Comment by gangstead
12 hours ago
One idea to replace the H1-B lottery that I've seen on HN is to sort the applications by salary and let in the top XX highest paid.
Do you have any thoughts on that? Is this one of those "why don't they just..." type of ideas that people with first hand knowledge know is majorly flawed?
I just don't see how the value - from a benefit to the U.S. economy perspective - is tied to salary so that doesn't make sense to me as a line to draw. If the H-1B program were to be limited in any way (which is not something I necessarily agree with), one option is to list occupations that are in short supply each year and to prioritize those. Many countries do this.
> one option is to list occupations that are in short supply each year and to prioritize those
That's a lot of what prioritizing slots by pay does: pay is higher for jobs with low supply relative to demand.
I suspect that the real problem with prioritizing by pay is that it shows that a lot of employers are using H1-B workers to put downward pressure on wages.
Also there are a lot of parties involved in gaming the complex system whose services wouldn't be needed if the solution was that simple. I think Upton Sinclair's quote applies here. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
Not necessarily. You need farmers and scientists. Can't do a descending sort by salary.
2 replies →
I had two H1-Bs.
The process is completely divorced from reality.
The questions and requirements are meaningless.
To my eye, there is zero rationality in the process.
As far as I can see, the and the only effect of the visa programme is that there is a limited number of visas, and so this acts to prevent businesses from hiring the people they want to hire, and that's not freedom; and in the process of doing so, causing untold disruption to lives and businesses and direct and indirect costs to businesses, individuals and economy as a whole.
Doesn't salary at least set a floor on what a company thinks that employee is going to add in value? They wouldn't spend dollars on salary to get dimes of extra revenue.
I would also argue that prioritizing the highest paid jobs makes displacement of US workers less likely. It would raise the bar for everyone.
US residency and citizenship is in extremely high demand, so whatever immigration system is put in place will ultimately be gamed. Creating a visa category that is solely based on salary would be attractive to some cohort of people who want to live in the US regardless of the costs.
We saw similar things with previous "investor visas" where there was no intention to start a business and the USCIS had to stop issuing them for many years because of the pervasive fraud on both sides of the equation. I can guarantee that some creative lawyer out there was already thinking about how to game the US "startup visa" when that was proposed a few years back.
A salary-based requirement is a lot less easy to game. After all salaries are reported to the IRS on W-2s. Any fraud in the amount of salary can be easily detected without sophisticated investigation.
The only difficulty I see is that salary isn't necessarily proportional to a person's usefulness to the economy or the country. A person can start a company and pay himself a million dollars a year while the person and the company does nothing at all. Sure the IRS gets to collect a bunch, but at that point we might as well create a class of visas that are sold in an auction.