4 ms·

Since H-1B says it is supposedly intended for high-value employees unobtainable in the US, why not auction the visas, with a reserve price that would prevent th

by Zigurd 3y ago

Since H-1B says it is supposedly intended for high-value employees unobtainable in the US, why not auction the visas, with a reserve price that would prevent them being used to push down wages?

rayiner 3y ago
Because the system is really intended to drive down skilled worker wages and subsidize American universities that essentially sell American permanent residency to full-tuition paying foreign students.
- lgleason 3y ago
  this ^^^
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
shagie 3y ago
Not "high value", but rather "high skill". Some examples of occupations that need a professional degree in order to be filled. Information Technology Software engineers Database administrators Teachers Primary Secondary University Health care professionals Physicians Nurses Dentists Psychologists Engineers Civil Chemical Mechanical Industrial Surveyors ... and Fashion models With an auction approach, would the software engineers completely at big tech companies (or consultancies capable of demanding big tech compensation) continue to be able to drown out the other professions? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=central+consolidated+school+district&job=&city=&year=2023 https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=central+consolidated+schoo... https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=emory+healthcare+inc&job=&city=&year=2023 https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=emory+healthcare+inc&job=&... The visa lottery makes it difficult to reliably get H1B visa teachers. H1B visa abuse makes it even more difficult. An auction would make the H1B visa program into a "visa for software developers where consultancies charge high prices to win auctions and pay their employees little."
- freeone3000 3y ago
  It might be my naiveity, but, shouldn’t highly-skilled and in-demand professions be the highly valued ones? Something’s gone terribly wrong if there’s few teachers, it’s hard to get new teachers, but the price of teachers remains the same. It makes no sense from a labor standpoint.
  - shagie 3y ago
    Compensation is often coupled with revenue generation - not skills. Teachers generate no revenue. Compare the compensation for big tech software developers vs those employed directly in public sector. Its not that public sector are less skilled, nor less in demand - but rather public sector doesn't generate revenue and its budget is a different path. I would contend that this isn't "teachers and public sector software developers are necessarily poorly compensated" (though I will say that teachers should be paid more) but rather that the revenue that is coupled with a software developer in the private sector is disproportionately high and so companies in that domain can compensate more highly. The control of teachers salaries are based on what funding the school district gets which comes from taxes. The public tends to prefer low taxes and models which do not allow tax dollars collected in one spot to be used in another which depresses the compensation for everyone in public sector (including teachers). Unless you are at or near the top and have control of the budgeting, rarely will public sector pay on the same scale as private sector.
  - weberer 3y ago
    >Something’s gone terribly wrong if there’s few teachers, it’s hard to get new teachers, but the price of teachers remains the same. It makes no sense from a labor standpoint. Its because the state has a near monopoly on hiring teachers, so they can keep wages artificially low.
    - shagie 3y ago
      The school has a budget that comes from property taxes (in most cases) that people tend to be resistant to raise. Let's double the teachers' wages, but first you need to double the budget, and for that, need to first double the local property taxes. Put doubling the property taxes on the next ballot and see if that passes. If not, there is no money to raise the wages for teachers. Where wages can go up is when teachers move from a cost center to a profit center ... such as with a private school, though that is still limited by the amount that people are willing to pay to go there. A local private high school (midwest - median household income is $75,000) is $16,000 per year with enrollment of about 500 students. You have $8M to use. There are 100 people on staff (this includes grounds and maintenance). Let's apply a broad stroke and say that this is 75 teachers and 25 kitchen, maintenance, grounds, and secretarial jobs. Pretending that all other expenses are $0 and that the non teaching staff is $0 also... $8M into 75 is $106k. That places an upper bound on the amount that teachers make there ... unless we raise that $16,000 tuition or find other revenue sources.
