<a href="https://archive.ph/DiYAk" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.ph/DiYAk</a><p><i>It’s not just a matter of enticing new immigrants but of retaining bright minds already in the country. In 2009, a Turkish graduate of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erdal Arikan, published a paper that solved a fundamental problem in information theory, allowing for much faster and more accurate data transfers. Unable to get an academic appointment or funding to work on this seemingly esoteric problem in the United States, he returned to his home country. As a foreign citizen, he would have had to find a U.S. employer interested in his project to be able to stay.</i><p><i>Back in Turkey, Arikan turned to China. It turned out that Arikan’s insight was the breakthrough needed to leap from 4G telecommunications networks to much faster 5G mobile internet services. Four years later, China’s national telecommunications champion, Huawei, was using Arikan’s discovery to invent some of the first 5G technologies. Today, Huawei holds over two-thirds of the patents related to Arikan’s solution—10 times more than its nearest competitor. And while Huawei has produced one-third of the 5G infrastructure now operating around the world, the United States does not have a single major company competing in this race. Had the United States been able to retain Arikan—simply by allowing him to stay in the country instead of making his visa contingent on immediately finding a sponsor for his work—this history might well have been different.</i>
We don’t even have to recruit. We can just fix the catastrophically broken skilled worker visa program.<p>Attach it to a person not a company.
Advanced degree or comparable skill and a job offer should be sufficient.
Simplify it so a person can do it without resorting to $10k in legal fees.
Remove the cap, actively police and slap down companies abusing of the system instead.
Find the program properly so it is fast.
I’ve got a friend with an advanced degree in comp sci. I referred him to a FAANG company. He got an offer. He had to leave the country and wait a year before his H1B came in. And he can’t switch companies without a lawyer and permission.<p>Catastrophically broken is not an exaggeration. Any smart ten year old could invent a better system.