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I want a bidding system for the H1B slots, paid not just once, but yearly by the companies which hire the H1Bs. That money should then go for scholarships to ed

by jmpman 3y ago

I want a bidding system for the H1B slots, paid not just once, but yearly by the companies which hire the H1Bs. That money should then go for scholarships to educate American citizens for these jobs. It first allows American citizens to compete, as they would be cheaper than the H1B salary (market rate) + fee, and it would provide funding for scholarships in areas which apparently aren’t being supplied by US graduates. In addition, there should be a multiplier on that fee for any company which lays off US citizens with that skill in the past N years.

orochimaaru 3y ago
The H1B and EB green cards are already pretty expensive. I’m pretty sure the USCIS is using that money to subsidize its other activities. American university education is really expensive. I don’t think any amount of money from this is going to help subsidize that. I’m not sure why it is so expensive but charging more for h1b and green cards isn’t going to help that cause. Edit: I support the idea that the US workforce should be self sufficient and not rely on immigration. That has to come through reducing cost of higher education. I just don’t trust the uscis to give up their $$ in support of that cause.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nextaccountic 3y ago
This can only possibly work if education in US is made cheaper. Otherwise it's just free money to US universities, that are already swimming in money
ChadNauseam 3y ago
This is very similar to an idea proposed by the late economist William Vickrey. He suggested having an auction for visas, and distributing the revenue generated by the auction evenly between every citizen. This would somewhat align the incentives between citizens and immigrants without introducing feel-good steps like scholarship subsidies. Realistically, there's not very many Americans who could get become an engineer if only they had a little more scholarship money. Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer. If you have any empirical data that contradicts this I'd be interested in seeing it.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  Don't forget the other problem we're running out of labor in the US.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- asu_thomas 3y ago
  What kind of financial advice says to take out more loans to make long term investments when you're already deep in debt?
- jmpman 3y ago
  My one data point: I used to be an IT consultant in St Louis. St Louis is roughly half white and half black. The IT departments I worked with were roughly half white and half H1B Indian. The only black employees I saw were the security guards, or were from Africa or the Caribbean. I’m convinced that H1B provide a barrier to entry for Black Americans into the IT sector.
  - btilly 3y ago
    You may be convinced, but I'm convinced that the barrier to entry for black Americans is that they don't go to college, and if they do go to college, they don't go into STEM. So they're by and large not qualified to enter the sector. https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf It is easy to blame immigrants. But immigrants aren't involved in the bit where the disparity starts showing up in a big way.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Black Americans face systemic issues keeping them out of college. It's complicated and I salute all who even attempt it considering their starting points in life are so much worse.
      - btilly 3y ago
dragonwriter 3y ago
> I want a bidding system for the H1B slots, paid not just once, but yearly by the companies which hire the H1Bs I want to eliminate the H-1B (and some other non-immigrant economic visa categories, but the H-1B is the most salient) and instead allow would-be immigrants or temporary workers not admitted under any other visa category but not personally disqualified from entry to get an annually renewable paid self-sponsored work-eligible visa (with lower fees for those eligible but on a waitlist in an immigrant visa category) . If employers want to pay for the cost, they can, but the worker’s visa status won’t be dependent on them.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  Annually renewable would be borderline evil. For some reason, the US is incapable of renewing visas for people who are already in the country. You can renew status, but not visa. If you renew your status and want to travel internationally, you must get a new visa if you want to return. And, for unknown reasons, that can take a lot of time even in trivial cases. Such as when the applicant is already living and working legally in the US.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > If you renew your status and want to travel internationally, you must get a new visa if you want to return. And, for unknown reasons, that can take a lot of time even in trivial cases. If that's true, you couldn't visit your family back home? Personally, I have spent a lot of energy dealing with partially dysfunctional immigration system, I would not be willing to do that again
    - sveiss 3y ago