citrin_ru 3y ago
A counter argument I've seen - with auction only IT companies will be able to hire H-1B workers and other industries like healthcare and pharma and even chip production will be out-priced. Different industries have different level of salaries. $200k/y salary may suppress SDE wages in Silicon Valley but it is well above market rate for an electrical or a chemical engineer.
- kjksf 3y ago
  It's only a counter argument if you make an assumption that H1-B program is designed to bring, specifically, healthcare or pharma workers. Unless you can point to a reason why law of supply and demand was breached, high salaries reflect high demand vs. low supply and low salaries reflect low demand vs. high supply. My understanding is that healthcare and pharma are not exactly poor industries so if they don't pay their highly skilled workers a lot of money, the most likely explanation is that there's abundance of those workers. What follows from that is that we don't need to import them from abroad. And that logic generalizes to all industries hence it really is that simple as letting in those who can score the highest salaries. It aligns the interests of U.S. in general (highly paid workers put way more into taxes than they get back in benefits) with the interests of the companies. It's hard to game, simple to apply and trivial to verify (once you issue SSN you check with IRS once a year if they are really paid what the company said it will pay). And if companies try some fraud they are now in the business of tax fraud. It boggles the mind that this is not a rule applied by all governments in the world. Unless, of course, you understand that government is not exactly pre-occupied with doing the best thing for the country but with doing the best thing for themselves. All those speeches you can give, on both sides, about immigration!
  - shagie 3y ago
    > It's hard to game, simple to apply and trivial to verify (once you issue SSN you check with IRS once a year if they are really paid what the company said it will pay). And if companies try some fraud they are now in the business of tax fraud. This is one of the areas where it may be easier to game - at least until the people committing the fraud have gained a bit, shut down the business, and moved on (at least for the smaller instances - larger consultancies would have more difficulty but they game in other ways). Government agencies are notoriously siloed and often have laws preventing all but the most limited data exchange between agencies. Consider https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/03/student-aid-tool-held-key-for-tax-fraudsters/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/03/student-aid-tool-held-ke... The IRS Data Retrieval Tool isn't "send data from IRS to DoEd" but rather "send data to the individual who then sends it to DoEd". The exchange of data between agencies is specified in Information Exchange Agreement https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/information-systems/privacy/data-sharing-agreements https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/information-systems/privacy/da... https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/documents/IEA(F)%20State%20Agency%20Level.pdf https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/documents/IEA(F)%20State%20... https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-policy/tax-information-exchange-agreements-tieas https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-policy/tax-infor... https://www.hhs.gov/guidance/sites/default/files/hhs-guidance-documents/issuer%20iea%20for%20pbp_1.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/guidance/sites/default/files/hhs-guidanc... The referenced privacy act: https://home.treasury.gov/footer/privacy-act https://home.treasury.gov/footer/privacy-act This leads to it being easier for each department to establish its own set of data (so it doesn't need to go through the difficulty of having an IEA with all of that additional bureaucracy and since there's more than enough work for for underfunded agencies working with data that you don't have gets deprioritized) ... and such fraud is likely easier to do or takes many years to raise up enough discrepancies to merit further investigation by qualified investigators.

