One problem with H1-Bs is that the spouses of these workers can't work. And their kids, who might be born in America, often have to leave with the worker if the job is lost. It's a form of highly-paid indentured servitude, which links residential status to a specific job. Not great.
I feel like H1-bs were never as popular as refugee resettlement and such. No one liked importing a foreign non-christian elite, except other non-christian elites.
"When foreigners attend our great colleges & want to stay in the U.S., they should not be thrown out of our country." Presidential Candidate Donald J. Trump, 2015
While I think it's long been clear Trump doesn't like certain, um, *kinds* of foreigners, I believe the record indicates his visceral instincts on the issue are not characterized by immigration hawkery. Trump is the son of an immigrant. He married two immigrants. He's done loads of business with and made lots of profits from foreigners. He's certainly employed large numbers of immigrant workers. And he's a New Yorker.
It's all pretty much moot, now, of course: he's in the home stretch of his presidency, and, whatever his personal feelings, Trump has led the most isolationist and xenophobic administration in many decades. But my take is he's been captured by the Millerite faction when it comes to immigration policy. The ICE stuff is terrible, of course, and Trump no doubt thinks that's a political winner with his base. But the remorseless attack on *legal* immigration channels doesn't buy him much politically, I suspect. But he's an old man now, and I seriously doubt he's up to the task of resisting the more destructive goals of his policy advisers.
It’s pretty clear that the purpose of immigration policy under Trump is to limit immigration, period. It’s not a matter of what’s economically beneficial, it’s about all about the “America first” agenda, which seems to be trying to create a “blood and soil” movement in the US.
Considering only my perspective from the STEM education pipeline, I have essentially had an ongoing version of this discussion across several countries for many years. And it all comes down to the fact that rich counties do not produce enough willing-and-able students to supply their university systems.
Rich countries like to fund research for various reasons, and research has direct costs (funding labs, medical schools, etc.) that are dwarfed by the indirect costs of educating researchers. Countries that cannot afford or are still in the process of building a university system bear that cost and send their own citizens abroad to be educated in the hopes that enough will return for an overall benefit to their country. This is a positive-sum, win-win game where rich countries get to accrue international talent to provide talent for R1 universities, engineers for the tech sector, doctors for hospitals, etc. and less-rich countries re-import talent that was educated in a system that they could not support themselves.
Any solutions that boil down to "just make it harder to hire foreigners" and/or "just expand the slots available for Americans" fail at the outset because they are inventing a problem and then misdiagnosing the cause. No one would take seriously the idea that expanding professional sports leagues would produce more tall Americans to play basketball. But that is exactly what "increase the class-size of medical schools" purports to do; just as athletic ability aligns with a particular sport, intellectual ability has to align with a particular profession.
If we, collectively, are so sure that skilled immigration is a problem to be solved, then we have to make a choice: 1) give up on scientific research and cede technological superiority to other countries or 2) pour immense resources into nationwide improvements in education, free tuition and the requisite support for families to build a domestic pipeline to ensure that innate talent aligns with a remunerative path to skilled knowledge-work.
So NBA expansion has, in fact, absolutely increased the number of Americans playing in the NBA. People previously on the cusp can now get roster spots. It also increases the number of foreigners, but the absolute level of American players increases. And the foreigners are extremely highly-skilled (not H1B skilled, actually elite) and highly paid.
For medical school, we absolutely know there are more applicants than spots. We absolutely know there are more medical school graduates than residency positions. In both cases, the USA has limited the number of qualified Americans, despite the demand for more doctors (which we source from abroad). If there were more school and residency spots, I absolutely believe more people would consider applying, as it would be rational to make the sacrifice in undergrad and medical school if people believed there would be a payoff.
We ought to allow H1B holder unfettered freedom to switch jobs, too, perhaps after a probationary period (12 months?).
Under current rules, such workers are tremendously vulnerable to abuse, because, while fairly well-paid by US standards, they're nonetheless akin to indentured servants: look at your boss the wrong way and you might be facing imminent, forced departure (because job loss leads to visa loss). Indeed, Trump wants to change the 60 day grace period after job loss (which workers can use to look for another position, or change to a different kind of visa) to basically immediate, forced exit.
