[jedberg]

It seems like it would be so easy to fix the H1-B program but no one wants to and I feel like I must be missing something. The purpose of the H1-B is to allow companies to hire foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens.

So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?

Let any company apply and list a salary which they have to agree to pay for at least two years, and then just issue them highest salary first until they hit the quota for the year. No country based quotas or any other kind. Just straight up salary. And make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.

If people are so skilled then they must be valuable, right? This would be good for both the employee and the country, bringing in the most highly paid people.

The only ones that would get hurt in this process are the companies that abuse the system to underpay people and then get them beholden to the company.

[tomrod]

Some pushback on your logic chain:

> foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens

This is honestly rare, unless you couple it with a wage level that is lower than the domestic market will bear. Some individuals involved in R&D, but outside of that there are few skills that are not found in the US. I believe the condition isn't not found, but rather, in low supply?

> make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.

This would be a huge boon.

[hirvi74]

In my experience, the special skills that many foreigners tend to have that many Americans do not is the ability to tolerate absolute and utter bullshit. I'm not kidding.

I am not satisfied with my job/employer -- bad environment, bad culture, etc.. I have coworkers from all over. Of the non-US native ones that I interact with, they all absolutely love our job and/or employer.

I've asked them about it, and I generally get the sense that I could not survive in the conditions from which they originally came -- both at work and outside of work.

If a dumb drone like me could figure that out, then I am sure plenty of employers found out long before me.

[rayiner]

> Of the non-US native ones that I interact with, they all absolutely love our job and/or employer. I've asked them about it, and I generally get the sense that I could not survive in the conditions from which they originally came -- both at work and outside of work

My dad’s an H1. (Before they created H1B in 1990.) He grew up in a village in Bangladesh. One out of five kids died by the age of five. He came in as a skilled worker and was an elite within our country—but that meant his parents owned land in a third world village and he went to school (but it had no walls). Both my parents sound like Breitbart when Gen Z or work from home or work life balance comes up. (And they’re Democrats!) My dad’s bullish on China “because they know how to work hard like Americans used to.”

And so do I! I didn’t grow up in a village, but I grew up with my dad, who made clear that there’s 16 work-hours in a day. I’m an absolute company man. So is my brother, who was born here. So is his wife, who was born here but whose family fled communism in China. My kids are growing up hearing my dad talk about taking a boat to school during monsoon season.

At some point the memory will fade. Maybe my grandkids. But in the meantime, how many more H1Bs will they have brought over?

[appplication]

This comment made me realize sometimes I’m such an entitled shit. Lately I’d been feeling legitimately depressed that I seem to have hit a career plateau, despite that plateau occurring at a very generous salary.

[rayiner]

You shouldn’t feel bad for having higher expectations.

[bilekas]

> In my experience, the special skills that many foreigners tend to have that many Americans do not is the ability to tolerate absolute and utter bullshit. I'm not kidding.

This actually made me giggle a little bit and while I have seen this, what I've seen more of is that a company hiring internally has offshore employees who have a vast amount of company specific info and experience that the company simply can't hire for. That only applies to internal transfers of course but it's what I see the most of.

[p_l]

Internal transfers that have such knowledge don't go on H-1B though, but L-1B

[bilekas]

Ah okay, I haven't done the process myself so mixed it up! Good to know though !

[p_l]

It's how big tech with multinational offices manages to handle lack of enough H-1B, among other things.

You hire someone in local office for a year, then arrange L-1B visa which has no numerical issuance limits - but requires at least one year of previous employment with the company sponsoring the visa.

There's also L-1A which IIRC doesn't require time in company but is limited only to upper management in practice.

[nine_k]

The foreigners with special skills for which it's really hard to hire someone in the US, even for a lot of money. Maybe if you agree to pay $1M / mo, you'll have them leave their current jobs and flock to you, but will your business still stay profitable?

Hence the idea of prevailing wage, and paying somehow above that.

This of course creates an avenue to game the system, because prevailing wage for basically any work in SF or NYC is likely higher than on average over the entire US. You can undercut local markets a bit by bringing in smart people from abroad, and paying them less than they would make in SF or NYC if hired as locals, but more that the country-wide average.