by Zigurd 3y ago

Since H-1B says it is supposedly intended for high-value employees unobtainable in the US, why not auction the visas, with a reserve price that would prevent them being used to push down wages?

rayiner 3y ago

Because the system is really intended to drive down skilled worker wages and subsidize American universities that essentially sell American permanent residency to full-tuition paying foreign students.

lgleason 3y ago
this ^^^
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

shagie 3y ago

Not "high value", but rather "high skill". Some examples of occupations that need a professional degree in order to be filled. Information Technology Software engineers Database administrators Teachers Primary Secondary University Health care professionals Physicians Nurses Dentists Psychologists Engineers Civil Chemical Mechanical Industrial Surveyors ... and Fashion models With an auction approach, would the software engineers completely at big tech companies (or consultancies capable of demanding big tech compensation) continue to be able to drown out the other professions? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=central+consolidated+school+district&job=&city=&year=2023 https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=central+consolidated+schoo... https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=emory+healthcare+inc&job=&city=&year=2023 https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=emory+healthcare+inc&job=&... The visa lottery makes it difficult to reliably get H1B visa teachers. H1B visa abuse makes it even more difficult. An auction would make the H1B visa program into a "visa for software developers where consultancies charge high prices to win auctions and pay their employees little."

freeone3000 3y ago
It might be my naiveity, but, shouldn’t highly-skilled and in-demand professions be the highly valued ones? Something’s gone terribly wrong if there’s few teachers, it’s hard to get new teachers, but the price of teachers remains the same. It makes no sense from a labor standpoint.
- shagie 3y ago
  Compensation is often coupled with revenue generation - not skills. Teachers generate no revenue. Compare the compensation for big tech software developers vs those employed directly in public sector. Its not that public sector are less skilled, nor less in demand - but rather public sector doesn't generate revenue and its budget is a different path. I would contend that this isn't "teachers and public sector software developers are necessarily poorly compensated" (though I will say that teachers should be paid more) but rather that the revenue that is coupled with a software developer in the private sector is disproportionately high and so companies in that domain can compensate more highly. The control of teachers salaries are based on what funding the school district gets which comes from taxes. The public tends to prefer low taxes and models which do not allow tax dollars collected in one spot to be used in another which depresses the compensation for everyone in public sector (including teachers). Unless you are at or near the top and have control of the budgeting, rarely will public sector pay on the same scale as private sector.
- weberer 3y ago
  >Something’s gone terribly wrong if there’s few teachers, it’s hard to get new teachers, but the price of teachers remains the same. It makes no sense from a labor standpoint. Its because the state has a near monopoly on hiring teachers, so they can keep wages artificially low.
  - shagie 3y ago
    The school has a budget that comes from property taxes (in most cases) that people tend to be resistant to raise. Let's double the teachers' wages, but first you need to double the budget, and for that, need to first double the local property taxes. Put doubling the property taxes on the next ballot and see if that passes. If not, there is no money to raise the wages for teachers. Where wages can go up is when teachers move from a cost center to a profit center ... such as with a private school, though that is still limited by the amount that people are willing to pay to go there. A local private high school (midwest - median household income is $75,000) is $16,000 per year with enrollment of about 500 students. You have $8M to use. There are 100 people on staff (this includes grounds and maintenance). Let's apply a broad stroke and say that this is 75 teachers and 25 kitchen, maintenance, grounds, and secretarial jobs. Pretending that all other expenses are $0 and that the non teaching staff is $0 also... $8M into 75 is $106k. That places an upper bound on the amount that teachers make there ... unless we raise that $16,000 tuition or find other revenue sources.

citrin_ru 3y ago

A counter argument I've seen - with auction only IT companies will be able to hire H-1B workers and other industries like healthcare and pharma and even chip production will be out-priced. Different industries have different level of salaries. $200k/y salary may suppress SDE wages in Silicon Valley but it is well above market rate for an electrical or a chemical engineer.

kjksf 3y ago
It's only a counter argument if you make an assumption that H1-B program is designed to bring, specifically, healthcare or pharma workers. Unless you can point to a reason why law of supply and demand was breached, high salaries reflect high demand vs. low supply and low salaries reflect low demand vs. high supply. My understanding is that healthcare and pharma are not exactly poor industries so if they don't pay their highly skilled workers a lot of money, the most likely explanation is that there's abundance of those workers. What follows from that is that we don't need to import them from abroad. And that logic generalizes to all industries hence it really is that simple as letting in those who can score the highest salaries. It aligns the interests of U.S. in general (highly paid workers put way more into taxes than they get back in benefits) with the interests of the companies. It's hard to game, simple to apply and trivial to verify (once you issue SSN you check with IRS once a year if they are really paid what the company said it will pay). And if companies try some fraud they are now in the business of tax fraud. It boggles the mind that this is not a rule applied by all governments in the world. Unless, of course, you understand that government is not exactly pre-occupied with doing the best thing for the country but with doing the best thing for themselves. All those speeches you can give, on both sides, about immigration!
- shagie 3y ago
  > It's hard to game, simple to apply and trivial to verify (once you issue SSN you check with IRS once a year if they are really paid what the company said it will pay). And if companies try some fraud they are now in the business of tax fraud. This is one of the areas where it may be easier to game - at least until the people committing the fraud have gained a bit, shut down the business, and moved on (at least for the smaller instances - larger consultancies would have more difficulty but they game in other ways). Government agencies are notoriously siloed and often have laws preventing all but the most limited data exchange between agencies. Consider https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/03/student-aid-tool-held-key-for-tax-fraudsters/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/03/student-aid-tool-held-ke... The IRS Data Retrieval Tool isn't "send data from IRS to DoEd" but rather "send data to the individual who then sends it to DoEd". The exchange of data between agencies is specified in Information Exchange Agreement https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/information-systems/privacy/data-sharing-agreements https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/information-systems/privacy/da... https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/documents/IEA(F)%20State%20Agency%20Level.pdf https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/documents/IEA(F)%20State%20... https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-policy/tax-information-exchange-agreements-tieas https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-policy/tax-infor... https://www.hhs.gov/guidance/sites/default/files/hhs-guidance-documents/issuer%20iea%20for%20pbp_1.pdf https://www.hhs.gov/guidance/sites/default/files/hhs-guidanc... The referenced privacy act: https://home.treasury.gov/footer/privacy-act https://home.treasury.gov/footer/privacy-act This leads to it being easier for each department to establish its own set of data (so it doesn't need to go through the difficulty of having an IEA with all of that additional bureaucracy and since there's more than enough work for for underfunded agencies working with data that you don't have gets deprioritized) ... and such fraud is likely easier to do or takes many years to raise up enough discrepancies to merit further investigation by qualified investigators.