>We ought to allow H1B holder unfettered freedom to switch jobs
They have that right now- the idea that H1-B visa holders are tied to 1 specific employer is a myth that will seemingly never ever die. Everyone says it because everyone else says it. In fact, they were not complete idiots in Congress when they drafted the original legislation- they were not creating an indentured servant class
“imposing a $100,000 fee on employers who get H-1B visas for people filing from abroad (many H-1Bs go to people who are already here on another visa).”
The first proclamation affected anyone interviewing for a visa at the consulate or border rather than changing status in the U.S., not just people abroad. That may sound like a fine distinction, but it meant Canadian commuters (the lifeblood of a lot of hospitals in Northern New England and far upstate New York) spending three weeks in a hotel to renew their visas, since they couldn’t activate an extension on their morning commute; hospitals having to pay six figures for doctors whose post-training waivers were delayed, which in turn meant they couldn’t apply for an H-1B until their J-1 had expired; college graduates in TPS (a lot of Venezuelans) who had worked here legally for years and were chosen in the lottery right before the program terminated being unable to travel to Colombia for stamping (since they didn’t have a formal status to change out of); and, on a much more mundane level, tons of people forgoing their first visit home in years or needing to pony up the $3k ‘premium processing’ fee to ensure their regularly scheduled visa extensions didn’t subject them to the fee.
Republican really hold America Last priorities. Every terrible act and malicious proposal from this administration cannot even get the most tepid of criticisms.
Today’s take should be tabled until at least January 2029. The current administration has little to no interest in fixing the H1-B program and their weakening of it is a feature, not a bug, in their eyes. And it’s hard to see Democrats taking this issue up next year as they (hopefully) reclaim congressional power.
This post is sort of odd to me in that it sort of framed as though the Trump administration is actually interested in making the H1B visa a better program. Like I feel you know that the $100K fee for H1B visa holders is a feature not a bug. Because the goal isn’t to reform the program, the goal is keep our non white immigrants regardless of how smart or capable they are. Like they are statements like every day from the country’s richest man, POTUS, Stephen Miller, the SecDef and others who handle White House communications who make it very clear their goal is to “White Supremacy”. I know, I know he said a 2020 left buzzword phrase, bad bad bad. I’ll just ask you all try your best to not let your own negative partisanship blind you to stuff in front of your face.
This actually fits in with your podcast today with Brian. You seem to be under the impression that it’s bad for Democrats to bring up racial bigotry or religious bigotry…at all like in any context. You look back at lefty rhetoric from 2017 and especially 2020 and essentially declare “you know nothing far left” and I’m sorry the correct response “is we do know some things”. Yes it’s true the far left went too far with this stuff 2016-2020. But no it’s not actually clear at all that literally never bringing up is good. To get at something concrete. You cited a poll showing 42% of Americans have at least somewhat negative impact on the country or worse and only 17% say positive. And therefore Muslims and the left should shut up. Umm you are leaving out the 40% who say neither. Which last I checked is a perfectly reasonable answer. You know what that poll almost exactly reflects? Trump approval rating. But more pertinent you know what that poll almost exactly matches? Polling on abortion which shows almost exactly the same number of Americans want abortion illegal in all or vast majority of cases. But do we turn around and say Democrats shouldn’t talk about abortion? Absolutely not, we say (correctly) this is a winning issue in any state that’s not super red.
I think the fundamental question on Matt's mind is "Do you want to fight, or do you want to win?" You may think your strategy will cause you to win. He obviously disagrees, so it would be good for you to try to persuade him and others. What's your strategy for winning beyond calling the opposition bad names and saying they are evil? I never get a response from you on these questions. You just keep popping up repeating that Republicans are bad. We all know that. What's the next step?
I think Matt and lots of readers here really are discounting how lots of people in the Trump administration, many Republicans in Congress, and probably Trump himself (at least when there aren't bats flying around inside his degenerating brainpan) really, really want immigration to be Zero. There is no economic argument that would make these people want to improve any type of immigration outcome for anybody, from farmworker to software engineer, especially if they are not from Europe or a white South African. Whether that's rooted in racism or general xenophobia is beside the point.
