This is actually a fantastic experiment to evaluate whether people are employed on H1-Bs because of a shortage which can't be met locally, or because indentured workers are cheaper. Ideally there would be another cohort, allocated randomly, where the employee is not tied to any one employer, like a temporary green card.<p>It is fallacious to say that with decreased supply, demand will dictate wages will go up. It is quite possible that demand is elastic at a particular price point, but at higher prices demand falls to zero (aka set up an office in Canada). There is no reason to assume linearity in any of this.<p>What's missing is that, even with the potential for high wages after graduation, it is still a big risk for an individual to borrow for a college education. These employers should be taxed, perhaps 10% of their H1-B expenditure, with that tax subsidising education in that field.
> The reality is that some H-1B workers such as an IT analyst would need a starting salary of $208,000 to be eligible – a massive jump over the previous requirement.<p>> An entry-level programmer would need to make $111,946 instead of the previous $78,125.<p>The title is kind of misleading and inaccurate.
I was planning on going down to the states (I'm living in BC Canada), the salaries down there are more than 2x what you can get here. It doesn't look like I'll be able to do that now. With this said, this move by your current administration makes a lot of sense to me, there is an opportunity to grow the American middle class around knowledge work. The United States has the best training institutions and capital structures in the world. They have a healthy demographic profile (they are maintaining their population), there is no reason for them to spoil their own job market with injections of foreign labour. I see no reason for them not to train and hire their own citizens.
Basically the administration turned the tables on Big Tech. They primarily import H1Bs to dilute the employment pool to let the market take care of wage depression. There is plenty of tech talent pipeline inside the country. Just look at the eager undergrads looking for employment and other US citizens looking to step into tech field via boot camps. Increasing the threshold for the wages to paid for “specialty occupation for which several attempts have been made to hire US Citizens” aka H1B makes the test true to the spirit of the law.
Please forgive me for my lacking knowledge of the US immigration system, but does this mean that folks on H-1B currently waiting for a green card must withdraw their applications the next time their H-1B expires unless their salaries are greater than this threshold? Are there any publicly available numbers on how much of the insane GC backlog (greater than a 100 years for Indian nationals) this might affect?
Allocating the h1bs by how much the receiving companies are willing to pay is solid.<p>The real issue is decent the number of h1bs, and thus the cutoff
One demographic this policy seems to unintentionally trample is international students. There’s a pretty well-trod path of F1 Visa -> OPT -> (OPT STEM Extension) -> H1B -> (green card, if you’re from the right country). It’s a tall order to expect that all new grads from this path will be able to command such high salaries, and there’s an existing set of international students who have planned their lives on being able to get the H1B before OPT runs out.<p>In my opinion, we should encourage immigration through our higher-education system (and we have been doing so for decades). I generally agree that the loopholes allowing for below-market H1B roles should be closed, but I think that students/recent graduates should be treated differently. There’s a big difference between sourcing lower-wage foreign workers who don’t already have roots in the USA, and paying entry-level salaries to recent graduates who’ve been living in the US for years already.<p>Of course, some may take issue with the premise here, and might say that the F1 shouldn’t be issued with intent to immigrate. But I think that’s terrible policy; nearly all of my (uniformly brilliant, top-shelf) friends who came here on F1 had horrendous, soul-crushing experiences with work authorization, even though they provide tremendous value to companies and the country by being here.
I am no fan of Trump but this is an interesting experiment. It seems like a last minute grab bag for votes and it would have been more interesting if it happened 2 years ago.
Seems like this would be a problem for smaller companies (not much cash) and startups (remuneration is stock based).<p>Large companies can absorb the cost if someone is that important. They can also just employ remotely and do an internal company transfer later (L-something visa).<p>I mean the big people it screws are those companies that abuse the system - the IT "consulting" companies, that are functionally a market undercutting scam.
This is good atleast now Indians will stay in India and develop our country instead of going to the US and contributing to a country which is already ahead in everyway.