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Caps on high skill immigrant workers might be worth the tradeoffs, but I think we as a society should acknowledge they are serious tradeoffs.
Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.
Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.
As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw. It's the same way that dating apps like Tinder are mostly used by the unpleasant and unwanted, the good ones are already picked through. Of course just like the apps there's often some amount of pickings but they're limited and get scooped up quick of course and we're still overall limited to Y production. Even during periods of layoffs, companies don't tend to fire their best talent, they fire the weaker ones so even picking through those is still trying to find a diamond in the rough.
Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it. And maybe it's worth it if we put hard limits on economic growth and only allow Y production no matter how much market demand exists. Maybe it's worth it in the same way that some leftists felt promoting some minorities above their skill level was worth it.
But that's a discussion with some hard tradeoffs is it not?
I think that this part of your argument is mistaken. My experience working in tech isn't that the H1B program is used to bring in high skilled immigrants to expand labor beyond what the native population can support. It's that the H1B program is used to bring in employees at below-market pay, rather than paying the native citizens market rates for their work. Not only that, but then the employer has an indentured servant to whom they can do whatever they want, because if he leaves the company he has to go back home (and while the pay may be below US market rates, it's above the rates in his home country). This isn't exactly a situation where employers are giving people a win-win fair deal. The ideal is certainly as you describe, but I don't think that the reality lives up to that (thanks to good old human greed).
I guess I'm not enough of an expert on economics and immigration law to feel confident this is a good option, but why not auction the H1-B visas, rather than a lottery? The government chooses the highest N salaried applications and collects an extra percentage payroll tax on such visa holders. I have heard complaints that this would probably drop them all in high-cost-of-living areas, but it seems easy enough to adjust for that.
Maybe I'm missing a reason why that wouldn't work that isn't "existing H1B body shops have too much political power."
A lottery would be better than the current system for sure, but it doesnt address the problem that once the top 10% of the bids are actually filled, there will still be a bunch of people offering "job openings" in the 60-80k range that they claim they cant fill with Americans and then the bottom bidders still can fill those. Unless there really is enough actual high end demand for H1bs for all of them to make like 500k. But given the current market that seems extremely unlikely.
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Which is a problem why exactly? Most of the people who object to immigration are living outside of those extremely HCOL areas anyway, seems like it would do a good job of ensuring that the areas that wanted lots of immigrants had lots of immigrants and the places that don't like immigrants don't get them.
IIRC the reverse: "my factory in flyover country that needs real experts won't be able to compete with the coastal tech companies hiring entry-level JavaScript developers."
Yeah, "there are 4 experts on this equipment in the world and none of them are US citizens and we need one of them for 4 weeks" is a problem which is not well addressed by my proposal (or by our current system).
In the current system they could theoretically come in on an O-1. In practice, the expertise may be too narrow to be legible to the US government.
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It's not just greed, is the inability to compromise. Just like with abortion, where neither party is willing to offer a sensible compromise because it angers their extreme wing, is a platform to shit on the other party from, and poses a defection risk from the other party (like with gun control), the ruling parties of the US both acknowledge the shortcomings of H-1B, but can't create a bipartisan bill that reforms it into something that matches its original design (providing short-term high-skilled labor) or its current purpose (naturalization visa for white-collar workers).
Honestly, Trump Mk.1 was the Dems' best chance to run a reform like this through the Congress. Instead, they spent four years making Trump, who struggled with GOP support, their sworn enemy. Now Trump Mk.2 is all about owning the libs and rules by decree.
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