Take Ireland[0] and Sweden[1], for prime examples. For those of you who don't want to read the links: The company has to have a minimum salary (oft above the standard cost of living) for the employee to obtain (and retain) the permit. (On an aside, in Sweden, they go a step further in that the contract must also be approved by the relevant union that company has agreements with.) [0] - https://dbei.gov.ie/en/What-We-Do/Workplace-and-Skills/Employment-Permits/Permit-Types/Critical-Skills-Employment-Permit/ https://dbei.gov.ie/en/What-We-Do/Workplace-and-Skills/Emplo... [1] - https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/Working-in-Sweden/Employed/Work-permit-requirements.html https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...

mclightning 8y ago
It is not really a specialist salary enforced in that law. I've been living in Sweden for 5 years now, as an immigrant, soon to be citizen. The required salary quota, which is 15.000 swedish krona per month, is less than half of an average developer salary. And that thing about union, is not as bureaucratic, as you make it sound. Company has to be part of a Union as a whole, to offer work-visa for immigrants. That's almost all there is to it. They dont really check each individual contract.
- renholder 8y ago
  (Jag tänka att du inte förstod min svar men jag ska skriver i engelska, så alla kan att läsa.) >It is not really a specialist salary enforced in that law. To which law do you refer? The minimum stated on the original page that I referred? You would be correct that it's not a specialist salary; however, to suggest that it simply does not exist would be fool-hearty. Migrationsverket has documentation specific to that[0]. >The required salary quota, which is 15.000 swedish krona per month, is less than half of an average developer salary. An average developer's salary, where? I can tell you that the average developer's salary in Östergötland, for example, is far less than in other places in Europe. >They dont really check each individual contract. A "check" is vastly different that an approval, yeah? You could've easily found this information[1] yourself, as it's freely available on Migrationsverket's site. [0] - https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/Working-in-Sweden/Employed/If-you-are-in-Sweden/Visiting-an-employer.html https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/... [1] - https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Other-operators-English/Employers/Employing-people-from-non-EU-countries-/Work-permit-requirements.html https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Other-operators-Engl...

marcinzm 8y ago

The problem is that there's two very different things achieved by the H1B process: a) Getting talented entry-level employees who graduate from US schools to stay in the US b) Getting talented experienced employees to move to the US The H1B is actually rather bad for b) due to the long processing time (6 months) during which a candidate cannot work in the US and high chance of not winning the lottery. Revamping the O1 visa makes more sense for that case. So that leaves a) for which salary requirements based around experienced employees make little sense.

rbanffy 8y ago
> Revamping the O1 visa makes more sense for that case. Canada has a pretty sane skilled worker visa program that gives you points for academic achievement, proficiency in English, French, age and other factors. I see no reason the US couldn't have that. Having said that, factors that would increase the wish to move to the US would be things like universal healthcare, a sane schooling system (with less inequality between school districts, easy access to higher education), better lablr laws, and overall social security. Without that, I don't think it's that much attractive.
- marcinzm 8y ago
  >Without that, I don't think it's that much attractive. Given that salaries can be something like 5x what you get in Europe for the same experience level with lower taxes there is a big reason. Probably even more compared to places outside of Europe. If you're working at a large tech company making good money then healthcare doesn't matter (since you got solid medical insurance), school district doesn't matter (since you can afford to live in the good district), labor laws don't matter (in fact their lack is probably why you're making 5x the money) and social security doesn't matter (that's what saving the decent chunk of money you make is for).
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    These are all things that don't matter to me - I was always under some sort of health insurance since before the day I was born and never seriously contemplated needing social security systems. Still, living in a society where everyone can enjoy that makes for a better living experience. Earning 5x what I would earn (which is not what I observe on my compensation level) does not compensate for knowing there are people who were driven out of their homes and now live in tent cities because I could pay more. In fact, I would not want to live in a society that encourages that and, most definitely, don't want to raise my kids to think that's normal, or desirable.