(Smart, hard-working, educated people from underprivileged places get a chance of having a better life while working to improve the US economy! What's not to like?)

[remarkEon]

I'm a little confused with your logic here. You're saying that businesses are looking for these allegedly rare skill sets, which do exist in the US but only at excessively high wages (your "$1M / mo" hypothetical/exaggeration). So the solution is to bring in H1Bs and pay them less (or what's affordable for the company).

How does this not, by definition, depress what would otherwise be the prevailing wage for these "rare" skill sets in the US?

[rayiner]

> Smart, hard-working, educated people from underprivileged places get a chance of having a better life while working to improve the US economy! What's not to like?

Lots of things if people thought about it for more than 10 seconds. Why do you think the US has such uniquely bad work life balance even in white collar sectors? And those educated people are in the top 1-2% of their home countries. What’s it going to your country to import a bunch of foreign elites with chips on their shoulder?

If what you care about is maximizing profits for Fortune 500 companies, then yeah, maybe it’s a good thing.

[ojbyrne]

H1Bs are transferrable. I did it at least twice.

[arcticbull]

Transfers are cap-exempt, but the new employer still needs to file LCA and hence do the prevailing wage determination. You're effectively applying for a new H-1B for the balance of the time remaining on the first one, exempt from the cap. [1]

[1] https://flag.dol.gov/programs/LCA

[pyuser583]

Experienced coders don’t magically appear because salaries go up.

[hcks]

They actually do?

[Glyptodon]

Low supply should mean that it's not available unless wages are a lot more above market. Which lives well with highest pay first.

[0xcde4c3db]

The thing you're "missing" is that it absolutely is, in practice, about laundering low-wage foreign labor. It's not actually complicated. It's obfuscation of exploitation. Same as it ever was. You're just not supposed to believe that your country is doing that.

[quatrefoil]

A lion's share of H-1Bs go to big tech companies where people make $250k a year or more. And where total comp of $400k+ is common for senior roles, with no regard for visa status.

Yes, it alters market dynamics and the whole reason it's done is that the same skills are not available domestically for that price (or at all) - but talking about "low-wage labor" and "exploitation" as the whole point of the program is pretty rich.

[red_admiral]

I'm going to disagree here. Looking just at tech, it's possible to have huge compensation and still exploitative working conditions, like unofficial expectations of unlimited overtime and being available 24/7 and putting up with abuse from others in the company.

Rachelbythebay wrote about this in 2018: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/09/08/visa/ if your company decides they don't want you anymore, you have _ten days_ to get a new sponsored job or be out of the country. If you're being bullied or harassed or otherwise treated badly and your employer knows full well they can have you kicked out of the country in under two weeks, would you really speak up?

For an extreme example, see Susan J Fowler's https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on... . Fowler had the luck to be a US citizen, so she could go public without being deported. (She also says she got another job offer less than a week later.) Would the next person in this situation, but on a H-1B visa be able to do the same?

[0xcde4c3db]

> A lion's share of H-1Bs go to big tech companies where people make $250k a year or more. And where total comp of $400k+ is common for senior roles, with no regard for visa status.

Since you're apparently so acquainted with the stats, please enlighten us outsiders: what percentage of H-1B employees make $250K a year or more, and what percentage of H-1B employees make $400K+?

[dilyevsky]

This data is actually public and scrapable. Here’s a (non-official) chart for CA:

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/H1B-Salary--in-Califor...

Considering US DOL didn’t count stock comp for prevailing wage (at least last i checked) it would not surprise me if over 50% do in fact clear 250k in total gross comp

[wenc]

You can Google it. Few people seem to know this and love to argue in circles about what H1bs make but all H1B salary data is public.

You can even search by company and see how much your colleagues make for each job title (no names though)

Strange but true.

[dixie_land]

Not being hyperbolic, ALL of H1B friends I personally know makes 250+ total comp. Many makes around that in base salary. ( most my friends are late 20 and early 30s )

[trimethylpurine]

Are they really doing jobs that Americans wouldn't or couldn't do for that amount? Honestly curious about your opinion, since they are your friends.

