Why not just stack rank h1b applicants by salary instead of using a lottery system? That forces the income levels up which should benefit Americans workers as well.
If you did that you'd favour profitable industries (say computing) over areas with actual shortages (say Arabic translators in Detroit). You'd also make it impossible for areas with low cost of living (Detroit) to be allocated any H1B visa. It's one of those perennial proposals that always come up but are really poorly thought out when you look into it.
You could just raise the salaries of translators to $150k to ensure they get a visa. Looking at h1b data it seems they are all employedin the medical field. What do doctors make and why? There’s a shortage of medical professionals. Since translators doesn’t requiring accreditation when you’ll get American workers who will switch into the role from different professions when you increase salary. Making h1bs salary ranked makes the market more efficient and helps adjust incomes in the employees benefit.
If there were "actual shortages" of Arabic translators in Detroit as you suggest, market forces would drive wages up until enough people with the skills were sufficiently motivated to move to Detroit.
In the case of a long-term, widespread shortage, rising salaries would lead to a widespread increase in people training to enter the industry. This is exactly what's been happening with software the past several years.
> If there were "actual shortages" of Arabic translators in Detroit as you suggest, market forces would drive wages up until enough people with the skills were sufficiently motivated to move to Detroit.
I don't know about the specific case of Arabic translators, but that's far from the only possible outcome. It's also likely that you won't find one at any price that your poor Arabic-speaking parents can possibly afford to pay to attend your parent-teacher conference meetings, and you end up with no translator at all.
An actual shortage would, by definition, mean that, at least in the short term, no amount of price pressure would meet the need, because of a supply constraint that prevents response to price level changes. For jobs that need to be done on site and take significant time to acquire necessary skills, national borders can be a supply constraint for labor if there is an absence of local talent sufficiently qualified but there is foreign qualified talent. That's the problem H-1B notionally addresses.
If you have static demand and it is possible to train to meet the need, you shouldn't have long-term shortages, but dynamically increasing needs can produce a long-term gap, where you are continuously playing catch up.
If H-1B was well adapted to real shortages, the continuous use in tech would indicate such a persistent dynamic shortage. I don't think that's the real condition, and I don't think H-1B is well adapted to serve only real shortages, but the idea of real, including persistent, shortages that price signalling alone doesn’t suffice to close is not to be dismissed.
> An actual shortage would, by definition, mean that, at least in the short term, no amount of price pressure would meet the need, because of a supply constraint that prevents response to price level changes.
There are over a million Arabic speakers in the US, hundreds of thousands of whom are legally able to do the work. I strongly suspect that a number sufficient to handle the city of Detroit's translation needs could be brought in at under (likely far under) the rates proposed above. Having done translation work myself, I can say the pay is often startlingly low!
In the unlikely case that weren't possible, the necessary salary would exceed the H1B qualifying threshold, and translators could be imported to do the work.
What exactly are you arguing here? In what situation would a shortage truly require importing labor at low wages? As they are now, H1Bs suppress wages, especially immigrant wages.
> There are over a million Arabic speakers in the US, hundreds of thousands of whom are legally able to do the work. I strongly suspect that a number sufficient to handle the city of Detroit's translation needs
That's an argument that there is not an actual shortage (which, I suspect, is correct), not that an actual shortage could be addressed by bidding higher with wages (which it could not, by definition.)
> What exactly are you arguing here?
Your incorrect statement about an actual shortage being addressable by bidding higher with wages.
> In what situation would a shortage truly require importing labor at low wages?
I wasn't arguing that would occur, but since you ask, a sudden supply constraint or demand surge (perhaps from a debilitating epidemic that spreads particularly well in conditions associated with a particular job) in an essential, common, but not completely unskilled job might require that to avoid massive economic disruption.
> As they are now, H1Bs suppress wages, especially immigrant wages.
I'm not sure I agree with the “especially” part, but, yes, I've said elsewhere in the thread that that is what H-1Bs do, and by design even if it's not the sales pitch.
The thing with H-1B visas is they tie the immigrant employee to a specific employer, thus giving the employees little ability to negotiate for raises. It also results in H-1B visa holding immigrants being paid significantly less for their contributions.
In contrast, adrr's suggestion above to "stack rank h1b applicants by salary instead of using a lottery system" would result in a system where H-1B holding immigrants are well-paid and "shortages" result in rising wages over time.
Re: sudden shocks, I agree with you. Market pricing will tend to fix imbalances over time (barring extreme regulation or other distortions), but it does take time. In a truly extraordinary situation such as you suggest where huge swaths of the population are suddenly dead or incapacitated, you'd have a reasonable argument against market pricing. I don't believe the H-1B was ever intended for such catastrophic scenarios, though.
Isn’t that the same case with hiring America workers. I’d also argue that high pay attracts better talent. This why FAANG companies dominate the market since they offer compensation packages higher than anyone else and attract better talent. You could argue it was anti-competitive from a consumer standpoint but it’s beneficial from an employee standpoint. Immigration regulations are designed to protect American employees.
