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That sounds great -- but it's not an argument for throwing all the H1Bs out. Make it $250K and it returns to being a truly high-skilled program.
All in all it's a M&B -- the motte is "the H1B salary floor is too low and it's not skilled enough", the bailey is "immigration bad".
I don’t think it’s a Motte and Bailey. Maybe some people on Twitter are claiming every last immigrant needs to be deported but even that is hyperbole. People wouldn’t care if it was just cutting edge STEM researchers, renowned surgeons, etc. But instead what is happening is that entire towns are being overrun by Indians making $120k working in IT at a bank or something, plus their parents that they bring over and their citizen children. I guess an economist would say this is good, they’re net taxpayers and not criminals, but I don’t see how this materially benefits the nation like they’re working on the Manhattan project or founding Nvidia or whatever. It just feels like additional competition for the ~1 SD above the mean citizen who makes up the bulk of the mid-middle to upper-middle class of the country for some marginal positive effect on the government’s balance sheet, plus all the more qualitative negative effects of increased diversity.
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Very few people are arguing you shouldn't be able to import Alfred Einstein but it's also inherent to the system that whatever cutoff line you originally use to define unique genius is going to get eroded over time as business & humanitarian cases pile up. Plus people outside the country learn to adapt their individual cases to better resemble the Diagnostic criteria.
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