      You can visit home, but you might end up stuck there. Leaving the US as a non-immigrant always carries a small amount of risk: CBP can always decide to refuse your next admission, even with a visa. After the recent spate of tech layoffs some H1-B holders have been asked to show recent payslips at the border to prove their continued employment, for example. If you’re super unlucky (with your citizenship, or even just sharing a name with someone on a list) visa renewals can be delayed by months to years for security checks (“administrative processing”). There are also some green card routes which require a period where you simply can’t leave the US without abandoning your application, after which you’ll be refused entry as a non-immigrant and will need to do the entire multi-year immigrant visa process from your home company. H1-B holders avoid this, fortunately, but TN holders and tourists who get married and decide to stay can get caught out here. tl;dr: the US immigration system is actively user-hostile.
mavelikara 3y ago
FWIW, employers pay $750-1500 into The American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) fee when they apply for an H-1B.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Right, but if these people are skilled migrants working in in demand areas, that's 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less than an auction would raise.
  - mavelikara 3y ago
    People on H-1B do pay into programs like social security which they won’t be able to repatriate when they leave. Agree that an auction will raise more money. My point was that there is significant amount of money H-1B programs generate already.
    - orochimaaru 3y ago
      Social security and Medicare. H1b holders pay into both but are not eligible for either. They are not entitled to get it back even when they return to their country of citizenship. So yes - there’s a whole lot of $$ that are currently paid into by h1b holders.
laverya 3y ago
The payment should be by the employee, not the employer, but perhaps pre-tax. This way the difference between an H1B and a real citizen employee is transparent to the employer, and the employee can move between companies without issue (or even take time off work, as long as they still pay)
- jmpman 3y ago
  No. The employer should be required to pay market rate, plus whatever they bid on the slot. Now, you could convince me that the additional fee is evenly split between the employee and the employer. Any excess money the employee has is either spent in driving up the local rental market, enriching landlords, or sent back to their home country. Minimizing rental competition is in the best interest of US citizens. Minimizing exporting money is in the best interest of the US government.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    This won’t happen, that would not be a market equilibrium. What will happen is that the sun of fee and immigrant salary will match the non-immigrant salary.
- jcarrano 3y ago
  It makes no difference who pays, save for what you propose about free movement between companies. If it is paid by the employee, then companies would probably reimburse at least part of it. If it is paid by the company, it is already factored in the .salary amount. In the end, both employer and employee only care about the net amount the pay or get.
  - jmpman 3y ago
    Absolutely it does. Let’s say that the market rate for a job is $100k. The company, over time, has a bunch of “overpaid” senior employees making $200k. Now they want to lay off all their senior employees and replace them with H1B. Currently they must pay the H1B $100k. With the additional tax, they now must pay $100k + (tax) * (some multiplier due to laying off US employees), which could bring the cost of the H1B worker much closer to the US workers salary of $200k. Now let’s say that the H1B, when he receives his $100k salary, goes and rents an apartment. He pays $2000/month for the apartment and lives in a nice luxury rental, and the apartment complex has one less available unit and charges $2100/month to future renters. The H1B is sending $30k/year back home. Instead, let’s say the H1B must also pay a $40k tax/year from their $100k salary. Now the H1B isn’t renting a luxury rental. They’re sharing a bedroom in a house, and sending $5k/year back home. The luxury rental stays on the market longer, and the next renter pays $1900/month, instead of $2000/month. The key is that the H1Bs will take significantly lower than the “market” price which companies are being forced to pay. The companies are willing to pay significantly more than “market” price in order to displace their older workers. The claim for this system to work is that there aren’t enough US citizens to perform the work, and yet they’re laying off older US workers.
tonmoy 3y ago
A bidding system will help tech companies in California more preferentially than the agricultural engineering firm in Alabama. Is that better for the US? I’m not sure
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Yes. It will raise wages for everyone.
  - pif 3y ago
    And where will the money come from? I often hear requests for higher wages, but nobody ever volunteers to pay more to fund such wages.
    - linuxftw 3y ago
      Record corporate profits and executive compensation can be reduced to return value to the workers.
    - michaelt 3y ago
      No company would bid more than they can afford in an H1B auction. The amount they pay will be more than offset by the value generated by high skill of the highly skilled employees this gives them access to.
IMTDb 3y ago
