Companies that import labor when they had a perfectly acceptable local candidate should face severe fines...
Who defines acceptable local candidate?
Anyone who has interviewed candidates knows that are always a lot of local candidates who think that they are qualified for the job who you don't want for any of a variety of reasons. I don't want the government telling me that I can't hire the sysadmin I want because there is a Java programmer who thinks he can administer Unix systems. Because computers are computers, right?
Alternately I don't want to be told that I have to hire someone with a particular degree rather than the high school dropout who is self-taught and whose open source projects demonstrate ability to me. Government tends to be very impressed by certificates that industry insiders know well don't mean squat.
Companies should be forced to pay H1Bs significantly above prevailing wage, where "prevailing wage" is interpreted liberally instead of conservatively.
A modest proposal. If H1Bs are at the quota and someone else wants to hire an H1B worker and pay more than you're paying, you should get the choice between giving up your worker's spot (they can continue working for you remotely) or upping their pay. Without setting any particular dollar figure this would create salary competition among H1Bs that would take spots away from the worst of the sweatshops.
I don't think that would be much of a fix. But it would be an improvement.
I actually don't believe that ending the tie to an employer will help. I mean, we should do it anyway, but the abuse will continue.
I both believe that it would help, and that the abuse would continue. I see value in limiting how much abuse employers can get away with.
> Who defines acceptable local candidate?... sysadmin... java
I think your question already demonstrates the deviation of the H1B from its original intent.
Bringing in a generic sys admin or generic java programmers on an H1B is visa abuse. Sorry, but neither of those is a special skill and neither of those jobs is an appropriate use of the H1B. There are more than enough sys admin and java programmer candidates in the USA above a certain (quite low) price tag.
When it comes to H1B's intended purpose, I would expect something like: "we need someone who is expert in this aspect of the Java garbage collector and knows the internals of the X framework. Our candidate has made significant open source contributions to both. There is no one in this country with expertise in both who is currently looking for a position." Or, "we need someone who has extensive experience working in the insurance sector and also has experience being the senior developer on a large project written in Haskell. We can't find anyone who has passed the first actuarial exam and who has also been a senior engineer at a firm using Haskell". That sort of thing. The H1B was designed for __skilled immigration__. Not warm body java school kids.
I get your point that this is difficult to evaluate. That's why one of my proposals was to provide Justice with plenty of funding so that they have the resources to spot-check cases with high accuracy.
NB: I absolutely would support a new midskill immigration program for things like sys admins and generic java app developers. But the H1B program was never really meant for those sorts of jobs. The H1B program has radically diverged from its initial intent, and that is why the abuse of H1B workers happens. And, in fact, this is why even within H1B you don't see nearly as much of the abuse that happens in tech within other sectors (academia, medicine). CS has been democratized over the past 20 years and our H1B criteria in CS needs to catch up.
Oh, and BTW, H1B abuse also fucks over actually skilled immigrants. I've been trying to hire a PhD with huge amounts of high-quality open source contributions, a bunch of publications, and there's a whole class of very particular algorithms that literally no one except him understands. He's literally the only person in the world who is qualified from day 1 to lead this heavy-R R&D project. This is what the H1B is for. But apparently his qualifications are equivalent to low-level Accenture drones doing sys admin and java app dev. I just don't buy that a properly equipped Justice wouldn't be able to hire someone who knows the difference...
If we want a midskill immigration program, we should just create it from scratch. That'll be easier than morphing the H1B into 80% of what a midskill program should look like.
Have you ever seen the difference between a top notch sysadmin and the average one? There are lots of sysadmins who are interchangeable cogs, just as there are lots of developers who are just warm bodies.
Who defines acceptable local candidate?
Anyone who has interviewed candidates knows that are always a lot of local candidates who think that they are qualified for the job who you don't want for any of a variety of reasons. I don't want the government telling me that I can't hire the sysadmin I want because there is a Java programmer who thinks he can administer Unix systems. Because computers are computers, right?
Alternately I don't want to be told that I have to hire someone with a particular degree rather than the high school dropout who is self-taught and whose open source projects demonstrate ability to me. Government tends to be very impressed by certificates that industry insiders know well don't mean squat.
Companies should be forced to pay H1Bs significantly above prevailing wage, where "prevailing wage" is interpreted liberally instead of conservatively.
A modest proposal. If H1Bs are at the quota and someone else wants to hire an H1B worker and pay more than you're paying, you should get the choice between giving up your worker's spot (they can continue working for you remotely) or upping their pay. Without setting any particular dollar figure this would create salary competition among H1Bs that would take spots away from the worst of the sweatshops.
I don't think that would be much of a fix. But it would be an improvement.
I actually don't believe that ending the tie to an employer will help. I mean, we should do it anyway, but the abuse will continue.
I both believe that it would help, and that the abuse would continue. I see value in limiting how much abuse employers can get away with.