[thomasahle]

Why would companies go through the hassle of getting H1B workers, if they could hire Americans for the same job at the same amount?

Clearly there has to be either a shortage of the type of worker, or the Americans want a higher pay.

[dixie_land]

As another commenter mentioned you may or may not consider my experience as selection bias. So with that out of the way:

- all H1B friends I know obviously are from work; I used to work at one of the FAANGs - these friends are in late 20s and above, so at least SDE 2 if not more senior - you can verify at levels.fyi that 250+ TC is normal for these roles

I'm interviewing a lot for my company and I recall in the height of the hiring boom that peaked around 21, we really are throwing out 200-300 TCs for fresh graduates, Americans or not

[htrp]

Selection bias.

[darth_avocado]

H1B salaries are public, but with the caveat that it only includes the base salary. So if you see someone getting paid $170k at Amazon, they actually make $170k + bonus at their level + equity that is almost as big as their salary. You can look at the public salaries, and compare them to the base of what people at their level get at the company they work for using levels.fyi to figure out how much they get paid.

[Glyptodon]

In my area the top H1 salaries are mostly doctors and radiologists in the $200k to $500k range, but a huge chunk of the overall H1s go to teachers making sub $50k/yr. Along with random stuff like aircraft mechanics (also sub $50k) and postdocs (sub $60k). But a lot of random ones seem like scams - school district has a computer lab technician at $36k, for example.

[29athrowaway]

That's false. The H-1B database is public and you can look at the wages yourself.

https://h1bdata.info/

Those are real salaries from LCAs, not self reported salaries.

[sratner]

Without any claim to the accuracy of the data, there is no incentive to list a salary on the LCA that is higher than required. You can always pay more, never less, so it only limits future flexibility. I have certainly paid higher salaries to individuals than what's listed on their LCA, not to mention total packages which aren't stated on the LCA.

[29athrowaway]

Sure, it does not list total compensation.

But it is still more credible than self reporting.

[tonmoy]

Because then the agricultural company in Alabama wanting to hire the brightest chemist will be at a disadvantage compared to the IT firm in California. Forgetting about the cost of living adjustments for each area the industry wide disruption alone may not be worth it

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

A disadvantage in what way? Unless I'm missing something this just sounds like markets being markets. As a worker, why would I accept a job that pays less and requires me to live in Alabama if I can do better?

[dalyons]

Because chemistry and IT/swe are not the same jobs. And America also needs chemists

[trimethylpurine]

Based on pay, I would guess chemists aren't in demand.

[saagarjha]

That’s not how the market works. It doesn’t go “oh we need chemists let’s increase their pay and they’ll flock here”. It goes “oh I guess we let our science skills rot for 20 years it seems really hard to do chemistry now let’s pivot the business into a glorified real estate holding and invest in those ad companies that seem to have good ROI”.

[trimethylpurine]

>I guess we let our science skills rot for 20 years.

Americans are world leaders among chemists, so I don't think you're correct in this case [1].

It looks much more like saturation, with only 7200 openings per year [2]. And over 13000 annual graduates [3].

We have an excess of chemists in the US, as best I can tell, and we should expect pay to reflect that.

[1] https://research.com/news-events/world-ranking-of-top-chemis...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/che...

[3] https://cen.acs.org/education/graduate-education/numbers-s-c...

[selimthegrim]

Ex-chemist, can confirm.

[kube-system]

Based on pay, you'd think childcare is in low demand and astronomers are in high demand. But that would be wrong.

[trimethylpurine]

Based on pay I wouldn't think that astronomers are in high demand, and neither does the Bureau of Labor [1].

Child care labor is in fact in low demand [2].

I think child care is expensive because insurance is expensive.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Life-Physical-and-Social-Science/Phy...

[2]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/childcare-...

[29athrowaway]

If there is more demand for chemists, the wages will go up which in turn will incentivize more Americans to pursue being chemist as a career.

[kube-system]

To a point, they will. However, the amount they can rise is capped by other economic factors. e.g. If wage pressure goes beyond a businesses ability to pay, they can't hire. This then leads to businesses ceasing operations and hiring nobody.

