The general direction of the Trump plan regarding H-1b is the way to go. The lottery needs to be replaced with a demand system where the highest salaries get slots. A floor of $100,000/yr should exist and adjust for inflation. Next, generously expand the green card fast track, as this category of employee, as an immigrant, is a free agent to move among companies or to start their own business. To date, as we all know…
The H1B as it is has many problems, but a big salary floor is not the way to go in my opinion. Remember H1B is not just for tech workers. If you want to hire, say, an interpreter of a specific foreign language to work on a community in rural Alabama temporarily, a $100,000 minimum wage would be absurd. They instead need to go after the companies that learned to game the system. I'm not sure what the solution is here.…
I'm not sure if there's a way to prevent global labor arbitrage. Multinational corporations will shift labor to countries with the lowest wages.
Perhaps they should put a multiplying factor on payroll taxes that's proportional to the total non-US labor wages paid (directly or indirectly) for producing a product. All expenses should be default considered as foreign labor-based unless proven otherwise. It would introduce a ton of paperwork initially, but then everyone will be incentivized to produce documentation showing US labor-produced products to prevent the increase in taxes.