[jltsiren]

Making the process itself harder can be counterproductive.

Every system will be gamed. The ones gaming the system often stand to gain more than those the system is intended for. A visa program for skilled/talented individuals is supposed to select people who could find good opportunities elsewhere. Getting a job in the US is not a big deal for them. On the other hand, an average person who somehow manages to qualify could improve their life greatly by coming to the US. Especially if they are from a developing country.

If you add bureaucratic requirements to the visa process, make it last longer, and make it less predictable, you are effectively telling the skilled and talented people to go elsewhere. Then you get more people trying to game the system and hoping for a lucky win.

[cudgy]

> you are effectively telling the skilled and talented people to go elsewhere. Then you get more people trying to game the system and hoping for a lucky win.

Isn’t this the false argument that tech companies have been making for decades?

“Imagine all the highly talented people that companies will miss out on if we don’t have this program?“ meanwhile, the vast majority of the people being hired are average developers, many of whom are less qualified and talented than the locals. The only major distinction is the salary and now that the programs been so rampant for so long, enough of the H1B path employees are in the system that they control the hiring.

[jltsiren]

Those two are not mutually exclusive. Every country needs programs that bring in foreign talent. And there are always people who try to abuse such programs. The longer a program exist in the same form, the more successful the abusers become.

The answer is supposed to be simple. When a law no longer fulfills its purpose, you change the law. Then the abusers will have a new system to game, and they will be less successful for a while. But that doesn't happen in the US, because the Congress has long been unable or unwilling to do its job.

H-1B works pretty well for the academia. The government trusts that academic recruitment processes are competitive and reasonably meritocratic. But it has much less trust in the industry. That's why H-1B petitions from the industry are subject to the cap and the lottery, while petitions from the academia are not.

[tivert]

> Then the abusers will have a new system to game, and they will be less successful for a while. But that doesn't happen in the US, because the Congress has long been unable or unwilling to do its job.

The simple solution is to remove the employer lock-in, so once an immigrant gets in, they have 6-7 years to job hop. If an employer truly needs foreign talent that it can't get locally, they'd have to have competitive compensation and working conditions. If they don't, they just wasted the sponsorship fees. I don't think there's a way they could effectively game that (especially if you also ban contracts where the immigrant has to repay the sponsor if they job hop).

The fact that the H1B program hasn't been reformed in this way, tells me its real purpose (at least nowadays) is to provide a source of cheaper labor to undercut American workers.