But have you considered that importing intelligent beings might lead to them killing everyone? They might even do scary things like *work in teams* towards *shared goals*. What’s your P(Doom | H1B workers)? (Every serious person has one of these, and it’s very rigorously derived from first principles.)
I would be only worried about this if the intelligent beings were an ethnically cohesive group that was well-armed (or had the ability to acquire superior foreign arms), and believed that they had the exclusive right to live in or at least rule the territory they are moving into, particularly if such belief were based on religion or ethnicity. Nothing about our current immigrants gives off this vibe.
“I don’t want to be a total utopian about the efficiency of labor markets and say that salary offers precisely correspond to the economic value of the work done.”
How can efficient labor markets be the case when, for instance, a lot of medicine is rearranging deck chairs for lots of money on largely unproductive very elderly patients? Sure the providers and equipment manufacturers do something with the money they receive, but it’s not hard to think up other fields with more productive actual work.
Goes along with my thoughts that any locale or region where a hospital system is the leading employer is a region that is in trouble.
This is an obvious technocratic reform. I wonder how many percent we could add to gdp by adopting all the obvious technocratic reforms. A president who could get to 8% plus baseline growth would be remembered very fondly.
Or -- as we did after the last great wave of immigration -- we massively restrict legal immigration (to spouses of U.S. citizens, intra-company transfers, and a few actual geniuses perhaps/scientists and techies in PhD programs) and focus on massively expanding opportunities within the United States -- more medical school slots for the many Americans that want them for example. Increase visas for things like seasonal farm workers but do not allow adjustments of status. Give the country what many of its people want -- a break from the demographic and cultural change crashing through the country now for 60 years. Stop importing ever more people with ever more cultural backwardness and ethnic hatreds -- enough of that already. Prioritize access from Canada (at some point we'll be back to being friends again), Europe, and Australia/NZ. Let housing catch up with demand. Let the assimilation machine work.
Then in 20-30 years, decide if we want to open the taps again. At the very least, reform legal immigration to focus on skilled workers and their nuclear family only, not the current program.
You’re complaining about other people’s ethnic hatreds but then demanding ethnically based government exclusion in the next sentence, that seems to be quite the contradiction. The reality is that almost all of the ethnic hatred and discrimination that has occurred in the history of this country was done by the dominant ethnicity running the government against minority ones. I’ll take my chances that the new immigrants will be less in favor of ethnic discrimination since they’ve likely been on the receiving end.
Yes, I am saying we've managed to work out the ethnic hatred over 200 years of the various European groups, and that we should limit future importation of ethnic hatreds. 100%. I believe a country is safer, more trusting, and a better place to live with a dominant ethnic majority -- whether it's the USA, China, Japan, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, etc. Looking around the globe, I'd say most of the globe agrees with me.
I also believe immigration can be an incredible positive good, if managed correctly, and would like to see the USA adopt a system that maximizes economic opportunities for citizens and will be supported by them over the long term.
Same reason as many others -- better opportunities, different lifestyles, and a belief in the country. I have European friends with kids who just started in college in the USA over the past 2 years. Kids are loving it, and parents would be fine with them staying (sad, obviously).
It always depresses me when I realize how many Americans seem ignorant of the very successful people who've come from the midwest. In aerospace alone Kansas is a huge player in Wichita. Garmin came form Kansas, and I suspect google would give me plenty more.
You are really understating how good Kansans are at assimilating and how many immigrants live in the middle of the US. Even the most Trumpian areas of the US are going to be more amenable to immigrants than Europe.
One problem with H1-Bs is that the spouses of these workers can't work. And their kids, who might be born in America, often have to leave with the worker if the job is lost. It's a form of highly-paid indentured servitude, which links residential status to a specific job. Not great.
Counterpoint.
We taught an entire generation to code and they are not unemployed or work retail. There are also thousands of unemployed senior coders as well.
We don't need Indians because of some talent deficit. We need foreign farm laborers, not IT support.
I feel like H1-bs were never as popular as refugee resettlement and such. No one liked importing a foreign non-christian elite, except other non-christian elites.