[15457345234]

> wages will go up

The issue is that tech can pay exorbitant salaries compared to physical-world companies as the product they're producing has infinite reach and is often 'evergreen'

It's the same issue as investment banking; when you can almost literally print the money you're paying salaries with you can hire everyone at any price.

The issue is, that leads to the smartest people in the country all ending up at 'virtual' industries and you discover eventually you don't have an economy, you just have a giant video game.

[medvezhenok]

You just have to turn off the money printer and watch the tech money dry up

(What we’re seeing now)

[selimthegrim]

No, they try to rebrand as “quantitative bioscientists” or “molecular engineers” and cross their fingers and hope for postbac students who weren’t chemists because they don’t believe in their own curriculum anymore.

[horns4lyfe]

America HAS chemists.

[ok123456]

Have a different auction for different worker skill classifications.

[tivert]

> So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?

As others have pointed out, you're assuming highest salary == most valuable, but what your idea will lead to is a bunch of talented people working on new ways to get people to click ads or write yet-another trading algorithm.

IMHO, you'd fix the H1-B program by doing two things:

1. Eliminate the requirement that the visa-holder have a sponsor past the start date, so the they can quit immediately and take a different job if they are underpaid or the working conditions are poor. That will eliminate any potential exploitation enforced by the program.

2. Limit the sponsors to legitimate US-based companies who will employ the workers for in-house work. Working out a precise definition may be hard, but it should be possible because it's pretty clear when we see it. Basically, something to prevent foreign contracting/outsourcing companies from even using the program.

[CalRobert]

I have the opposite experience, I guess, as a US citizen who immigrated to Ireland, but after putting in my two years with the company that sponsored me and getting the right to work without sponsorship I left within a month for a 50% raise (actually more like 150% but I got lucky on stock) and full remote (before full remote was normal).

A lot of the appeal of an immigrant is that they can't quit or take a better deal.

[tivert]

> A lot of the appeal of an immigrant is that they can't quit or take a better deal.

Exactly, the whole point of my proposal is to undermine that appeal. An H1-B program structured like I propose would mean that employers would only sponsor immigrants when they truly can't get employees with the needed skills domestically at the real market rate.

[CalRobert]

We agree! I phrased my response clumsily, I meant my experience was the opposite in that I emigrated from the US instead of immigrating to it. I like living in Europe but it likely came with $2 million or so in opportunity cost, especially since I'm from norcal...

[fishtoaster]

Another goal (as I understand it) of the H1-B process is to allow foreigners who've come to the US for school to stay here and work after they've graduated. This seems (IMO) better than training a bunch of valuable people, then having them immediately go back home.

A system based entirely on salary would bias towards only senior roles, preventing the handling of that scenario at all.

[karmasimida]

> So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?

Because industries pay differently. Unless you argue H1Bs all go to big techs.

The problem with H1B program is, no matter how it is structured, it WILL be gamed.

[nmca]

The point is that paying more isn't gaming the system

(and to be super explicit, yes if the US were to choose to allocate 25k annual h1b by ranked wage & thus all 25k were to go to various flavours of computer programmer or financial modeller, that seems totally fine)

[sverhagen]

I have no stake in the discussion, but "pay their talent the most" could be among comparable job titles, or something like that?

[quatrefoil]

Then it's a race to the bottom with titles. You're no longer a software engineer, you're a "computer technician".

H-1B is probably one of the most gamed and abused visa categories, perhaps next to marriage-related stuff.

[sciencesama]

But there are very few that are handed out !! Compared to illegal and marriage related ones and the bar is pretty high !!

[TheCoelacanth]

How is that a problem? If they aren't willing to pay as much, then obviously they don't need it as much.

[sfifs]

The purpose of H1B is to keep wages in control amongst highly qualified American workers so that owners and executives can create a more competitive financial advantage in P&L and stock price juicing

I'm surprised even in HN we are taking PR at face value.

[saltcured]

The problem with replacing a lottery with a salary ranked cutoff is that all skills do not exist on a single linear axis proportional to economic value. It is not as if all academics are currently highest paid across the economy, so why would that be true of imported academics?