> there should be a multiplier on that fee for any company which lays off US citizens with that skill in the past N years Under that proposal I would probably not hire a US citizen at all if a foreigner is available. Sure the foreigner might be more expensive (that is: if I am not reducing his salary to compensate for the H1B fee), but at least I don't have that Damocles sword hanging over my head. Especially if the firing happens in a time of hardship when my finances are already strained, that could be the straw that breaks the camel back.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  H1B minimum pay is supposed to ensure it is for highly paid and highly skilled workers. Not something to be exploited to suppress wages or keep employees hostage.
  - jmpman 3y ago
    And yet you regularly see companies laying off their more senior employees in favor of H1B either directly or through hiring TCS or Infosys to bring in an army of H1Bs.
    - orochimaaru 3y ago
      If you have noticed, that army of h1b has whittled of late. Most of the firms will hire us citizens and perm residents locally but provide liberal work visas in Canada where it is a lot easier. So I don’t think the army of h1b is the same size as before. It’s most likely in Canada. A lot of firms also hire direct in India. Accenture or ibm will have a token representative in the us with a majority of the worker bees in India. I think singling out Tcs or infosys is a bit of a dog whistle. The biggest offenders are American consulting companies.
jcarrano 3y ago
You are proposing a mechanism for determining the price but not the quantity. And, since the quantity can be arbitrary, then, thought bidding, so can the price (within limits). Furthermore, if the H1B is causing a cost/loss to someone, then the money should go to these people. You can argue that the H1B is harming local workers, but it cannot possibly be harming future/potential workers to which you propose to give the scholarship.
treis 3y ago
They already do (or did) this. It's how I got into programming. Company got a grant and put together a training program.
Gareth321 3y ago
Eric Weinstein proposed something similar back in 2004 (https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/j.1564-913x.2002.tb00238.x https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/j.1564-913x.2002.tb00238.x). A kind of "migrant dividend." It would align all kinds of currently misaligned economic incentives. No economic policy is costless. Least not migration. Unfortunately most of the costs of high migration are borne by the poor, and most of the benefits are borne by the rich. A migrant dividend would go a LONG way to better distribute the benefits and compensate the poor for downward pressure on wages and working conditions. These dividends would demand employers think long and hard about their real need to employ foreign labour. I suspect they're perfectly capable of finding skilled labour locally. They just want to cut labour costs by hiring H1Bs. The dividends could be used for a raft of things, including what you've suggested. Alternatively, it could simply be divided by every person in the country and evenly distributed. Dividends, as they offer in Alaska, are very politically popular, and stand a good chance of being legislatively approved.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > No economic policy is costless. Least not migration As with all of these discussions: what costs? And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce?
  - Gareth321 3y ago
    > As with all of these discussions: what costs? I'll use one of the most cited papers on migration (https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739100 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739100) (part of the text here: https://www.oecd.org/els/38195773.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/38195773.pdf). It's a longitudinal study on Denmark during the period of 1991-2008, exploring the results of a wave of new refugees in the country. The tl;dr is that low-skilled natives were effectively pushed out of their previous employment. They could not, or would not, compete with the migrants owing to ostensibly lower wages and worse working conditions. Instead, they leveraged Denmark's generous free education system, and earned degrees. This afforded them higher wages over a long period of time. So, one of the costs of high migration - particularly low-skilled migration - is that the poorest lose their jobs, or earn less, or have to work in worse conditions. If you live in a country without free university education, these people will have to contend with a permanent quality of life downgrade. Then there is housing. The West has experienced enormous pressure on rental and home prices over the last couple of decades. Part of the reason for this is high migration. People need to live somewhere. In many places, for various reasons, production has not kept up. This means locals are forced to pay more for accommodation. This, once again, disproportionately impacts the poor. I also cite demand for social services and infrastructure, which also appears to be failing to expand at sufficient pace in many nations. > And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce? Your question implies no distinction between locals and immigrants. That is clearly incorrect. A nation exists to protect the wellbeing of its citizens, not citizens of other nations.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
