[handoflixue]

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?

[colmmacc]

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.

[jalapenos]

That visa is literally the "hot chicks are OK" visa. Melania Trump is a famous example.

[AuthError]

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

[austhrow743]

What does overindexing on the swe market mean?

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?

[dotnet00]

Not at all. Salaries aren't just a function of talent availability, they're also a function of capital availability.

[AuthError]

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)

[jalapenos]

You're not genuinely curious because it's obviously stupid that we'd need H1B visas for artists.

If their art's got enough value to be valuable in the real sense, they're well above all this. Otherwise they're nothing.