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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?
It also is one with, from my perspective, mostly imagined tradeoffs. The problem with incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts or otherwise exists in the low wage market (and fir the first 3, very prominently in the H1b market), but the tradeoff for employers looking abroad vs. at home at the high end is mostly about age discrimination and wage expectations. Take, for example, this recent viral tweet: https://x.com/JoshuaSteinman/status/1964097707636625671
Essentially, this guy is complaining about the fact that he needs a couple of retired/semi-retired 50-65 year old guys to come out of retirement to found a transformers company and is complaining that their salary demand is... slightly under $500k? Of course, if you are at all familiar with the mid-high end engineering work environment this is not at all new to you. The thought of hiring a 55 year old is offensive to most people in hiring. The thought that they are just as important as a founder with seed money, probably moreso. So even though this startup cost is actually a drop in the bucket, it seems unteneble to this fellow (who is representative).
So what will he do? Likely he will give up on the idea, but if he doesn't he's likely to try the H1b route. And if you are familiar with that you will know there will be many applicants with resumes that say they have experience designing and fabricating large transformers under various industry standards. They will not. If the company ever launches it will flounder and never get out a product until this guy caves and pays an old guy, OR one of his like 25 year old incidental white guy hires from Colorado School of Mines befriends one of those old white guys and fixes everything.
That's hilarious. "I believe I have a market of $50B, but to get started I need to hire one knowledgable retired guy who won't get out of bed for less than $0.0005B. What should I do, what should I do?"
Sometimes there are actual shortages (e.g. there's 4 qualified people in the world and 10 companies looking to hire them), where upping your price just results in a bidding war. But in this case it looks like it isn't; they just have to convince one of a number of middle-aged guys to get off his fishing boat for a while.
He goes on to say:
LOL, no, they're not there to "work hard, work fast". If you know what you're doing, you're not hiring them for that. They're not the Wozniak or Jobs and certainly not the Randy Wigginton or Bruce Tognazzini, they're the Mike Markulla there to provide "adult supervision" for your younger guys who are doing the "work hard, work fast" thing.
My thoughts exactly. But this case is simply illustrative. I work with engineers in my law practice. My brother is an engineer. I swear, these firms treat age 50 as if it is death, and 45 as pushing the reaper. If someone in mid/mid-sr management on the engineering side gets laid off and they are over 50, they might as well just start their own model train shop right away. There simply is no appetite to hire them, even at 1/2 rungs below where they were let go from. This is why people in the industry have such skepticism about the whole model of immigrant labor. Companies inevitably ignore dozens or hundreds of qualified domestic candidates, often accompanied with a very specifically worded job posting. That then gets forwarded to the H1b agency that takes a half dozen even less qualified foreigners and writes them perfect resumes for the position (regardless of the truthiness of those words), and now you have 3 engineers for the price of 1! Or do you? For some reason the project is always "going well" or "coming along". But deliverables always seem lacking, often the claim is they are contingent on someone else's work (who is often some recent StateU grad, and "his work" is the whole project).
Yeah this is the issue that whenever somebody sets out to simplify the immigration question with a 'fair and unbiased criteria' inevitably a massive cottage industry converges to game the fuck out of those rules whilst also finding any possible legal angles for discrimination and humanitarian exemptions.
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