It really isn’t hard to move those tech jobs abroad and then have Americans go to India or China instead on working visas (eg a Chinese Z visa I had for 9 years). The USA is maintaining some kind of balance with their H1 program: enough to encourage keeping those jobs in the USA, but not enough to be a free for all for immigration. It isn’t doing really good at that, but an overly punitive H1B program will simply cause those jobs to switch to other countries.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > It really isn’t hard to move those tech jobs abroad It isn't? They've been trying their hardest since the late 90's, and have never been able to make it work. They'd love to pay $1.00/hour for programming work in Bangladesh like they do for textile manufacturing, but as of a quarter-way through the 21st century, they haven't been able to.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    It isn’t. There is a cost, it doesn’t make sense right now to pay those costs beyond a few R&D centers. But make work visas harder to get in the USA, then it will make sense to do more R&and abroad.
- throwaway_62022 3y ago
  Yep. Since OP mentions working as IT consultant, I can easily see how that field being dominated by IT shops that merely checkbox one or more of H1B critireas. I can see how his/her perspective is colored. But if you make visa program too punitive, then folks will simply chose not to come. A person in their 30-40s, want stability so as they can raise their kids, have a place to call home and not be on a perpetual cycle of anxiety. In my mind, this will disincentivize folks who have most to contribute to US economy. I don't know much about China but for folks who are really good, salaries in India is already pretty high and closer to US salaries and will have fewer reasons to immigrate.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
shortrounddev2 3y ago
I say we should have open borders
davidw 3y ago
> the H1B slots The number of slots feels extremely arbitrary to me. Is it based on anything remotely 'real'? As in statistics or other hard numbers? Or is it some 'magic number' that Congress handed down at some point?
lumost 3y ago
The US immigration system for skilled labor is fundamentally broken. We give out student visas openly, incentivizing universities to bring on large numbers of international students at full rate vs. discounted local students. We then do not provide immigration visas to these same students, leading to them being deported some years into the professional workforce. This is a recipe to create a skilled labor shortage.
- rmah 3y ago
  In fairness, that system wasn't designed to increase the # of skilled workers in the US, it was designed to propagate and spread "American values" overseas. A half century ago, the idea was that you bring a lot of the best and brightest of poorer foreign nations to the US for a university education. Then they return to their home nation and eventually work their way up to positions of power. Hopefully, their positive view of the USA will influence their decision making. In addition, many will have maintained contacts they made during their school years. It's not a crazy tactic given that the cost was mostly borne by the foreigners.
  - rexpop 3y ago
    Do you have any sources for your assertions?
mlboss 3y ago
This might be controversial but I think the situation cannot be changed with scholarships. Somebody with the will can do courses in community college and become employable. The way to solve is by more parental guidance. American parents usually leave everything to the kids to decide. STEM courses are hard. Asian parents push their kids to take difficult subjects even if the kids resist.
sharemywin 3y ago
You might as well just send the money to the universities directly. The universities don't take the extra money and hire more professors to fill the supply they divert the money to non-education activities. College isn't even about education anyway it's some weird social signaling game where the more people with a badge(diploma) the less the value of the badge.
abhinai 3y ago
I came to the US on an H1B. I worked at Microsoft and Facebook. Then I started a company funded by YCombinator. It is now a unicorn and has created hundreds of jobs. This country treats immigrants unfairly but even that poor treatment represents more opportunities for them than elsewhere. So they put up with it. But that won’t always be the case and it’s already very different than when I came here. Not sure I’d decide to immigrate to US if I were starting today, knowing what I know now.
- dgs_sgd 3y ago
  what has changed that would make you less likely to immigrate today?
  - abhinai 3y ago
    A lot. Pandemic accelerated globalization. Availability of VC money used to be exclusively American but is now global.
  - throwax 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    the key part is 'knowing what I know now' I migrated, not to US, and my brother stayed. We work in the same industry, and has 2x my quality of life with 60% of the income. Peope who immigrate on these visas are typically not lower class in their home societies, they are usually upper-middle class. And usually you wnd up just in the middle class in the west. And standarss of living for middle class have beeen declining for the past 10 years or so, while developing nations are developing. There is also cost to immigration - losijg contact with family, expense and stress of applying for visas, etc. You wouldn't make the jump for like 10% improvement, the QoL improvement has to be at least 50% for it to be worthwhile.
    - abhinai 3y ago
      Giving up comforts of home is not easy and there has to be a 2X improvement in QoL for the move to be justified. And I’m not sure there is any improvement in QoL honestly. You get some you lose some. It’s more or less an even trade at this point.

