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

I think there’s plenty of interesting debates to be had about immigration policy and its effects on the labor market, but one thing worth noting here is that the primary problem that damn near every other country on earth has isn’t immigration, it’s brain drain.

A core strategic strength of the US over the last century has been that everyone with any talent wants to come here to work, and by and large we’ve let them do so. You can argue how well that’s worked out for us - having worked with a great many extremely talented H1bs in an industry largely built by immigrants, I’d consider it pretty positive - but it damn sure hasn’t worked out well for the countries those talented folks came from.

The top end of H1B has been great for America. In the last few decades, there has been growth of abuse of the program to get mid level talent at below market rates which really hurts the middle class in America. People need to understand that most reformists don't want to get rid of the truly exceptional immigration to the US. We need to limit the volume, especially the immigrants that are directly competing with a hollowed out middle class in the US. Let me know if you want further reading on this topic.

The median pay of an H1B visa holder is $118k. The 25th percentile is $90k. This is from the government's official data: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/O...

Any suggestion that the program is dragging wages down instead of dragging wages up is not just misleading but factually wrong.

You seem to be suggesting that the H1B pulls wages up because the median pay is higher than the median overall pay in the country? That’s not a valid comparison, you’d have to compare the H1B’s salary to the median pay in their specialty.

You can! If you look at the report it breaks down H1b pay range by occupation and education level.

An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.

> An H1b software engineer median is ~$120k.

> Using other official sources, the median pay for US software engineers overall is... ~$120k.

So, it seems that if we remove H1b workers and assume that the demand would have stayed the same, then domestic salaries should have been higher. Assuming, of course, that companies won’t simply offshore.

Overall the US economy employs about 800,000 software engineers, with 200,000 or so of them being H1B holders.

Now you can argue you would prefer that those 200,000 jobs go to Americans, but on the scale of the overall economy, it really doesn’t matter. What’s far more important is the massive impact those 800,000 software engineers have on the rest of the economy. Four million IT jobs, the entire finance and healthcare and retail industries that are propped up on technology built by those people; whole technology companies like Uber or doordash that create entirely new labor markets.

Risk 25% of that capacity on the idea that we would rather have those industries built solely on domestically-grown engineering talent? Why would that be a good tradeoff?

It's ludicrous. US companies will not be able to dig up 200,000 qualified software engineers in the domestic population while every other skilled profession is experiencing a similar brain drain.

The prospect of a $100k/year/employee visa tax makes opening an office in Europe so much more compelling.

I guess the people who can't be offshored will see their salaries go up so that's cool?