If the goal really is to enable highly qualified people to come to the U.S. (separate from the usual immigration process) wouldn't a fairly simple tweak just be to take the wage into account in the allocation? There's currently a fixed quota, with two things that go into allocating it: 1) offers not paying the "prevailing wage" are disqualified; and 2) the remaining offers are allocated in first-come, first-serve fashion until the quota is reached, with no preference to good vs. bad offers.
Seems you could collapse those two issues by just saying: the 50,000 slots (or however many there will be) are auctioned off, or allocated in order of highest salary offer, or something similar. In theory the "invisible hand of the market" ought to then allocate the slots to where foreign talent is most needed, and the companies using it for cheap labor won't be able to outbid Google/etc. for the slots.
If that were the goal, the tweak would be simple -- give out more green cards to people with appropriate education. Let them come here and get jobs.
These programs suppress wages for low-end computer positions. If you were around in the 90s at a big company/government, you'd run into old guys who made big bucks tweaking COBOL and Operator types tweaking Batch jobs. The whole point of COBOL was that you could teach the average bean counter to write it, so the answer to the problem of these guys retiring was to import cheap workers and automate.
My grandparents all came to the U.S. from Ireland. No H-1 nonsense where you get tied to an employer, just plain immigration and a path to citizenship. It should be no different today.
The wage is already part of the criteria for application. USCIS only accept application if the salary of the visa beneficiary is comparable to a US citizen salary doing the same job.
I mentioned that part; that's the "prevailing wage" requirement in (1) in my comment above. I'm proposing prioritizing by wage beyond that, e.g. if there are 300,000 applications that meet the "prevailing wage" requirement, and 50,000 slots, instead of allocating the slots randomly or first-come-first-serve, allocate them highest-wage-first.
Sure, markets are an imperfect way to allocate limited resources. But is a lottery really a better way? At least markets would allocate the slots in way that bears some relationship to where the maximum demand in the economy for those workers is.
- Indian companies
- Using cheap labor
- Paying significantly less then other companies.
- Responsible for almost 50% of all H1B applications
Driving the salaries by immigration is an historical complaint worldwide. HackerNews or not.