by jmpman 3y ago

orochimaaru 3y ago

The H1B and EB green cards are already pretty expensive. I’m pretty sure the USCIS is using that money to subsidize its other activities. American university education is really expensive. I don’t think any amount of money from this is going to help subsidize that. I’m not sure why it is so expensive but charging more for h1b and green cards isn’t going to help that cause. Edit: I support the idea that the US workforce should be self sufficient and not rely on immigration. That has to come through reducing cost of higher education. I just don’t trust the uscis to give up their $$ in support of that cause.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nextaccountic 3y ago

This can only possibly work if education in US is made cheaper. Otherwise it's just free money to US universities, that are already swimming in money

ChadNauseam 3y ago

This is very similar to an idea proposed by the late economist William Vickrey. He suggested having an auction for visas, and distributing the revenue generated by the auction evenly between every citizen. This would somewhat align the incentives between citizens and immigrants without introducing feel-good steps like scholarship subsidies. Realistically, there's not very many Americans who could get become an engineer if only they had a little more scholarship money. Those Americans can mostly get loans to pay for college, then pay off their loans using all the extra money they make now that they're an engineer. If you have any empirical data that contradicts this I'd be interested in seeing it.

sharemywin 3y ago
Don't forget the other problem we're running out of labor in the US.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
asu_thomas 3y ago
What kind of financial advice says to take out more loans to make long term investments when you're already deep in debt?
jmpman 3y ago
My one data point: I used to be an IT consultant in St Louis. St Louis is roughly half white and half black. The IT departments I worked with were roughly half white and half H1B Indian. The only black employees I saw were the security guards, or were from Africa or the Caribbean. I’m convinced that H1B provide a barrier to entry for Black Americans into the IT sector.
- btilly 3y ago
  You may be convinced, but I'm convinced that the barrier to entry for black Americans is that they don't go to college, and if they do go to college, they don't go into STEM. So they're by and large not qualified to enter the sector. https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf https://dhewd.mo.gov/documents/EquityReport2020.pdf It is easy to blame immigrants. But immigrants aren't involved in the bit where the disparity starts showing up in a big way.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Black Americans face systemic issues keeping them out of college. It's complicated and I salute all who even attempt it considering their starting points in life are so much worse.
    - btilly 3y ago

dragonwriter 3y ago

> I want a bidding system for the H1B slots, paid not just once, but yearly by the companies which hire the H1Bs I want to eliminate the H-1B (and some other non-immigrant economic visa categories, but the H-1B is the most salient) and instead allow would-be immigrants or temporary workers not admitted under any other visa category but not personally disqualified from entry to get an annually renewable paid self-sponsored work-eligible visa (with lower fees for those eligible but on a waitlist in an immigrant visa category) . If employers want to pay for the cost, they can, but the worker’s visa status won’t be dependent on them.

jltsiren 3y ago
Annually renewable would be borderline evil. For some reason, the US is incapable of renewing visas for people who are already in the country. You can renew status, but not visa. If you renew your status and want to travel internationally, you must get a new visa if you want to return. And, for unknown reasons, that can take a lot of time even in trivial cases. Such as when the applicant is already living and working legally in the US.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > If you renew your status and want to travel internationally, you must get a new visa if you want to return. And, for unknown reasons, that can take a lot of time even in trivial cases. If that's true, you couldn't visit your family back home? Personally, I have spent a lot of energy dealing with partially dysfunctional immigration system, I would not be willing to do that again
  - sveiss 3y ago
    You can visit home, but you might end up stuck there. Leaving the US as a non-immigrant always carries a small amount of risk: CBP can always decide to refuse your next admission, even with a visa. After the recent spate of tech layoffs some H1-B holders have been asked to show recent payslips at the border to prove their continued employment, for example. If you’re super unlucky (with your citizenship, or even just sharing a name with someone on a list) visa renewals can be delayed by months to years for security checks (“administrative processing”). There are also some green card routes which require a period where you simply can’t leave the US without abandoning your application, after which you’ll be refused entry as a non-immigrant and will need to do the entire multi-year immigrant visa process from your home company. H1-B holders avoid this, fortunately, but TN holders and tourists who get married and decide to stay can get caught out here. tl;dr: the US immigration system is actively user-hostile.

