[makecheck]

As someone who went through the process, I can tell you that the mere existence of a maximum annual number was insulting.

If I get a job, and my company NEEDS me, and I'm GOOD at what I'm doing, I should get IN; period. There should be no crap involved. How the hell is it good for a company to be told that it can't grow because it happened to petition the 65,001st person out of 65,000 that year? How the hell is it good for the prospective employee to have to try again later? And in extremely-fast-moving industries such as tech, even the arbitrary time frame of "one year" is an insanely long time.

The only limit that kind of makes sense is a thorough investigation of the type of person you're bringing in (e.g. university degrees or other background, some indication of what they're bringing to the country as a whole). It may make sense to force companies to prove that no U.S. citizen can do the job but this system has been gamed for years, as companies produce vague job descriptions just like they post vague patent descriptions.

[diogenescynic]

>Limits of any kind make no sense at all.

They are trying to protect US citizens from losing their jobs (or getting wages cut) due to a sudden availability of cheap labor. A government is rightfully concerned with making sure its own citizens are gainfully employed. Citizens vote, foreigners don't. Every person within those borders who does not have a job puts a drain on the rest of the country. Someone without a job outside of those borders does not. So bringing someone across those borders while an unemployed person is within them is a net economic negative.

Look at the biggest H-1B recipients: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx It's all low quality outsourcing shops like Infosys and Cognizant.

These laws/protections are intended to prevent a race to the bottom. If the public subsidizes the operation of a company through security, education, and infrastructure, the community that makes that investment is entitled to ensure that the fruits of that investment go to other members of the community.

[makecheck]

The thing is, "protection of US citizens" assumes a lot about what actually happens to companies, and it assumes a lot about what the citizens themselves are doing.

First, are you willing to pay $500 more for every product, and $10 more for every meal? Companies have to compete, and they are responding to what is necessary to survive. If a company employs 5,000 U.S. citizens and can't compete, it may stumble and lay off 1,000 U.S. citizens, or fail entirely and shed 5,000 U.S. jobs, all because it wasn't allowed to bring in a few immigrants to grow a little.

Entire companies (and successful companies, like Google) have been started by immigrants, creating potentially thousands of jobs for U.S. citizens. There is no reason to automatically fear immigrants; many of them are brilliant people.

A lack of a paid job does not make you a "drain" on society, either! What about children? What about volunteer work in communities? For that matter, I have met some astoundingly lax and irresponsible people over the years that have paying jobs, to the point where I almost thought of them as a net negative to the company.

[diogenescynic]

>First, are you willing to pay $500 more for every product, and $10 more for every meal? Companies have to compete, and they are responding to what is necessary to survive. If a company employs 5,000 U.S. citizens and can't compete, it may stumble and lay off 1,000 U.S. citizens, or fail entirely and shed 5,000 U.S. jobs, all because it wasn't allowed to bring in a few immigrants to grow a little.

You're playing fast and loose with the facts. $500 for every product and $10 for every meal? That doesn't seem like an intellectually honest scenario. Where is that based in reality? Skilled immigration and non-skilled immigration are totally different. No one here is begrudging the immigrants picking fruits and doing farm labor. The issue is when companies lie/cheat/commit fraud to outsource jobs that Americans do want and are qualified/willing to do, all for the sake of driving down wages.

Not to mention most of those 'products' are manufactured in China already so there isn't going to be much price increasing there. Second, what a ridiculous scenario where a company has to choose between hiring 'a few' immigrants to save 'thousands' of US workers. Again, where are you drawing these examples from? Clearly not reality.

You didn't acknowledge what I said and again shifted the goal posts to another issue entirely. This is a pointless conversation if you can't even listen to the other side.

[davidw]

Throwing up walls isn't going to protect people from the US. It's a facile and ultimately unproductive response that plays to fear. The answer is to make US workers competitive in a global marketplace. And it absolutely is possible to compete on things other than price.

And while his numbers are invented, the concept is spot on: producing some things is expensive in the US, perhaps too much so to be competitive.

[Spooky23]

Nobody says the company can't grow; just that they need to hire folks legally able to work in the United States.

Ask an Indian entrepreneur how easy it is to hire an US national with origins in Pakistan.

[whybroke]

There is no limit to growth there's just a limit to how little a developer will accept a job for. That is the sole limit H1B is trying to work on.

I assure you and anyone reading this, your skills are not unique nor is you talent unmatched. And even if they were, there is no way it could be discovered in our broken hiring processes. The chief attraction in these 65000 cases, so long as some vaguely plausible skill exist, is price I'm afraid.

[Madmallard]

I'm against foreign employees in all cases except when there is no available qualified individuals in the country of employment. It's ridiculous to screw over your own people for foreign help at a cheaper rate.

[prostoalex]

In a situation like this large direct employers usually take advantage of L-1 visa, which is reserved for moving existing employees between foreign and US-based offices. Outsourcing companies are at disadvantage with L-1, but so are smaller startups who don't have foreign offices.

[geebee]

Why is it better to let corporations decide who gets to live in the US and become a resident or citizen, rather than doing this by lottery?

I mean, in the absence of open borders, we have a limited number of spots available. Why should someone who wants to open a sandwich shop have lower priority than a programmer? Why should we skew things to accomodate Disney's desire to fire middle aged programmers? I think it's pretty clear we aren't talking about best and brightest here.

While I don't love the idea, I would concede that focusing on skilled immigration does make a certain amount of sense. But even then, I see no reason to give corporations the power to micromanage who gets in and who doesn't. They are, of course, free to hire any of the immigrants who come here - in fact, it would be very illegal, and rightly so, to discriminate against immigrants.