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Any company offering remote work and a good salary.
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In doing so, I've noticed that there are two primary ways that companies artificially limit themselves to a tiny pool of eligible people:
One: An interview process based on trivia and logic puzzles, not "can this person drive success". This eliminates people that have years of industry experience, but that can't quite remember the solution to Four Knights on the spot.
I have seen plenty of of "unqualified" people that work as consultants, and pull in large sums of money, solving business problems at companies where they could never get through the interview process. These people would have been great hires, but they were forced out due to bad process.
Two: Requiring that candidates permanently relocate, nominally to a city with a very high cost-of-living, without paying a correspondingly high salary. This eliminates people with families, people with elderly parents, and so on.
Money is rarely the problem if the company is otherwise flexible in terms of location. If you want, say, a parent with two kids to move to SF, you're going to need to pony up $160k+ a year. The same person in Boise would likely be happy at half that.
Even if there were no legal or immigration costs (which there definitely is), it seems to me they could easily do the same by getting someone from a less prosperous part of the US and moving them to, say, CA. I'm sure this happens all the time.
It's strange how action which has apparently helped to lift tens of thousands of poor Indian workers out of poverty is portrayed as a "scandal". There's clearly a big labor pool willing to work for lower pay than Americans. Give them a chance at a better life! If Californians dislike foreign workers so much, why are they still allowing people from the midwest to work there? Shouldn't they be throttled too to keep wag…
The left ignore the benefits of the free market, and pretend that there is a better system out there. They selfishly expect workers the developing world to respect the "right" of the Western middle class to high wages, as if magically other opportunities that don't involve competing with the Western middle class will arise.
The right want people to think that capitalism is magic, because they don't even want redistribution, which mainstream economists believe is something the market cannot do itself, and must be done by the government. The right want people to believe that all government intervention in the economy is equally bad, whether it is fixing the price of rent, providing medical services, or a negative income tax.
That said, I don't think H-1Bs are best used on average paid contractors. I know people earning a lot more money who missed out on the lottery. These people could have contributed a lot more to the economy.
EDIT: Added scare quotes around "right" in response to a comment.
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> But the author here claims that "H-1B is not about skills or skills gap" and cites as evidence the fact that the vast majority of the approved applicants have only a Bachelor's degree. Perhaps he's not familiar with the current state of the software engineering market, where an advanced degree is in no way a prerequisite to become a top-rated engineer? Sure, you can be a great developer with just a Bachelor degree…
It's strange how action which has apparently helped to lift tens of thousands of poor Indian workers out of poverty is portrayed as a "scandal". There's clearly a big labor pool willing to work for lower pay than Americans. Give them a chance at a better life! If Californians dislike foreign workers so much, why are they still allowing people from the midwest to work there? Shouldn't they be throttled too to keep wag…
Free market economics is often intentionally misunderstood because it doesn't fit into anyone's ideologies. The left ignore the benefits of the free market, and pretend that there is a better system out there. They selfishly expect workers the developing world to respect the "right" of the Western middle class to high wages, as if magically other opportunities that don't involve competing with the Western middle clas…
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While I have no comment on the parent article, I have done a lot of market research over the past few years, as part of a potential product to help companies hire better people, faster. In doing so, I've noticed that there are two primary ways that companies artificially limit themselves to a tiny pool of eligible people: One: An interview process based on trivia and logic puzzles, not "can this person drive success"…
Actually it is possible (and probably) that H-1B holders earn the same wages as their equivalents. The presence of the H-1B workers increases the supply of labor, and lowers wages for everyone. But it happens simultaneously so that at no time are the H-1B holders earning less.
It's interesting to me that in order to deal with this inconsistency, people have basically invented the myth that it's hard to shift jobs while on an H-1B, and thus H-1B holders are like "indentured servants". The reality is for most H-1B holders the job market is no different, as long as they have the visa, which depends on the government, not their company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free market economics is often intentionally misunderstood because it doesn't fit into anyone's ideologies. The left ignore the benefits of the free market, and pretend that there is a better system out there. They selfishly expect workers the developing world to respect the "right" of the Western middle class to high wages, as if magically other opportunities that don't involve competing with the Western middle clas…
I agree with most of the things you said, except on minor point, which I don't know is a wording issue or not: there is no "right to high wages", at best, it's a privileged.