mavelikara 3y ago

FWIW, employers pay $750-1500 into The American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) fee when they apply for an H-1B.

michaelt 3y ago
Right, but if these people are skilled migrants working in in demand areas, that's 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less than an auction would raise.
- mavelikara 3y ago
  People on H-1B do pay into programs like social security which they won’t be able to repatriate when they leave. Agree that an auction will raise more money. My point was that there is significant amount of money H-1B programs generate already.
  - orochimaaru 3y ago
    Social security and Medicare. H1b holders pay into both but are not eligible for either. They are not entitled to get it back even when they return to their country of citizenship. So yes - there’s a whole lot of $$ that are currently paid into by h1b holders.

laverya 3y ago

The payment should be by the employee, not the employer, but perhaps pre-tax. This way the difference between an H1B and a real citizen employee is transparent to the employer, and the employee can move between companies without issue (or even take time off work, as long as they still pay)

jmpman 3y ago
No. The employer should be required to pay market rate, plus whatever they bid on the slot. Now, you could convince me that the additional fee is evenly split between the employee and the employer. Any excess money the employee has is either spent in driving up the local rental market, enriching landlords, or sent back to their home country. Minimizing rental competition is in the best interest of US citizens. Minimizing exporting money is in the best interest of the US government.
- konschubert 3y ago
  This won’t happen, that would not be a market equilibrium. What will happen is that the sun of fee and immigrant salary will match the non-immigrant salary.
jcarrano 3y ago
It makes no difference who pays, save for what you propose about free movement between companies. If it is paid by the employee, then companies would probably reimburse at least part of it. If it is paid by the company, it is already factored in the .salary amount. In the end, both employer and employee only care about the net amount the pay or get.
- jmpman 3y ago
  Absolutely it does. Let’s say that the market rate for a job is $100k. The company, over time, has a bunch of “overpaid” senior employees making $200k. Now they want to lay off all their senior employees and replace them with H1B. Currently they must pay the H1B $100k. With the additional tax, they now must pay $100k + (tax) * (some multiplier due to laying off US employees), which could bring the cost of the H1B worker much closer to the US workers salary of $200k. Now let’s say that the H1B, when he receives his $100k salary, goes and rents an apartment. He pays $2000/month for the apartment and lives in a nice luxury rental, and the apartment complex has one less available unit and charges $2100/month to future renters. The H1B is sending $30k/year back home. Instead, let’s say the H1B must also pay a $40k tax/year from their $100k salary. Now the H1B isn’t renting a luxury rental. They’re sharing a bedroom in a house, and sending $5k/year back home. The luxury rental stays on the market longer, and the next renter pays $1900/month, instead of $2000/month. The key is that the H1Bs will take significantly lower than the “market” price which companies are being forced to pay. The companies are willing to pay significantly more than “market” price in order to displace their older workers. The claim for this system to work is that there aren’t enough US citizens to perform the work, and yet they’re laying off older US workers.

tonmoy 3y ago

A bidding system will help tech companies in California more preferentially than the agricultural engineering firm in Alabama. Is that better for the US? I’m not sure

linuxftw 3y ago
Yes. It will raise wages for everyone.
- pif 3y ago
  And where will the money come from? I often hear requests for higher wages, but nobody ever volunteers to pay more to fund such wages.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    Record corporate profits and executive compensation can be reduced to return value to the workers.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    No company would bid more than they can afford in an H1B auction. The amount they pay will be more than offset by the value generated by high skill of the highly skilled employees this gives them access to.

