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OK, fine, how about this.

We get rid of ALL limits on visas, as long as they go to people making 100k+ and the company pays a 25k tax to the government.

Win-win for the US, right?

The problem with the H1B visa is that it is a freaking lottery. We should NOT be assigning these visas randomly.

We should be auctioning them to the highest bidder. That would ensure that Americans don't get undercut, and the US gains a shit ton of tax revenue.

This would mean no visas for the international students graduating out of US colleges. Someone with a bachelor degree isn't going to get $100k straight off the bat.

That in turn will drive the best and brightest to stay home and not come to the US educational system.

You could easily add a clause that says if you have a useful 4 year degree from the US, the minimum is $75k (or whatever) and 100k for everyone else. Then new grads wouldn't be at an unfair disadvantage for getting jobs.

It's not trivial to identify useful degrees. Even if you tied this to professions with low unemployment (jobs in need of workers) you would need some link between major/program and profession.

Keep in mind, also, that few of the ideas on this thread haven't already been implemented by some country (Canada, Australia, etc.). It would behoove politicians to look at the resulting data instead of voting on measures that affect groups they don't care to understand.

If they really ARE the best and the brightest, then they will have no problem getting 100k straight off the bat (LOTS of people do this in SF) .

If they aren't then they won't be able to demand this high salary.

SF isn't the only place that hires the best and the brightest in the country. I graduated from Purdue in Indiana. Cummins was one of our biggest employers. $70k in rural Indiana is considered quite a good salary.

No one is going to get $100k straight out of college outside SF.

$100K is not a big barrier in SV right now. I've hired an average NCGs for $90K in the past so someone with enough experience to qualify for an H1B would easily surpass $100K.

> They are brought to the US, given around 40% less, to work jobs that could easily be worked by Americans.

Some of them are; many are not. Check out H-1B salaries at AmaFaceGoogSoft or SV startups.

> So to sum it up, America does not need more talent, it has plenty of its own in a population of 300 million people.

A large fraction of SV wealth has been created by people who first came on H-1B.

I would like to see a fairly hefty tax on top of visas, the proceeds of which go into funding some useful program. If companies genuinely need these skills, you're going to pay more for it than hiring local.

> you're going to pay more for it than hiring local.

A lot of companies already do.

I used the fact that H1B salaries have to be reported to the government and made publicly available to very successfully argue for a significant raise at my employer - the H1B employees on my team were making up the majority of the top percentile.

I recognize this isn't universally true, but you can check out http://serebryakov.info/h1b/ and compare your company vs. big names, etc. You might be surprised at what you find, despite the narrative being 'all h1b workers are underpaid just to undercut local talent costs'.

Flat numbers are also silly, because then people finishing up their undergrad or masters here are now competing against people with 10 or 15 years of experience, which means they are going to be receiving a lot less pay but still have plenty of potential to be a positive gain on our country.

> I would like to see a fairly hefty tax on top of visas, the proceeds of which go into funding some useful program.

There is a $1500 fee as part of every H-1B visa application dubbed "American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998 Education and Training Fee". See https://www.uscis.gov/forms/h-and-l-filing-fees-form-i-129-p... for details.

Also, aliens working on H-1B visas pay all the same taxes as local citizens.