"When foreigners attend our great colleges & want to stay in the U.S., they should not be thrown out of our country." Presidential Candidate Donald J. Trump, 2015
While I think it's long been clear Trump doesn't like certain, um, *kinds* of foreigners, I believe the record indicates his visceral instincts on the issue are not characterized by immigration hawkery. Trump is the son of an immigrant. He married two immigrants. He's done loads of business with and made lots of profits from foreigners. He's certainly employed large numbers of immigrant workers. And he's a New Yorker.
It's all pretty much moot, now, of course: he's in the home stretch of his presidency, and, whatever his personal feelings, Trump has led the most isolationist and xenophobic administration in many decades. But my take is he's been captured by the Millerite faction when it comes to immigration policy. The ICE stuff is terrible, of course, and Trump no doubt thinks that's a political winner with his base. But the remorseless attack on *legal* immigration channels doesn't buy him much politically, I suspect. But he's an old man now, and I seriously doubt he's up to the task of resisting the more destructive goals of his policy advisers.
It’s pretty clear that the purpose of immigration policy under Trump is to limit immigration, period. It’s not a matter of what’s economically beneficial, it’s about all about the “America first” agenda, which seems to be trying to create a “blood and soil” movement in the US.
Considering only my perspective from the STEM education pipeline, I have essentially had an ongoing version of this discussion across several countries for many years. And it all comes down to the fact that rich counties do not produce enough willing-and-able students to supply their university systems.
Rich countries like to fund research for various reasons, and research has direct costs (funding labs, medical schools, etc.) that are dwarfed by the indirect costs of educating researchers. Countries that cannot afford or are still in the process of building a university system bear that cost and send their own citizens abroad to be educated in the hopes that enough will return for an overall benefit to their country. This is a positive-sum, win-win game where rich countries get to accrue international talent to provide talent for R1 universities, engineers for the tech sector, doctors for hospitals, etc. and less-rich countries re-import talent that was educated in a system that they could not support themselves.
Any solutions that boil down to "just make it harder to hire foreigners" and/or "just expand the slots available for Americans" fail at the outset because they are inventing a problem and then misdiagnosing the cause. No one would take seriously the idea that expanding professional sports leagues would produce more tall Americans to play basketball. But that is exactly what "increase the class-size of medical schools" purports to do; just as athletic ability aligns with a particular sport, intellectual ability has to align with a particular profession.
If we, collectively, are so sure that skilled immigration is a problem to be solved, then we have to make a choice: 1) give up on scientific research and cede technological superiority to other countries or 2) pour immense resources into nationwide improvements in education, free tuition and the requisite support for families to build a domestic pipeline to ensure that innate talent aligns with a remunerative path to skilled knowledge-work.
So NBA expansion has, in fact, absolutely increased the number of Americans playing in the NBA. People previously on the cusp can now get roster spots. It also increases the number of foreigners, but the absolute level of American players increases. And the foreigners are extremely highly-skilled (not H1B skilled, actually elite) and highly paid.
For medical school, we absolutely know there are more applicants than spots. We absolutely know there are more medical school graduates than residency positions. In both cases, the USA has limited the number of qualified Americans, despite the demand for more doctors (which we source from abroad). If there were more school and residency spots, I absolutely believe more people would consider applying, as it would be rational to make the sacrifice in undergrad and medical school if people believed there would be a payoff.
We ought to allow H1B holder unfettered freedom to switch jobs, too, perhaps after a probationary period (12 months?).
Under current rules, such workers are tremendously vulnerable to abuse, because, while fairly well-paid by US standards, they're nonetheless akin to indentured servants: look at your boss the wrong way and you might be facing imminent, forced departure (because job loss leads to visa loss). Indeed, Trump wants to change the 60 day grace period after job loss (which workers can use to look for another position, or change to a different kind of visa) to basically immediate, forced exit.
>We ought to allow H1B holder unfettered freedom to switch jobs
They have that right now- the idea that H1-B visa holders are tied to 1 specific employer is a myth that will seemingly never ever die. Everyone says it because everyone else says it. In fact, they were not complete idiots in Congress when they drafted the original legislation- they were not creating an indentured servant class
https://www.google.com/search?q=transferring+h1b+to+new+employer
Trump has a unique gift for policy choices that manage to have zero upside and just make everything worse.
He's on Xi Jinping's payroll. I'm convinced of that.