To me, an ideal skilled worker system would define quota categories by skill/job at a much finer granularity, i.e. hundreds or thousands of different H1-B sub-categories somehow weighted by policies rooted in national strategic interest.

Maybe some kind of blinded auction process that could minimize abuse. Both potential employer and employee go through some vetting process and post their needs/skills using a standard ontology. Then, a matchmaker assigns job offers that are binding. You might allow either party to reject the offer and go back into the matchmaking pool for a limited period or number of offers before they are evicted with a cooling-off period before they are allowed to reapply.

You would also need some kind of anti-abuse audit. Otherwise, malignant players could establish esoteric job requirements via covert channel and then mislabel both the worker and the position to try to force the matchmaker's hand. How do you distinguish a truly rare skill from covert ear-marking?

[elashri]

> It is not as if all academics are currently highest paid across the economy, so why would that be true of imported academics?

I think that academic positions are already exempt from H1-B restrictions. To be more specific, these will be exempted [1]

- a higher educational institution

- a nonprofit entity related to or affiliated with a higher educational institution, or a nonprofit research

- organisation or a government research organisation

[1] https://www.nnuimmigration.com/h1b-cap-exempt/

[elevatedastalt]

They are only exempt from the yearly quota (aka 'cap'). They still result in foreign talent being brought in so if your concern is about displacing the labor pool that still applies.

[dilyevsky]

Firstly, your assumption seems to be that it’s broken but I don’t think uscis or most other participants actually share that opinion. What they need to fix is fraud and you can have fraud in any system including the one you proposed.

Secondly, h1b is not just a working visa - it’s officially a “dual intent” visa meaning it’s also a path to immigration. If we do what you are suggesting then 99.99% of applicants will be senior-principal sw engs from china/india. Which, i assume, is not the intention of this program.

Besides, companies already have to pay over prevailing wage for the role in the area. I don’t think you can just conjure up expert professionals out of thin air by raising wages despite what folks on hn/reddit seem to believe. We tried that in 2021 - didn’t work too well

[proudeu]

Yeah junior devs that barely can use css being paid 200k was quite common sight at the height of pandemic bubble. Most of them are gone now though. I guess that’s why HN seems to be in slightly more bitter mood nowadays than in the past 2-3 years

[COGlory]

Or we could pay grad students and post docs actual wages and have no skill shortages.

[nrmitchi]

It’s because the positions that talent may not exist for (but is needed) isn’t necessarily as profitable (and can’t pay as much) as other industries under the same program.

Basing on salary alone would mean ~100% of visas go to tech talent in major cities, and every other profession is cast aside.

That’s not to say that ranking based on salary within an industry wouldn’t be a potential improvement. Or modifying caps to be industry based. There are definitely options here that could be a bit more surgical.

[tziki]

Salaries vary by field. You can be an incredibly talented animation artist but you'll still get paid less than the average software engineer.

[nmca]

right, but that's approximately because one is less valuable modulo the adjustment period and some noise.

[tziki]

Wrong, it's because being an animation artist is much more often a career of passion, which brings down the salaries in the industry due to increased labor supply.

[vsskanth]

Administration A introduced a rule prioritizing higher wage levels, got blocked by the courts and Administration B rescinded it.

[NanoYohaneTSU]

According to your logic the H1-B program doesn't need to exist at all then. You can find all special skills within US Citizens. However what happens is that companies deny interviewees the chance so they can obtain H1-B workers for cheaper or for political power.

We need to abolish the program completely.

[next_xibalba]

The fact that the U.S. immigration system is so obviously broken is the topic on which I am most vulnerable to conspiracy theories. It just makes no sense. From the Southern border to H1-B, it looks designed to anger and disappoint every single stakeholder (excepting the businesses who employ illegal immigrants for poor wages).

[nostromo]

Because the major donors for both parties support illegal immigration.

Republican donors enjoy the labor of illegal immigration which is much cheaper than domestic labor. Any crack down on unauthorized workers in agriculture or hospitality, for example, would disrupt lots of big donors.

