Re: 4 – the problem with compensation-based H-1B prioritization is that the skills gap in the country doesn't correlate very well with salaries. A hospital in rural Kentucky that needs immigrant doctors and nurses to serve a critical need to the community isn't going to be able to compete with a Silicon Valley startup that is burning through VC dollars and offering new grads mid-six figure salaries.
This is a solvable problem. There are already categories for different occupations. You could put nurses (for example) in their own category with their own quota.
Rand Paul, of all people, actually had a pretty reasonable alternative to the 2019 bill [1] that took a different approach: nurses were simply excluded from the annual quota.
That is a band-aid fix, not a solution. Sure Congress can pass a bill to exclude nurses from the quota. Then do they pass another bill when the shortage is over, to prevent abuse? What if the year after there is a shortage of welders? Should companies rely on Congressional action every few months and for every profession?
That's not necessarily true. In determining priority categories, Congress is free to delegate that power to USCIS, the Secretary of Labor or another official or agency.
It's worth nothing that all H1Bs are technically priority occupations. Part of the process is to receive a labor certification that demonstrates you, as an employer, were unable to fill the position with a US citizen or permanent resident.
That itself is a whole can of worms because the system is heavily gamed to ensure that many such positions remain technically unfulfillable locally. For example, advertising such jobs where people are unlikely to find them and apply for them (eg in newspapers).
Now for big tech jobs, that need is genuine. For the body shops, it isn't. Despite attempts in the system to ensure such jobs are paid a fair market wage, they are not. The only people who take them are those Indian nationals who are so desperate to emigrate to the United States that they are willing to endure pseudo-indentured servitude for possibly decades if they and their family can have a better life.
That's a noble goal to be sure but we shouldn't enable employers to take advantage of them so. Even worse, in doing so, they're costing genuinely good jobs in big tech because of the lottery system.
You're right, and since the H1-B has effectively been "captured" by west coast tech companies, there are only a small handful of Senators that care to really fix it.
Perhaps the best band-aid fix is to add H1-B quotas by state, because then you might end up getting enough support throughout the nation for an actual solution. The military industrial complex has a lesson for us to learn?
If there are more prospective immigrants each year who are qualified for US jobs paying (say) $250k+ than the total number of available slots, that’s a pretty clear and unambiguous signal that the cap should be raised. Really I don’t see a reason to have any cap whatsoever on immigrants with that level of earning potential as long as appropriate anti-abuse measures are put in place.
I personally don't see this as a problem. If you cannot afford to pay for the workers you need then something is wrong with your business model and you need to fix it or the community (read:voters) need to deal with not having your service. In the case of a rural hospital it's a combination of several things within the US healthcare system being completely messed up, but shoving H-1B workers in to plaster over the problems is not the solution we need.
The hospital in rural Kentucky needs a physical person in KY
Silicon Valley does not, I am not sure why SV would not just hire the programmer in India, instead of bringing them to Silicon Valley, infact I am pretty sure we are going to see that more and more in the next few years
