Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

Crossposting from elsewhere:

Looking at it solely from a perspective of competition between labor glosses over the fact that insufficient labor is also bad because it keeps companies from growing and hiring more people.

So sure, while the fewer jobs that they can fill could have higher wages (not a given, because lack of labor can stunt or kill companies) there could be much fewer people employed overall, which is clearly bad overall.

Of course, that assumes there is enough room for companies to grow. There are strong indications (e.g. the various labor and unemployment surveys) that this is the case in the US. In fact, there is a credible theory that the reason the US managed the inflation crisis so well was due to the immigration crisis.

I elaborated more here (along with a couple of relevant empirical studies about how H1B actually impacted employment and wages of native workers): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308311

Did you look at the Bloomberg article I linked in my original post? It says that half of the H1-B visas are taken by staffing companies and they pay their staff significantly lower than the US laborers they are replacing.

How is that possible ? Doesn't h1b have to pay within a set range of wages?

Every h1b role I see posted at my bank pays more than I make so I don't get the lower paid comments

H1B holders have to be paid the higher of the prevailing wage or their employer's normal wage for similarly employed workers. So if a contracting company can ensure that the position their employees have is sufficiently different than the position a parent company is seeking to replace, there's an arbitrage. (This famously happened at Disney in 2014-15, with some workers directly training their H1B replacements.)

Ah interesting. Thanks

I could not read the full article so I don't have all the details about the report, but the scope pretty limited. There are equally numerous reports about e.g. BigTech H1B salaries being much higher than typical. So that raises the question, which is the greater effect?

Better instead to look at larger scale studies out there, including the ones I mentioned in the comment I linked. The results are much more nuanced, but generally they find negligible or mildly positive impact on native workers, suggesting they are largely orthogonal to foreign workers.

The point is that the dynamics are more nuanced than simple supply vs demand.