Democratic donors have openly stated that demographic changes would help them win more elections. These are the "demographics are destiny" folks that noted that increasing hispanic populations are good for them in elections. (If you're not winning enough votes, change the voters.) There was a lot of truth here -- just look at California, New Mexico, and Arizona elections from the 80s and 90s vs today. Recent polling suggests this may be changing.

So you end up in a strange situation where policies supported by the vast majority of Americans from all political stripes is (mostly) ignored by the parties.

[olliej]

> Democratic donors have openly stated that demographic changes would help them win more elections.

How does "illegal immigration" impact this? You know undocumented workers cannot vote, right? Hell, you know documented, legal, residents also cannot vote? The only people who get to vote in US elections are US citizens.

Demographics shifts obviously help the modern DNC, for the same reason it helped the GOP a century ago: Conservatism is definitionally rooted in having minimal demographic variance (be it race, gender, religion, or whatever), so if you have two parties one of which says "only this group matters" and the other says "more than that one group matters", then increasing the demographic variation will always favor the latter, because for anyone not in the ideal conservative demographic will see that party as actively targeting them.

It's also important to be careful when saying "look at elections from the past", because a lot of laws were passed in many countries in the late 20th century to address a variety of biased laws that impacted the voting power of targeted blocks. In the US there was redlining which prevented specific demographics from voting in specific areas of the country, coupled with extensive gerrymandering this allows large scale disenfranchisement that is still being undone by the courts today, even though redlining itself became "illegal" in the 80s. There are a wide array of actions that occurred in the states you're talking about through the decades you referenced and onwards to now, that both made it possible for demographics to shift where previously people were functionally banned, and to reduce the disenfranchisement of demographics that were already present. None of that resulted in "illegal immigrants" impacting elections though, because again, non-citizens cannot vote in US elections (even though they pay taxes in the country that produced "no taxation without representation").

As an additional note, because of US government representation being determined by total population, and not "legal voters" the abuse of biased law enforcement is hits multiple times: first off victims of that bias lose representation, but then regions that get prisons get increased voting power. If you're in a region with 1000 people, but have a prison that has 5000 prisoners, then you get the congressional representation that comes from 6000 people, but only 1000 of them get to vote. Again, prisoners should be able to vote. Felons should be able to vote. Ex-cons should be allowed to vote. If there are enough of those groups to impact election outcomes, then it's a reasonable assumption that law enforcement is being used as a tool to restrict voting rights (Something that multiple people from the Nixon and Reagan administrations have explicitly stated was the reason for how the "war on drugs" was set up).

[nostromo]

While migrants can’t vote in national elections, they are counted in the census (California has an additional four or five seats in congress just from illegal immigration, for example).

Secondly, the children of illegal immigrants are citizens and can vote. It takes decades for this strategy to pan out obviously. It can be sped up by family unification policies once an immigrant has a child citizen.

[olliej]

> While migrants can’t vote in national elections, they are counted in the census

Much like prisoners and legal non-citizen residents.

> Secondly, the children of illegal immigrants are citizens and can vote.

People born in the US - children of citizens, of legal residents, and of undocumented are all citizens because that's the only how the colonies justified their right to govern the territory they colonized. If you remove birthright citizenship the overwhelming majority of people in the US would not have any right to citizenship, and in fact most "illegal immigrants" would have a much stronger claim to governance and/or citizenship than pretty much every other group.

The fact that some people now find it inconvenient that the rules that were helpful to them now help a different group is irrelevant to that.

Moreover arguing that illegal immigrants are human (let's be clear here, the DNC is anti-immigrants as well, Obama deported more people than bush or trump), is not the same as being "pro-illegal immigrant".

You could make the same argument that conservative states weakening penalties for assault, removing women's bodily autonomy, fighting against actual sex ed, defunding education, etc are similarly a grand plan to increase the representation for conservative states.

[olliej]

An employee with an H1-B is definitionally not an illegal immigrant. H1-Bs are definitionally documented legal workers, the companies using undocumented workers are not companies interested in getting visas.