IMTDb 3y ago

> there should be a multiplier on that fee for any company which lays off US citizens with that skill in the past N years Under that proposal I would probably not hire a US citizen at all if a foreigner is available. Sure the foreigner might be more expensive (that is: if I am not reducing his salary to compensate for the H1B fee), but at least I don't have that Damocles sword hanging over my head. Especially if the firing happens in a time of hardship when my finances are already strained, that could be the straw that breaks the camel back.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
H1B minimum pay is supposed to ensure it is for highly paid and highly skilled workers. Not something to be exploited to suppress wages or keep employees hostage.
- jmpman 3y ago
  And yet you regularly see companies laying off their more senior employees in favor of H1B either directly or through hiring TCS or Infosys to bring in an army of H1Bs.
  - orochimaaru 3y ago
    If you have noticed, that army of h1b has whittled of late. Most of the firms will hire us citizens and perm residents locally but provide liberal work visas in Canada where it is a lot easier. So I don’t think the army of h1b is the same size as before. It’s most likely in Canada. A lot of firms also hire direct in India. Accenture or ibm will have a token representative in the us with a majority of the worker bees in India. I think singling out Tcs or infosys is a bit of a dog whistle. The biggest offenders are American consulting companies.

jcarrano 3y ago

You are proposing a mechanism for determining the price but not the quantity. And, since the quantity can be arbitrary, then, thought bidding, so can the price (within limits). Furthermore, if the H1B is causing a cost/loss to someone, then the money should go to these people. You can argue that the H1B is harming local workers, but it cannot possibly be harming future/potential workers to which you propose to give the scholarship.

treis 3y ago

They already do (or did) this. It's how I got into programming. Company got a grant and put together a training program.

Gareth321 3y ago

Eric Weinstein proposed something similar back in 2004 (https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/j.1564-913x.2002.tb00238.x https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/j.1564-913x.2002.tb00238.x). A kind of "migrant dividend." It would align all kinds of currently misaligned economic incentives. No economic policy is costless. Least not migration. Unfortunately most of the costs of high migration are borne by the poor, and most of the benefits are borne by the rich. A migrant dividend would go a LONG way to better distribute the benefits and compensate the poor for downward pressure on wages and working conditions. These dividends would demand employers think long and hard about their real need to employ foreign labour. I suspect they're perfectly capable of finding skilled labour locally. They just want to cut labour costs by hiring H1Bs. The dividends could be used for a raft of things, including what you've suggested. Alternatively, it could simply be divided by every person in the country and evenly distributed. Dividends, as they offer in Alaska, are very politically popular, and stand a good chance of being legislatively approved.

pjc50 3y ago
> No economic policy is costless. Least not migration As with all of these discussions: what costs? And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce?
- Gareth321 3y ago
  > As with all of these discussions: what costs? I'll use one of the most cited papers on migration (https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739100 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739100) (part of the text here: https://www.oecd.org/els/38195773.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/38195773.pdf). It's a longitudinal study on Denmark during the period of 1991-2008, exploring the results of a wave of new refugees in the country. The tl;dr is that low-skilled natives were effectively pushed out of their previous employment. They could not, or would not, compete with the migrants owing to ostensibly lower wages and worse working conditions. Instead, they leveraged Denmark's generous free education system, and earned degrees. This afforded them higher wages over a long period of time. So, one of the costs of high migration - particularly low-skilled migration - is that the poorest lose their jobs, or earn less, or have to work in worse conditions. If you live in a country without free university education, these people will have to contend with a permanent quality of life downgrade. Then there is housing. The West has experienced enormous pressure on rental and home prices over the last couple of decades. Part of the reason for this is high migration. People need to live somewhere. In many places, for various reasons, production has not kept up. This means locals are forced to pay more for accommodation. This, once again, disproportionately impacts the poor. I also cite demand for social services and infrastructure, which also appears to be failing to expand at sufficient pace in many nations. > And how does this differ from the costs of children being born and coming of age into the workforce? Should we in fact be enforcing birth, schooling and university quotas to limit the rate at which new humans can enter the skilled workforce? Your question implies no distinction between locals and immigrants. That is clearly incorrect. A nation exists to protect the wellbeing of its citizens, not citizens of other nations.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

It really isn’t hard to move those tech jobs abroad and then have Americans go to India or China instead on working visas (eg a Chinese Z visa I had for 9 years). The USA is maintaining some kind of balance with their H1 program: enough to encourage keeping those jobs in the USA, but not enough to be a free for all for immigration. It isn’t doing really good at that, but an overly punitive H1B program will simply cause those jobs to switch to other countries.

