[BobaFloutist]

Work visas of this type should pretty clearly provide a path to at least permanent residency, otherwise the workers are captive employees, and, in any case, highly educated skilled workers that an employer is arguing they can't replace out of resident populations seem like a population that even people that want restrictions on immigration would consider good candidates for it.

[koolba]

H1B should be an annual auction so that the fair market value is captured by the country as a whole. Existing employers should be required to pay the latest market price to maintain their visas.

That would boost wages for all other workers and discriminatorily raise costs against orgs that do not want to “hire American”.

[davidw]

Markets and auctions are often good ways of allocating things, but a big flaw with this is that there is still some arbitrary, "magic number" of H1B visas to auction. The current number is not derived from anything empirical, it's just a number some politicians picked.

[koolba]

> The current number is not derived from anything empirical, it's just a number some politicians picked.

That’s fine too. If it’s too low, companies can lobby to have it increased. If it’s too high, workers can lobby to have it reduced.

[davidw]

That's thinking of it like some kind of optimal number though, which really isn't the case anyway.

There is no fixed sized pie. How many big tech companies were founded or run by immigrants or their children?

[koolba]

There’s absolutely an optimal number. It’s whatever number the citizen’s as a whole decide that number to be. That’s the de facto optimal number.

The auction system to maximize the fees collected would apply regardless of the number of visas.

[davidw]

That's not really how these kinds of things are decided in the US.

[salamandersss]

I would argue path to PR on humanitarian grounds, but not citizen centric ones. It's probably ideal from a citizen's perspective to be like Dubai and attract talent with easy professional temp visas and then shitcan them the second they run out of money or become inconvenient.

[jmspring]

Actually, if there are (and there are usually are) citizens with the skillset, the person on the visa should not be hired. And these visas are used by companies to not hire those with the same skills.

The various body shops are one thing, but I've seen multiple large companies where they have incompetent individuals of the same nationality under a manager (maybe second level) as well - whole teams. 75+% on H1b. These are "wage draining" visas, not special skillsets.

If it was actually special skillsets, I agree with you.

[sokoloff]

I thought an H1B is a dual-intent visa and has a documented path towards permanent residency. Does it not?

[SpicyLemonZest]

Dual-intent just means that you're allowed to be interested in permanent residency. If you have a B-2 visitor visa, for example, customs won't let you into the country if you tell them you're hoping to stay. The actual process of permanent residency has to come from a separate program, such as the PERM one Apple used here.