Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
Genuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?
Interestingly, there's a whole category of H1B visas just for fashion models. H-1B3, which is for models with "distinguished merit and ability".
A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.
Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.
this also holds true for chemical, biomedical researchers, mechanical engineers working in deep tech, software engineering is such an anomaly that it's hard to do income based lottery without overindexing on swe market
If these other professions don’t pay as much as swe, then doesn’t that indicate that domestic supply is meeting those industries needs better than it is swe?
or it doesn't have software like margins so you can't pay insane salaries and you still need great talent that's not available in us (those salaries might be higher than normal but it won't match swe salaries)
Top 1% of artists have the O1 route, not the H1B route.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
Yes, and the usual suspects already abuse it to move jobs abroad. If you had observed, it's often multinationals, usually Indian consultancies or companies with Indian Capability Centers, which abuse the H1B. They'll just be forced to switch to the L1.
The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.
Why not filter it by ISIC&ISCO codes (if sector not in whitelisted ISIC code or job not in whitelisted ISCO code, automatic reject of company's immigrant worker request with return code "domestic talent exists")?
Why get hung out on the example profession and not the fact that some jobs pay drastically disproportionate rates?
Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.
In that case some technical aspects needs rework...
Currently O1 visa being a nonimmigrant visa have no path to PR/citizenship (unlike H1Bs) and need annual renewal. This make it unattractive to "who possess extraordinary ability".
Yes, but even for people eligible for EB1A (it usually has a higher bar in practice, EB2/NIW is easier but way worse backlog), filing a (or according to some lesser stringent interpretation, having an approved) I-140, will make you have immigration intent and thus illegible for extension of any nonimmigration visa.
So you apply for green card and if you don't immediately get it (particularly because of the backlog for some countries), you have to leave the US.
(I'm not an immigration lawyer and these are only my personal interpretation).
AI literally produces more mesmerising art, for pennies, than an artist ever could, because their whole shtick was "out-there visual concepts", which was a wide open space of anything that's "not normal", which now and AI can pump out copiously.