I want them auctioned by how much you pay the person hired. Want top talent, a million ensures you win and they get compensated well. Want cheap labor - train someone locally as you won't win the auction.
there is the downsides of what if they treat the emplopee baddly, of the emblopee commits fraud - I'm not sure how to handle that. However I still think the idea is right despite that issue.
There will always be unscrupulous companies trying to game the system, you just need to sue them into complying. Auctioning is generally the right idea, auction and make kickbacks illegal with regulation etc. My intuition if you auction 85,000 slots in US H1b, the average H1b salary will be around 250,000$. As you reduce the slots, the average will keep going higher. Reducing or increasing the slots can depend on the labor need for the economy.
Its already illegal, you just don't know how India behaves. The body shops in the US don't even behave legally in US, how are you going to get the behavior controlled in India?
Use the action to set the fee to the government, set a salary floor, and hold like 50% of the fee money in escrow that gets refunded back to the company after 5 years provided they retained the employee and tax records indicate the employee was paid at least at the floor level (something like 1.5x the median salary for the that position in that area).
How about "behave or you need to move your company elsewhere if you ever want foreign workers of any kind again."
Just ban organizations caught playing games (that is: "I'll know it when I see it" for labeling) and the ban should include not contracting consultancies that hire foreigners and maybe attached to anyone with feduciary duty as well. It would be very effective.
It depends on what you are optimizing for. If you are just optimizing for making the numbers go up, the yes letting big tech hiring all the available foreign workers so that they can do even more big tech stuff, increase their revenue, lift their share price, produce GDP, increase tax revenue etc. But what if you care about the diversity of the foreign workers in terms of field or specialty? What if for example you have a "Made in America" slogan and want to hire manufacturing workers so that we can have a renaissance in manufacturing?
The current H1B program is terrible in that it has a lottery. A strict salary-based distribution is marginally better but I would hope that it should incorporate multiple factors.
The issue is that people opposing it don't have a coherent view of what they want. They don't want a free market solution; they don't like the socialist position where the government picks the people; they don't like the lottery either. They want their preferred type of people to get the visa in a manner not too different from quotas/dei/affirmative action etc., which is impossible to engineer. It ultimately ends up creating a compromise brokered by lobbyists and politicians, kind of like how we do everything else in the country.
It only works if hiring H1Bs is cheaper, or otherwise much more appealing, so that paying the premium on an auction makes sense.
It used to be the case, say, 15-20 years ago. It not need to be the case today. Since we're talking about big tech, let the minimal bid for a company be the median salary across that company's relevant line of work (engineering, sales, whatever). This would make hiring an H1B candidate a merit-based decision, not a cost-cutting measure. This would make hiring a US-born engineer and, say, an India-born engineer approximately equally expensive, so the company would hire the better engineer, not the cheaper.
If the price arbitrage were gone, I bet there'd remain enough H1B slots to invite better researchers, better flute players, better sea captains, etc.
That really incentives you to under pay the H1-B though.
The fee should scale with the cost of training a US resident to do the job. If the fee is too low than toss the application cause the applicant should just pay for somebody's training instead.
Creating an artificial market around an artificial limitation that dumps cash into the government general fund is not what most economists would describe as "efficient allocation of resources".
It might create a local maxima around revenue per visa, but "google bought all of the H1-Bs to make life harder for Apple" is both an entirely foreseeable outcome, and one that has such a wide range of negative externalities that even in the context of the local maxima, it would be a challenge to argue of efficient allocation of resources with a straight face (if that argument is, in fact, the goal).
I mean, would big tech really buy them all? The argument against H-1B is it's being used to replace American workers with cheaper workers who are locked into their employer.
If H-1B requires massive comp, there would be little reason for Big Tech to hire Jr H-1B developers unless the employer lock in is worth it.
Would they? I know that they've engaged in a ton of wage suppression historically but deliberately paying out the nose for H1B visas seems like it wouldn't be worth it.
It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead.
Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
There are plenty of people that are against both types of immigration, or against one but not the other in each category. The Hive mind is often not that much of a hive.
> Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.
You are making big assumptions that the USA is a closed system that can generate its own prosperity, and that is far from the truth. Wrecking America's competitiveness (by not taking in skilled or unskilled immigrants) is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country, your goals are never going to be accomplished.
>is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country,
What value is the country getting richer if the people are still poor?
Wealth inequality is a real thing, and importing more labor competition for the working class people only devalues their labor, serving only to make the business owning elites richer while keeping workers poor. Bernie Sanders even said that himself.