“imposing a $100,000 fee on employers who get H-1B visas for people filing from abroad (many H-1Bs go to people who are already here on another visa).”
The first proclamation affected anyone interviewing for a visa at the consulate or border rather than changing status in the U.S., not just people abroad. That may sound like a fine distinction, but it meant Canadian commuters (the lifeblood of a lot of hospitals in Northern New England and far upstate New York) spending three weeks in a hotel to renew their visas, since they couldn’t activate an extension on their morning commute; hospitals having to pay six figures for doctors whose post-training waivers were delayed, which in turn meant they couldn’t apply for an H-1B until their J-1 had expired; college graduates in TPS (a lot of Venezuelans) who had worked here legally for years and were chosen in the lottery right before the program terminated being unable to travel to Colombia for stamping (since they didn’t have a formal status to change out of); and, on a much more mundane level, tons of people forgoing their first visit home in years or needing to pony up the $3k ‘premium processing’ fee to ensure their regularly scheduled visa extensions didn’t subject them to the fee.
Republican really hold America Last priorities. Every terrible act and malicious proposal from this administration cannot even get the most tepid of criticisms.
Today’s take should be tabled until at least January 2029. The current administration has little to no interest in fixing the H1-B program and their weakening of it is a feature, not a bug, in their eyes. And it’s hard to see Democrats taking this issue up next year as they (hopefully) reclaim congressional power.
This post is sort of odd to me in that it sort of framed as though the Trump administration is actually interested in making the H1B visa a better program. Like I feel you know that the $100K fee for H1B visa holders is a feature not a bug. Because the goal isn’t to reform the program, the goal is keep our non white immigrants regardless of how smart or capable they are. Like they are statements like every day from the country’s richest man, POTUS, Stephen Miller, the SecDef and others who handle White House communications who make it very clear their goal is to “White Supremacy”. I know, I know he said a 2020 left buzzword phrase, bad bad bad. I’ll just ask you all try your best to not let your own negative partisanship blind you to stuff in front of your face.
This actually fits in with your podcast today with Brian. You seem to be under the impression that it’s bad for Democrats to bring up racial bigotry or religious bigotry…at all like in any context. You look back at lefty rhetoric from 2017 and especially 2020 and essentially declare “you know nothing far left” and I’m sorry the correct response “is we do know some things”. Yes it’s true the far left went too far with this stuff 2016-2020. But no it’s not actually clear at all that literally never bringing up is good. To get at something concrete. You cited a poll showing 42% of Americans have at least somewhat negative impact on the country or worse and only 17% say positive. And therefore Muslims and the left should shut up. Umm you are leaving out the 40% who say neither. Which last I checked is a perfectly reasonable answer. You know what that poll almost exactly reflects? Trump approval rating. But more pertinent you know what that poll almost exactly matches? Polling on abortion which shows almost exactly the same number of Americans want abortion illegal in all or vast majority of cases. But do we turn around and say Democrats shouldn’t talk about abortion? Absolutely not, we say (correctly) this is a winning issue in any state that’s not super red.
I think the fundamental question on Matt's mind is "Do you want to fight, or do you want to win?" You may think your strategy will cause you to win. He obviously disagrees, so it would be good for you to try to persuade him and others. What's your strategy for winning beyond calling the opposition bad names and saying they are evil? I never get a response from you on these questions. You just keep popping up repeating that Republicans are bad. We all know that. What's the next step?
It's entitled "Trump’s terrible plan to break skilled immigration"
I think Matt and lots of readers here really are discounting how lots of people in the Trump administration, many Republicans in Congress, and probably Trump himself (at least when there aren't bats flying around inside his degenerating brainpan) really, really want immigration to be Zero. There is no economic argument that would make these people want to improve any type of immigration outcome for anybody, from farmworker to software engineer, especially if they are not from Europe or a white South African. Whether that's rooted in racism or general xenophobia is beside the point.
Well yes, people have different preferences and a sensible system tries to resolve the differences in preferences.
I think it's religious nationalism. At least where I grew up: people really don't want non-christian immigrants.
But have you considered that importing intelligent beings might lead to them killing everyone? They might even do scary things like *work in teams* towards *shared goals*. What’s your P(Doom | H1B workers)? (Every serious person has one of these, and it’s very rigorously derived from first principles.)
