[dheera]

I find the entire H-1B program somewhat ridiculously designed.

0. There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. What's the point of educating people and equipping them with everything they need to be successful in the US, advance the US (including creating lots of jobs) and then deporting them right after?

1. There should be no cap for people who are going into STEM, AI, or other jobs that are going to vastly develop the economy.

There is a cap-exempt H1B, but it's for nonprofits. It makes no sense.

[aatharuv]

There's been a massive problem of diploma mills, both in America, and even worse in Canada, where colleges have basically been admitting students for fake degrees for pay, just because it gets them work permits post graduation much more easily, as somewhat of a workaround Canadian immigration.

Canada recently has cracked down on (I believe undergraduate) student visas recently, with effectively a per-province cap. I'm not sure if Canada has a problem with diploma mills at the Master's level though.

[stackskipton]

Sometimes it's not even Diploma Mills but state schools wanting to sweet sweet foreign student money. One of my H-1B coworker got her Masters in Computer Science from University of Houston. She was competent programmer but her work and another developer work was indistinguishable. She said 97% of her class was foreign students because if you look at the program, it makes little sense for any American to go into debt to get this degree.

[selimthegrim]

I went to a few HPC/NVidia seminars there - it’s a real program but you are right about the composition.

[jedberg]

> There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US.

Agree 100%. Student visas should convert to work visas automatically on graduation from an accredited institution and be good for at least five years.

[BobaFloutist]

And work visas should have built-in naturalization paths. There's no reason a highly educated, highly contributing member of society for the past 5-10 years should risk deportation if they get laid off, or, god forbid, quit due to working conditions.

[jedberg]

My honest opinion is that you should get citizenship upon graduation or shortly thereafter, but I haven't really thought it through enough to figure out unintended consequences of that.

[dheera]

Yeah I fully agree with this. I know multiple people on H1B visas who stayed at their jobs even in the face of sexual harrassment, deteriorating physical health, and depression, because of bad job markets and the stupid 60-day rule, and some subset of them already had family and kids in the US who were already adapted to US lifestyle and not ready to be uprooted to a foreign language and culture.

All they needed was some time off and time to recuperate and then some job searching time.

There is no reason someone who is already "effectively American" from a professional perspective should be uprooted and moved. They already thrive here, they already benefit this country, they should be allowed to stay indefinitely and continue to contribute.

[the_svd_doctor]

With OPT and STEM OPT that’s _sort of_ the case, albeit for 3 years, not 5.

[dilyevsky]

I think h1b itself is limited to 5 after which you have to leave for a year unless you already filed green card application. At least that was the case back in the day

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

Higher education in the usa can be a degree mill in nebraska with no real acceptance criteria

[quatrefoil]

> There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US.

Then you're effectively creating a loophole. There would be a proliferation of private schools that accept anyone willing to pay enough $$$ and churn out barely-competent graduates just so that people have a better shot at citizenship. "Attended a school in the US" is not a good proxy for being an asset to the country.

> There should be no cap for people who are going into STEM, AI, or other jobs that are going to vastly develop the economy.

That's essentially the whole point of H-1B, and right now, they're overwhelmingly allocated to what one could generously describe as STEM professions.

[beacon294]

It's possible to require an accredited degree.

[quatrefoil]

Accreditation doesn't mean that the school is prestigious or selective, or that the degrees are useful. You have no shortage of silly and easy degrees you can pay for at accredited schools, and I don't think they should give you special immigration privileges. Communications, advertising, dance theory, you name it.

[cscurmudgeon]

You just described the problem with easy student loans.

The solution is same: tighten what qualifies for student loans and what is an asset to the country

[aidenn0]

A disturbingly large number of non-US born people I know with US degrees in STEM fields got their green-cards by marrying a friend who they had not previously been in a romantic relationship with. In many cases this was after dealing with the H-1B system for some time.

[dartharva]

Do foreign students get the same support from US government bodies for financing and scholarship as domestic students do?

Aren't almost all students paying in full for their education? Aren't they just consumers of the product American universities are selling?

[LegitShady]

>There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US.

I'm ok with that, if it comes along with the death penalty for diploma mill operators including major universities. Otherwise its not a loophole - its an open barn door.

[CPLX]

> There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US.

This has the effect of delegating decisions about who enters the country to an unelected and unaccountable group of admissions officers working at private institutions.

[kelnos]

Private and public; don't forget that there are many, many public colleges and universities in the US. And presumably this would be limited to accredited higher-education institutions; you couldn't just stand up Butts University, start issuing degrees in Flatulence and Cheekiness, and have met the criteria. And maybe it's not just anyone who graduates from a US institution; maybe limit it to certain levels of achievement, and/or certain fields that the US has interest in developing or maintaining competence or dominance in.

I get your objection about unelected/unaccountable, but this happens all the time, and is normal, expected, and unavoidable. The government very often reaches outside itself for expert opinions on things that it cannot or should not develop its own expertise in.

The current system is stupid. Educating foreigners in the US and then kicking them out (absent something with the intentions of a Fullbright, for example) is just bad policy.

[NovemberWhiskey]

No; they're already in the country, that's really the whole point. They'd still need to meet the requirements for H-1B visa.

Say you're a STEM graduate; you first got an F-1 visa to study, then you spend four years at school in the U.S. You find a job with a great firm for your OPT, and that firm immediately starts to enter the H-1B lottery on your behalf.

Based on the amount of oversubscription, there's a significant number of people who are just not going to get selected before they time out on their OPT and have no option but to leave the U.S. after seven years living here, amounting to perhaps their entire adult lives.

The fact that such people have no preference in a random lottery with others that have no investment in the U.S. at all is utterly perplexing.

[bubblethink]

That's something that the state and federal govt. can easily regulate through the Dept. of Education. The converse is more absurd. If I want to study X, and university Y wants me, why does a third party dictate anything here ?

[cscurmudgeon]

Y is located in country Z and benefits from Z's public resources. Z can dictate here.

[dheera]

No, Z invested resources in Y and Y is now a talent and economic asset to Z.

[ra7]

Students only get a visa after getting interviewed by a visa officer at a U.S. embassy/consulate. So they've already been vetted by a government official.

[jedberg]

Only if the student can graduate. And you can easily fix that by requiring a government review after school admission.

[CPLX]

We already have the OPT program. The idea of a limitless uncapped program for graduates is a different thing entirely.

[pandaman]

> What's the point of educating people and equipping them with everything they need to be successful in the US, advance the US (including creating lots of jobs) and then deporting them right after?

Making money for the schools where they go? Foreign student, studying in the US, come here on an F visa, and to obtain such a visa one has to prove that he or she has such strong ties to the home country that they cannot possibly stay in the US after graduation and need to quickly come back and use the education at home.

[VirusNewbie]

What? Why would a degree matter. Either an employee is worth sponsoring or they aren't, regardless of degree. Degrees are largely a waste of time.