The "line goes up" stock market and GDP numbers are abstract numbers for the working class people that don't reflect in their purchasing power or quality of life. The person flipping burgers at McD for $12 an hour, isn't gonna be better off now that Microsoft and Nvidia are worth 4 trillion instead of 1 trillion. It literally makes no difference to them.
So as long as there's no trickle down, why would people care about their country getting richer, when it's just the top 10% of the country who are seeing that richness and not them?
> maybe we should focus on other ways of dealing with wealth inequality (improving productivity, education so our kids can compete on the world stage when they grow up, etc...)?
Yes we should. And when politicians are gonna fix those issues first, then people's opinion on importing more competing labor will change. Until then, they'll vote to tilt the supply-demand balance in their favor, as per democratic process because the business class is also doing the opposite so you have a conflict of interest you need to fix.
People not seeing the argument of this side of the isle, are in a bubble who have never had to compete in a zero sum environment against people who will do anything for money, and love writing cheques that other people have to cash. Which is why you're seeing the backlash from this at elections. If you want people to agree with you politically, you have to take care of their grievances first, before you take care of imported people form abroad and business owners.
>it doesn't work now that the immigrants are no longer primarily white?
Nowhere was the skin color part of the argument till you brought that up witch says everything about you and why I'm exiting the convo here.
The issue isn’t race. Typical Americans would be just as against illegal immigration if it were white Europeans flooding into our country.
The uncomfortable reality is that illegal immigration is a net negative for society, particularly when it reaches the numbers it did under the Biden administration.
Until we hit zero percent unemployment, we have a surplus of labor in this country and have no need to import any more. It is up to employers to pay competitive wages and train people to fill the vacancies.
Zero percent unemployment is viewed as a bad thing by almost everyone with a familiarity of the employment markets.
Zero percent unemployment means that no one without a job is looking for one. It means no new entrants into the job market (since by definition, you are unemployed the moment you start looking for your first job). And it means that no one is transitioning jobs or careers without a firm job offer in hand. It means that no business ever fails. It means that it is remarkably difficult to find employees. It means that there are no employees that quit instead of doing something immoral.
You should look into the different types of unemployment, as well as the definition of "unemployed", and specifically, frictional unemployment since you seem very unfamiliar with the base concepts.
Okay, maybe not literally zero percent unemployment, but my point still stands that we do not have a shortage of labor in this country and we do not need to import any at this time. We should incentivize workers through better compensation and retraining to fill skill gaps.
There is not a shortage of labor in general. There is possibly a shortage of specialized labor (although arguably not in high skilled and technical positions like the H1B intends/typically aims to fill).
Again, people study this and have a name for it: structural unemployment. This is the unemployment level caused by employers needing to hire for skills that the market cannot currently provide. Think of the town with high unemployment due to a car factory closure, but a local business that needs scuba diving instructors can't find one. Plenty of labor, but no scuba diving instructors.
I think this is what you are getting at: If you want to hire someone foreign because the skills don't exist in the local labor market, you should be obligated to prove that the skill is being developed in the local labor market.
The argument (not mine, just an argument) against that is that individual firms should not necessarily be forced to bear the cost of training workers in a portable skill when you can just bring in non-local labor (H1B). Back to the Scuba shop example: it costs 5 figures and 6+ months to train a non-diver to the level of scuba instructor. It is good for the labor pool to force the shop to train a new instructor, even if they have to pay a massive cost for them to get certified, and the labor can quit the day they get certified. It is bad for consumers and the shop. They would much rather pay lower prices and bring in a foreign instructor than run short handed for months while they plow money into training someone in a skill that the worker can take to their competition.
My feeling is that H1Bs are probably useful in much more limited circumstances than they are used in now (probably something more like O-1 visas that are given for people who are leaders in their fields, or demonstrably and uniquely talented). If the H1B job can be done interchangeably, then it should be done by domestic labor. If you want to hire the one guy who just won a nobel prize to work on your time machine, that is when we should allow foreign labor.
> it costs 5 figures and 6+ months to train a non-diver to the level of scuba instructor. It is good for the labor pool to force the shop to train a new instructor, even if they have to pay a massive cost for them to get certified, and the labor can quit the day they get certified. It is bad for consumers and the shop.
I believe the common situation is a company pays for your masters degree but the two of you end up with a contract where you'll stay at the company for X years afterwards.
I don't see why there can't be a non-"At will" situation for the scuba instructor.
If you do this, you'll have unintended consequences:
- You don't allow the US to import skilled workers anymore, and rather than hire locally from a non-existent labor pool they simply move the jobs abroad. What's worse, hiring someone from India on an H1B to work in your AI lab, or moving your AI lab to India?
