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by jltsiren
561 days ago
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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. |
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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.