commandlinefan 3y ago
> It really isn’t hard to move those tech jobs abroad It isn't? They've been trying their hardest since the late 90's, and have never been able to make it work. They'd love to pay $1.00/hour for programming work in Bangladesh like they do for textile manufacturing, but as of a quarter-way through the 21st century, they haven't been able to.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  It isn’t. There is a cost, it doesn’t make sense right now to pay those costs beyond a few R&D centers. But make work visas harder to get in the USA, then it will make sense to do more R&and abroad.
throwaway_62022 3y ago
Yep. Since OP mentions working as IT consultant, I can easily see how that field being dominated by IT shops that merely checkbox one or more of H1B critireas. I can see how his/her perspective is colored. But if you make visa program too punitive, then folks will simply chose not to come. A person in their 30-40s, want stability so as they can raise their kids, have a place to call home and not be on a perpetual cycle of anxiety. In my mind, this will disincentivize folks who have most to contribute to US economy. I don't know much about China but for folks who are really good, salaries in India is already pretty high and closer to US salaries and will have fewer reasons to immigrate.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago

shortrounddev2 3y ago

I say we should have open borders

davidw 3y ago

> the H1B slots The number of slots feels extremely arbitrary to me. Is it based on anything remotely 'real'? As in statistics or other hard numbers? Or is it some 'magic number' that Congress handed down at some point?

lumost 3y ago

The US immigration system for skilled labor is fundamentally broken. We give out student visas openly, incentivizing universities to bring on large numbers of international students at full rate vs. discounted local students. We then do not provide immigration visas to these same students, leading to them being deported some years into the professional workforce. This is a recipe to create a skilled labor shortage.

rmah 3y ago
In fairness, that system wasn't designed to increase the # of skilled workers in the US, it was designed to propagate and spread "American values" overseas. A half century ago, the idea was that you bring a lot of the best and brightest of poorer foreign nations to the US for a university education. Then they return to their home nation and eventually work their way up to positions of power. Hopefully, their positive view of the USA will influence their decision making. In addition, many will have maintained contacts they made during their school years. It's not a crazy tactic given that the cost was mostly borne by the foreigners.
- rexpop 3y ago
  Do you have any sources for your assertions?

mlboss 3y ago

This might be controversial but I think the situation cannot be changed with scholarships. Somebody with the will can do courses in community college and become employable. The way to solve is by more parental guidance. American parents usually leave everything to the kids to decide. STEM courses are hard. Asian parents push their kids to take difficult subjects even if the kids resist.

sharemywin 3y ago

You might as well just send the money to the universities directly. The universities don't take the extra money and hire more professors to fill the supply they divert the money to non-education activities. College isn't even about education anyway it's some weird social signaling game where the more people with a badge(diploma) the less the value of the badge.

abhinai 3y ago

I came to the US on an H1B. I worked at Microsoft and Facebook. Then I started a company funded by YCombinator. It is now a unicorn and has created hundreds of jobs. This country treats immigrants unfairly but even that poor treatment represents more opportunities for them than elsewhere. So they put up with it. But that won’t always be the case and it’s already very different than when I came here. Not sure I’d decide to immigrate to US if I were starting today, knowing what I know now.

dgs_sgd 3y ago
what has changed that would make you less likely to immigrate today?
- abhinai 3y ago
  A lot. Pandemic accelerated globalization. Availability of VC money used to be exclusively American but is now global.
- throwax 3y ago
  [flagged]
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  the key part is 'knowing what I know now' I migrated, not to US, and my brother stayed. We work in the same industry, and has 2x my quality of life with 60% of the income. Peope who immigrate on these visas are typically not lower class in their home societies, they are usually upper-middle class. And usually you wnd up just in the middle class in the west. And standarss of living for middle class have beeen declining for the past 10 years or so, while developing nations are developing. There is also cost to immigration - losijg contact with family, expense and stress of applying for visas, etc. You wouldn't make the jump for like 10% improvement, the QoL improvement has to be at least 50% for it to be worthwhile.
  - abhinai 3y ago
    Giving up comforts of home is not easy and there has to be a 2X improvement in QoL for the move to be justified. And I’m not sure there is any improvement in QoL honestly. You get some you lose some. It’s more or less an even trade at this point.