- You don't allow importing unskilled workers and expect farmers to pay $30/hour to have Americans pick apples. Or maybe...they'll just figure out how to automate those jobs or go out of business since no one wants to pay $5 for an apple.
How many minutes do you think it takes to pick an apple?
The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true. Labor is a portion of the wholescale cost of food, which is a portion of the retail cost. A lot goes to shipping, packaging, processing, marketing, etc. If all migrant workers were replaced by Americans being paid a competitive wage, food prices would go up a little, but you wouldn't pay double for apples, let alone several times more. Highly-processed foods like cereal and pasta wouldn't change noticeably.
> The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true
My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.
It might be that (barring automation) we simply don't grow/pick apples in the USA anymore, for the same reason that other industries/jobs have become obsolete because the economics simply don't make sense anymore. Farmers will grow something else that is more economical to deal with given the labor costs they have to deal with, they simply won't grow apples anymore if it no longer makes sense.
> My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.
There is no evidence that this is actually true. Decades of illegal immigrant labor has suppressed wages and supplanted American citizens, so you have no way of knowing that’s the case.
There are plenty of food and things that have gone out of production because the economics don’t make sense anymore, even with illegal immigration. Apples aren’t going to be different. Demand isn’t somehow magically going to be present at any price.
No, it means the elevator operator just doesn't exist anymore. We didn't pay them more, we got rid of them. If agriculture workers don't exist anymore at the wages the market is willing to bear, we just won't bother with those foods anymore, or import them from somewhere else.
I'm uncomfortable with how racist HN has become. Because your ancestors were white they were permitted a chance to work from the bottom up, but because today's immigrants aren't white, you think its either slavery or exploitation, and they should just stay in poor countries accordingly (a situation that was not forced on your ancestors, for your benefit). Or if it isn’t racism, what is your reasoning for pulling up the ladder today?
> If agriculture workers don't exist anymore at the wages the market is willing to bear, we just won't bother with those foods anymore, or import them from somewhere else.
Expand H-2A: Temporary Agricultural Worker visa then.
We shouldn't be encouraging black market activity. If as the US we want to have cheap imported labor pick apples then write it into law. If we as the US want to experience the Baumol effect [1] then don't. I think most people want to experience the Baumol effect as opposed to losing out gains to trade.
> I'm uncomfortable with how racist HN has become.
You’re the one that’s bringing race into the argument. I don’t care what race they are, I don’t want any illegal immigrants in this country.
America’s obligation is to its own citizens first and foremost. This should not be a controversial opinion. Every country should put the interests of its own citizens first.
So ironic that your post full of racist name calling and wanting to support a perpetual underclass of people stuck in indentured servitude, masquerading as empathy, and then you're the one calling everyone who disagrees with you racist.
Pro tip: in case of actual racism, use the flag button.
> It’s funny how the HN hive mind is against H1-B visas and AI because they suppress their wages and take their jobs. However, the millions of unskilled illegal immigrants are a good thing, because they have that effect on the working class instead.
The hive mind is greatly exaggerated. The existence of cognitively dissonant opinions on a website is more likely evidence that the site has posters that have differing viewpoints, rather than evidence of a group thought process that is illogical.
At some point the contradiction is so flagrant that the typical "we're all individuals here" dismissal no longer suffices.
Like if you showed up on a homeschooling moms facebook group and half the moms are spewing religious mumbo jumbo and the other half are spewing trans rights stuff it immediately begs the question how the heck are these groups coexisting without fighting at every turn without massive cognitive dissonance or not actually believing what they're saying. Same thing here with immigration, among other things (wouldn't have been my first pick of an issue to highlight the dissonance but here we are).
This is not a homeschooling mothers' Facebook group though. There is absolutely no requirement for people here to agree, and/because the place will not fall apart if they don't - as you can see from its continued existence.
It’s not even clear that an auction would be the most efficient way to allocate H-1Bs if we define efficiency as maximizing long-term economic and societal value, not just short-term revenue. An auction favors companies with deep pockets right now — meaning a startup looking to bring in a world-leading PhD in a critical field could lose out to a much larger firm simply filling headcount. That’s hardly an optimal outcome for innovation or competitiveness.
"O-1A: Individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)"
Or straight to an EB-1a greencard - the criteria are virtually identical. And if they’re that good, they should be able to insist on being sponsored for the greencard not the employment-based visa.
Although for China and India the priority date for EB1a is three years currently so if you’re from either of them O-1 will be a necessary stopgap, but for anyone else EB1a applications are open immediately.
I have met people hired under the O1-A and they fit the bill pretty neatly. Think R1 profs publishing in Nature/Science/domain equivalents. If you have exceptional talent, you can 100% get in.
