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Like so many systems dreamt up by congress, the H1B mechanics were poorly designed from the start. A lottery? That's incredibly stupid. The DV lottery is one thing, kind of dystopian but one can see the 'logic' (in the progressive mindset) of allowing random people in poor countries to gamble on a kind of Ellis Island vision of making it in America.
But the H1B system requires certainty. A simple fix would just be to cut the total number by 60-80%, then turn it into a bid system. Each visa is auctioned off to the highest bidder. This would have two effects. Firstly it would provide companies with some certainty, because prices would be pretty stable, with some fluctuations depending on the strength of the economy/employment market. Secondly, it would immediately cut out Infosys/Tata/Cognizant etc because the "apply for literally every engineer we have in India, then send over the ones who win the lottery" tactic would no longer work and the new bidding price would be unaffordable for anyone who wasn't generating substantial economic value.
Another issue is the abuse of the O-1 system, which has risen from like 10,000 to 40,000 visas a year (inc dependants). There's no way there are that many exceptional people moving to the US each year. This is a visa designed for Hollywood stars and Harvard academics that is again being exploited by the tech sector.
Extraordinary, not just exceptional. Just having a PhD from a top UK university counts as exceptional under US immigration law (and probably should). Exceptional ability doesn't help much with the first visa (it makes you eligible for certain discretionary waivers), but when you are applying for one your green card comes out of a different quota pool which doesn't normally have a lag.
Extraordinary ability means meeting three out of eight criteria, one of which is "high salary" and some of the others of which are gameable. But the intent was "one of the top 100 or so people in your subfield in the world".
Interesting, I always thought the criteria for O-1 were much stricter. As things stand I'm probably eligible for the visa which is good to know...
You know, that would have made an unironic christmas gift for yourself to start on yesterday.
'This year, my gift to myself was starting my path to becoming a bloody Yank.'
Good point, although I'm quite happy here in the UK close to family working in one of the very few industries where the pay differential between the UK and the US isn't all that big. NYC is also a lot more expensive than London to live in from what I hear the people visiting us from the US say.
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Yeah, but there's no good way to measure that objectively without having per-field requirements which are very onerous for the state to come up with.
Absolutely agreed. Some things are hard, but important to get right. If you want generally low immigration, high-skill immigration is one of them.
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Or a points-based system, which can also subsume the O-1. And abolish the dual-intent of L-1, which is another incredibly stupid quirk.
Why not turn it into something the POTUS has power over, like these pardons of federal felons? If there's an exceptional person that is so weird he/she won't be able to score enough points through the regular route surely he/she is exceptional enough that the president is familiar with the name and can be convinced to let him/her in?
Any points-based system can be gamed. The O1 for anyone in STEM, including tech, is gamed, for example, by having applicants submit papers to bullshit fake journals that still count for the purposes of the application.
Because then any Democratic POTUS will just stamp millions of visas.
Yes, agreed, the L-1 visa should be for a maximum 5 year stay in the US followed by a minimum 3 year cooling off period in the home country during which they can’t visit the US for more than 60 days per year.
I don't see how you can game the Canadian CRS, for example. By faking your age, perhaps, or getting a Ph.D. from a diploma mill.
Make it a mandatory ceremony, then. The person must arrive at the White House and the President will shake their hand and hand them their papers.
That won't work; the step from "allowing a few" to "allowing a lot" is too easy to make. Maybe a by video ceremony, or using in a standin, or something else to remedy the "oversight" that "helps hard working immigrants who through no fault of their own can't attend". The exact method of slipping is less important than the fact that slipping is a very small step.
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Why not just cut off H1B entirely and family reunification, etc. Only leave maybe the modified O-1 system and limit the numbers but that also has its own problems.
Just cause foreigners are capable doesn't mean it is good to have them running your country. So you need to implement controls to keep them few and compliant. Or you end up with Indians banning the American president on twitter and running things along with other ethnocentric migrant groups and ideologically aligned liberals.
You need to also care about friendliness when selecting people in addition to competence. So for such purposes you are also selecting for people who are more like those who make disproportionately the math Olympiads who are east Asian nerds who aren't charismatic who are a) smart b) unlikely to run things. And so select against those whose skills and proclivities make them good social climbers and might be inclined to coordinate with their own foreign ethnic group or with others for such purposes. To the extend competent foreigners are to be chosen it must be few, friendly, and mainly smart nerds who don't want to run things and keep them as workers, but not managers.
That and obviously a country should give priority to those competent from their or similar ethnic groups over groups that are more foreign. With again special attention made on friendliness. Some ethnic groups might hold grudges against yours, or more likely to be a nationalist fifth column, despite being closer culturally. Baltics shouldn't prefer Indians because they aren't Russians, but of course a larger % of Russians threaten more fifth column activity and so it makes sense to prefer for example French over Russian migrants.
I mean, my preference is that we just reinstate pre-65 national origins, so if you want to bring in 10,000 Indians you need to bring in 100,000 English, 100,000 Germans, 30,000 people from the former Austro-Hungarian empire etc. But clearly that's unlikely to happen.
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