I would be only worried about this if the intelligent beings were an ethnically cohesive group that was well-armed (or had the ability to acquire superior foreign arms), and believed that they had the exclusive right to live in or at least rule the territory they are moving into, particularly if such belief were based on religion or ethnicity. Nothing about our current immigrants gives off this vibe.
(I was making fun of a different unrelated, somewhat silly, system of beliefs that Matt has adopted.)
“I don’t want to be a total utopian about the efficiency of labor markets and say that salary offers precisely correspond to the economic value of the work done.”
How can efficient labor markets be the case when, for instance, a lot of medicine is rearranging deck chairs for lots of money on largely unproductive very elderly patients? Sure the providers and equipment manufacturers do something with the money they receive, but it’s not hard to think up other fields with more productive actual work.
Goes along with my thoughts that any locale or region where a hospital system is the leading employer is a region that is in trouble.
This is an obvious technocratic reform. I wonder how many percent we could add to gdp by adopting all the obvious technocratic reforms. A president who could get to 8% plus baseline growth would be remembered very fondly.
Or -- as we did after the last great wave of immigration -- we massively restrict legal immigration (to spouses of U.S. citizens, intra-company transfers, and a few actual geniuses perhaps/scientists and techies in PhD programs) and focus on massively expanding opportunities within the United States -- more medical school slots for the many Americans that want them for example. Increase visas for things like seasonal farm workers but do not allow adjustments of status. Give the country what many of its people want -- a break from the demographic and cultural change crashing through the country now for 60 years. Stop importing ever more people with ever more cultural backwardness and ethnic hatreds -- enough of that already. Prioritize access from Canada (at some point we'll be back to being friends again), Europe, and Australia/NZ. Let housing catch up with demand. Let the assimilation machine work.
Then in 20-30 years, decide if we want to open the taps again. At the very least, reform legal immigration to focus on skilled workers and their nuclear family only, not the current program.
You’re complaining about other people’s ethnic hatreds but then demanding ethnically based government exclusion in the next sentence, that seems to be quite the contradiction. The reality is that almost all of the ethnic hatred and discrimination that has occurred in the history of this country was done by the dominant ethnicity running the government against minority ones. I’ll take my chances that the new immigrants will be less in favor of ethnic discrimination since they’ve likely been on the receiving end.
Yes, I am saying we've managed to work out the ethnic hatred over 200 years of the various European groups, and that we should limit future importation of ethnic hatreds. 100%. I believe a country is safer, more trusting, and a better place to live with a dominant ethnic majority -- whether it's the USA, China, Japan, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, etc. Looking around the globe, I'd say most of the globe agrees with me.
I also believe immigration can be an incredible positive good, if managed correctly, and would like to see the USA adopt a system that maximizes economic opportunities for citizens and will be supported by them over the long term.
Why would Canadians and Europeans *want* to immigrate to a Trumpy America?
Same reason as many others -- better opportunities, different lifestyles, and a belief in the country. I have European friends with kids who just started in college in the USA over the past 2 years. Kids are loving it, and parents would be fine with them staying (sad, obviously).
You still make 3-4x what you do in Europe, and don’t get taxed at euro rates.
Canadians I dunno.
"Canadians I dunno."
Canadians I do know. Lurid headlines about Trumpian awfulness to the contrary, lots of Canadians have voted with their wallets and headed south.
https://economics.td.com/ca-silent-brain-drain
AfD
They seem more interested in pulling the Iron Curtain back down.
No.
This is America and we are extremely good at making new Americans. If Europe desires stagnation that's their business; we are 120% better than them.
The Kansas yokels can similarly get bent.
Brain drain the whole fraking world.
It always depresses me when I realize how many Americans seem ignorant of the very successful people who've come from the midwest. In aerospace alone Kansas is a huge player in Wichita. Garmin came form Kansas, and I suspect google would give me plenty more.
You are really understating how good Kansans are at assimilating and how many immigrants live in the middle of the US. Even the most Trumpian areas of the US are going to be more amenable to immigrants than Europe.
Yeah I don't think "be more explicitly racist in favor of white people" is actually going to lessen anti-immigration sentiment, buddy