I think the issue is expecting a masters/phd to ensure access to th US labor market. This greatly distorts the fact that for most software engineering positions a bachelors is enough (if necessary at all), crowding the domestic market.
The US should not allow the pipeline of jr->sr engs to be culled for the sake of accessing cheap foreign labor. Given the necessity of software to run the modern economy, it really is a national security issue.
People want at least the appearance of a holistic process that considers a candidate’s broader value to society — even if that process isn’t perfect. An auction drops the pretense entirely and just says: pay to win.
So nurses, professors, teachers and artists will be in higher demand and they'll have to pay them a better salary to fill positions? which may attract people who currently avoid those career cause they lead to poverty? Yup I'm sold.
And as others said, add a cost factor to train an citizen for every H-1B issued. Actually, slap a 350% tax on all the salaries paid to H-1Bs except for the first 15 people (or, I don't know, 3% of the overall staff, whichever is higher) and make sure it's hard to game with shell companies, body shops and subsidiaries.
Precisely 0% chance it'll happen in the current administration, and it's anyone guess if there will be administrations after this one, but a few hours of additional thinking around this solution (this is the first 3 minutes roughly) could make it work way better. Remove limits, make it really expensive, give some rights to the people who come on it, use the money to address real shortages, and watch companies stop abusing it.
P.S.
European here, with 0 interest in coming to work in the US.
same could be said of famines like the one in China or Soviet Union or ones in Africa: they simply needed to pay up for food, if they were really that hungry
your logic erases nuance of the US labor market and infinity of specializations and niches, on top or large regional differences in labor market.
let's just say that nurses will never be paid on par with software engineers just because it is different specialty, and it is stupid to force nurses to compete with IT for visas
I'm not the person who proposed the auction, but I read it as "let the companies compete for the H1-B visas in an auction," not about the workers buying their way into the US.
For example, if CheapoCorp is looking to replace reasonably well paid US workers with H1-B workers, they won't bid much for the visas. CheapoCorp isn't trying to get good talent from overseas. They're trying to save money, push down wages, have a workforce that they can mistreat (since they can't easily leave the company given their immigration status requires employment), etc.
By contrast, if a company is looking to hire great engineers or scientists from overseas because they're in a growing industry with a shortage of workers, they would be willing to pay a lot more to get the H1-B visas. They're not looking to save $20,000/year on someone's salary. They want top talent.
When companies are trying to replace their workforce with lower-paid foreign workers who can't complain (lest they lose their job and with it their immigration status), that's not what the H1-B system was designed for. It certainly is how some companies are using it. If you're on an H1-B and lose your job, you have 60 days to find a new job or you're gone. That's going to make you a much more compliant employee. You have little leverage to negotiate raises, you aren't likely to quit even if they're overworking you, they can pass you over for promotions and you'll quietly accept it.
But if the employer is competing in an auction for H1-B visas, they're more likely to be companies that are seeking out top talent rather than seeking out workers they can underpay and mistreat.
The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement. The company is just a shell to win the auction and sponsor them. If an auction system were adopted without safeguards, it could turn the H-1B program from a labor-market tool into a plaything for the ultra-wealthy.
> The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement
If you are wealthy enough to bankroll this kind of a convoluted method to immigrate to the US (back of the napkin math $150k-250k), you are wealthy enough to bankroll an investor visa to the UK or Canada, invest locally in a business AND THEN target an American investment visa, or marry someone within the diaspora.
People are really overestimating the pull the US has on the truly rich. Most Indian H1Bs tend to be middle class Indians who hit a rut in their career in India, and are using the temporary US experience to land a better role back in India or maybe Canada.
If you are already earning $30-60K TC in the Indian market, the pull factor to earn $90-140k base on an H1B doesn't exist, especially because Green Card backlogs are multidecade long now.
There's a reason most of the H1B abuse is coming from consultancies - they tend to pay in the $3k-20k range. For someone in that bracket, the math of working as a low paid H1B works out.
That's why the H1B market is so bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups.
As a skilled immigration system, you want to optimize for the right half of the distribution and minimize the left hand side, but if you are too draconian in nature, you disincentivize people who you actually want to attract from coming to the US. India has already started trying to build something similar to the Thousand Talents program for NRIs and PIOs.
IMO, the current changes proposed are a good middle ground, but everything else on HN seems dumb.
But the golden ticket requires 5mil. Even in the US, even the most talented engineers, probably wouldn't have that much until after 5 to 10+ years of work, and outside of the US, earning that much money as an engineer is probably next to impossible before well over 40+. (And, even then, if all you have is just the 5mil, would you really part with that much money just for a visa?)
