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For "exceptional" people, there's the O-1 visa category. But candidate no. 1 likely would not qualify. You seem to think that the H1 program should place candi

by rmk 6y ago

For "exceptional" people, there's the O-1 visa category. But candidate no. 1 likely would not qualify. You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2. Let me give you a counterexample: Suppose you are hiring candidate 1 to write an app that will help you single men find hot women to date in a 5 mile radius in your 4-billion dollar, VC-backed startup. The second candidate is being hired into the body shop that has been contracted to develop a UI for a CAT scan machine produced by a major healthcare company. Now tell me who should be preferred. It's possible to make many value judgments like you and I have done, but at the end of the day they can't all be incorporated into the immigration law. Making the market the arbiter of what's valuable appears to me to be the least bad option, and strengthening that is the best, given the constraints. It still won't make the law conform to everyone's tastes, though.

alixander 6y ago
The scenarios you’ve posed doesn’t make candidate 2 any less replaceable. Maybe candidate 1 is needed for whatever advanced AI the dating app uses, but there’s many non-foreign options for the function candidate 2 is performing at ImportantCorp.
- lonesword 6y ago
  Yes, I think what the parent comment intended to say was that the UI for the CT scan machine is more valuable for the society (and hence candidate 2 should be given preference) than the fancy AI algorithm that goes into the dating app, even if it would actually take an ETH grad to come up with it. Yes, super subjective, but that's the point - it would be difficult to account for these things in the law.
nullc 6y ago
> You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2. The bodyshop spams the program with a zillion and one replaceable cogs (from the perspectie of the bodyshop). So if you compare C1 with all of the alternative C2 options submitted by the bodyshop, the C2 selection is many times (even hundreds of times!) more likely to get picked.

by rmk 6y ago

alixander 6y ago

The scenarios you’ve posed doesn’t make candidate 2 any less replaceable. Maybe candidate 1 is needed for whatever advanced AI the dating app uses, but there’s many non-foreign options for the function candidate 2 is performing at ImportantCorp.

lonesword 6y ago
Yes, I think what the parent comment intended to say was that the UI for the CT scan machine is more valuable for the society (and hence candidate 2 should be given preference) than the fancy AI algorithm that goes into the dating app, even if it would actually take an ETH grad to come up with it. Yes, super subjective, but that's the point - it would be difficult to account for these things in the law.

nullc 6y ago

> You seem to think that the H1 program should place candidate 1 over candidate 2. The bodyshop spams the program with a zillion and one replaceable cogs (from the perspectie of the bodyshop). So if you compare C1 with all of the alternative C2 options submitted by the bodyshop, the C2 selection is many times (even hundreds of times!) more likely to get picked.