The solution to the "apparent" scourge of undocumented workers is to make it so that the people running companies the use that undocumented labor are the ones who go to jail, and in the event ICE finds undocumented labor the minimum fine for the company should be a significantly greater than one multiple of the amount the company would have had to pay a documented worker, in addition to ensuring the undocumented workers are fully compensated at the amount a documented worker would have been paid. Threatening to report them to immigration, underpaying, and wage theft are all clear evidence that the company knows they were employing people who were not allowed to work.

That's all that would be needed. Instead of ever more draconian penalties for the undocumented workers - many of whom have lived in the US for essentially their entire lives at this point, and simply don't have a choice - the penalties that should be being increased are the ones that apply to the employers. It's great because it will stop all that evil undocumented labor people claim to hate, because now these employers have to pay the undocumented labor if anything more than documented labor, because undocumented labor can report unsafe or illegal working conditions, come out fully compensated and in addition to those costs the employer has to pay even more in fines, while the managers and executives who knowingly employed said laborers go to jail.

That said as we've seen in Florida, plenty of businesses in America have set themselves up to be unable to operate without violating the law, so when Florida started passing its various "lets punish the workers, but not those that employ them" laws a whole bunch of businesses couldn't handle the idea of capitalism and complained about how they couldn't get any workers.

[bombcar]

It’s not even really a conspiracy. The status quo is good for many and so it continues because people don’t care enough (or are persuaded to care in ways that others want them to).

[kmeisthax]

The system as it currently stands was a quick hack on the prior, explicitly racist immigration system we had before the Civil Rights Act. To be clear, there was no Congressional will for racially equitable immigration at the time. They wanted to keep the immigration system white without having to have the words "white race" in the text of the bill. So instead they changed the system to heavily favor family sponsorship, under the idea that white people would just keep sponsoring other white people and that would keep the system white.

Now, it'll probably be a shock to you, but these family sponsorship visas actually make America's immigrant pool way less white. It may not feel like it if you're trying to get an immigrant visa on an employment basis, but America is actually one of the easiest countries to immigrate to if you have relatives here. Other developed countries are far more selective and bureaucratic.

The trick is to recognize that nobody agrees on what part of the system is actually broken. The DNC said the quiet part out loud[0], but the GOP has been thinking for decades that immigration was just a way to dilute Republican voters. A good chunk of the GOP thinks the problem is that it's too easy to immigrate and we need to become like Japan[1]. Another chunk doesn't care about immigrants, but they want to end illegal immigration by any means necessary. The DNC wants, at a minimum, immigration amnesty with a path to citizenship[3]. And then you have business interests that maximally exploit immigrants, legal or otherwise. None of those positions are reconcilable in a way that will produce an immigration bill that will pass the House, Senate, and President Biden.

[0] "Demographics is destiny", which was DNC-speak for "Hillary Clinton can't possibly lose because we have enough Mexicans in California".

[1] As a massive weeaboo[2] I do not understand why anyone would want to adopt Japanese immigration standards.

[2] "Japanophile", but a different, derogatory term I won't use; wordfiltered by 4chan to a word they stole from https://pbfcomics.com/comics/weeaboo/

[3] Keep in mind that there are two classes of illegal immigration:

- People who just moved in without the proper visa, have been here for decades, have no intention of going back, and are already integrated with their local communities. Deporting them would be needlessly cruel.

- Agricultural companies who are importing massive amounts of day laborers from Mexico to avoid having to pay minimum wage

You can argue that the former should have amnesty while still wanting to have a functional minimum wage law by stopping the latter.

[lmm]

> So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?

Because then the acceptance rate would be x% for people from India, y% from China, and 0.001% for everywhere else, which would be politically untenable.

[bubblethink]

H1B does not have country caps. So the acceptance rate is already that based on the distribution of applicants. You are thinking of green cards, which do have country caps, and that's why this whole set up is quite asinine. It creates a large immigrant population with limited rights and no realistic path to permanent residency.

[lmm]

> So the acceptance rate is already that based on the distribution of applicants.

Currently it's a lottery which you can at least argue is fair in the sense that every applicant has an equal chance. If they made it so that only the highest paid were accepted, that would skew the distribution much further.