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H1Bs now require a $100k payment per year (I believe, seeing some remarks saying it might be per visa) to the government due to Donald Trump executive order, plus if you are currently overseas and hold a H1B you need to pay $100k effective immediately on your next entry into the USA if you are not within the country by the 20th of September.
As a foreign non-Lawyer I don't know how effective this is going to be/liable to be immediately derailed in the courts, but I do think it's a positive step towards ensuring skilled immigration is used for the genuinely effective instead of ye olde 'I can import a foreigner who I have more power over at a 10% discount rate to domestic workers'. I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires and wish them the best of luck in attempting to offshore the competencies required to make AI-powered Grindr for Daily Fantasy Sports
This may be "directionally correct" but it's too much and too sudden. This is currently positioned as a direct fuck-you to H-1B holders and the companies who hire them, with policy goals secondary. If they want to fix the abuse problem long term of companies underpaying H-1B, they can put a sliding salary tax for companies hiring under the median H-1B wage, up to a cap on the median wage. E.g. if you pay your tech guy 100k and median is 130k, then pay an addition 15k to the government.
Currently there are two problems:
H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries. ~100-200k H-1B holders in the country is only 0.1% of the 160M workforce, which is evidence that it is used to attract exceptional talent, for the most part. Top companies like FAANG plays by the book here, they do not generally pay H-1Bs less than local talent, they just want the best people.
This is the problem the administration should fix by adding taxes and fees.
The difficulty is to solve both problems at once. I don't think the program is perfect, but effectively killing it will be detrimental to the US in the long term. Yes, instituting a 100k/year fee on top for every H-1B employee will effectively kill this program.
I mean the problem with incremental changes is that they’re often gamed along the way. If you make sudden drastic changes then you can’t simply keep going while your lawyer finds the loopholes. And thus you end up doing things like fudging job titles to make tge lower wages not taxable. Sure a senior developer might get 160K a year. But Pajeet is actually a junior developer (just ignore that his tasks are exactly like a senior developer). Or if it’s 180 days in country before fines or payments kick in, you just need to get the guy on a plane on day 180, wait a few days and bring him back on a fresh H1B. If you give the. Until tomorrow to cough up the money you can’t rules-lawfare your way out of it.
Having predictable laws that allow people to plan for the future is good actually.
Having predictable laws that allow people to plan for the future requires law-making/law-compliance to be a cooperative rather than competitive game, where at least roughly-similar goals are held by both the rule-makers and the rule-followers. If you are in a war, preventing the enemy from planning for the future is an obviously good thing.
It seems to me that there's a pretty good parallel here to the dynamics we see in gun regulation, where regulatory agencies are fundamentally hostile to the businesses and individuals attempting to operate under their regulation, and use regulatory ambiguity and mercurial rules-redefinition as basic tools of control against people who actively don't want to be controlled. There, when getting the counterparties to comply with one's intention grows prohibitive, we see government action retreat from even-handed, routine enforcement of clear rules, instead centering on "making examples" of people more-or-less at random and with little regard to whether they crossed the line or not. When people aren't sure where the law actually is or how bad the downside for crossing it might be, they get a lot more cautious about living on the borders of the law.
Legible rules can never constrain human will. People who do not share sufficient values cannot coordinate together, and this sort of pseudo-legal warfare is one example of how that plays out, it seems to me. Look on the bright side, probably no one gets shot in the head by federal agents in a nautical-twilight raid over this one.
I don’t think we're at war with legal immigrants who came here to work. H1Bs tend to integrate pretty well, follow the rules, and just generally are productive members of society. You can reasonably make the case that 700,000 is not the right number of H1Bs to have in the US. I don't think you can reasonably make the case that we should consider ourselves at war with them.
It seems to me that we have a conflict between companies who want to import foreigners who work for cheap and lack many legally-mandated employee protections they would be compelled to respect for native employees, and a faction now with control of the federal government who want them to pay native workers standard market wages with full protections instead. Certainly there seem to be a number of other commenters here framing it this way, including several claiming that the H1B visa system was "abused". I use quotes there, because it's pretty clear to me that in situations like this one, we say things like "this system was abused" when what we want to say, but cannot, is "they clearly broke the law". I'm pretty sure if we prosecuted these companies for violating immigration law, their legal defenses would succeed. I'm also pretty sure that a lot of people don't want them to do what they're doing, and are willing to coordinate efforts to make them stop doing it. That's the conflict, and in that conflict, as with FFL licensing under the previous administration, giving those regulated a clear, consistent, stable set of rules to work under is not a good way to achieve the regulator's objectives.
And as with FFL licensing under the previous administration, the issue is that the regulatory goals should be achieved by laws but are not popular enough to achieve the necessary support among elected legislators.
In any case I don’t know how saying "any h1bs who were abroad must pay $100k to reenter effective basically immediately" serves any non-applause-light purpose.
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A few years ago (and maybe still) the game was that the real developers had "Software Engineer" titles and the Infosys programmers-by-the-pound were called "Programmers". Different salary for each, though they're the same job. So FAANG hiring $125-$200K H-1B Software Engineers didn't stop Infosys from hiring $60K programmers. Even though most of FAANGs rejects could do a better job than the Infosys people
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