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.

One man's rising gas prices are another man's oil industry boom.

The H1B process is unfair to engineers because it drives down their compensation in a way that doesn't affect nurses or welders. If immigration were completely irrespective of profession and based solely around whether the imported laborers get paid enough to contribute more than they receive in taxes/public services, nobody would have any standing to complain about their wages being driven down because every single person benefits in the long run from the economic growth.

As things stand, tech workers and unskilled laborers get screwed by the current status quo because they don't reap the benefit of cheaper goods and services in all the other industries, but everyone else benefits from cheaper electronics/software and landscaping/housekeeping/food service while their wages grow.

You're not wrong on paper, the current immigration practices are just screwy.

EDIT - The hard statistical proof that most of the H-1Bs are tech workers:

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...

Software developer salaries are still extremely high in the US. So I would doubt that this has had a huge effect.

I'm writing this reply not to the lazy commenter, but to anyone reading this thread...

Yet again, we have classic HN speculation masquerading as authority.

Should software developer salaries be comparable to accountants or to surgeons? That's an arbitrary value judgment.

Software engineers have less purchasing power than they would without the H-1B visa program, and that's indisputable. 64% of the visas go to IT workers and 52% go specifically to programmers, which implies beyond all shadow of a doubt that their salaries decrease further than the cost of the goods and services they pay for.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o...

It's all there, black and white, clear as crystal. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir!