alt Hacker Newsif people from India and China were allowed to naturalize as fast things would spiral out of control. I know it's not a popular thing to say on this forum, but H1B visas are absolutely a wage control mechanism for US corporations even if that's not the spirit of the law. Note that I'm also an immigrant.
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The H1B “problem” would disappear if companies were required to pay 50% more than the median salary for the position for one.
"Note that I'm also an immigrant."
This sentence doesn't really help your statement, it just makes you a gatekeeper.
The so-called wage control mechanism is never the intention of H1B. Workers with H1Bs have to meet prevailing wage standards before the H1B is approved: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/wages
I get that there are probably loopholes in the law. But then the solution is to fix the loopholes and tighten enforcement. Give DoL access to IRS data. Improve the definition of prevailing wages. A lot of things can be done to fix H1B so that it behaves like how it's intended.
mariel boatlift study found that even with a 7% short-term supply shock to labor concentrated in only miami in only low wage work led to no disruption in either employment or wages: https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
lump of labor simply never happens. I know it's fashionable to say 'wage suppression' but wages mostly reflect productivity in competitive AND deregulated markets!
I feel like the situation for US citizens would improve if they were allowed to naturalize. Their wages would go up and companies wouldn’t have the relatively cheaper labor pool to constantly draw from.
There’s a lot to be said about “spiraling out of control”. You could argue it’s fair for everyone. But you could also argue that a country like China which is as big as Europe gets the same amount of green cards as Luxembourg. You could argue there will be less diversity, but then you’d be arguing that the French and the Italian cultures are very different from each other, but people from NorthEast India are the same as people from South of India culturally and ethnically.
Anyway, if we are so concerned about “not letting things go out of control”. A simple solution is also to set those country caps on the H1B program. There can be other solutions and the conversation can be a lot more nuanced but HN is not the forum for it when it comes to the topic of H1B.