I would prefer if we had better visas with higher salary requirements, designed to attract the world's best, but without making them jump through hoops. E.g. Someone making $250k = green card instantly. Someone making $80k = denied, try again when you are worth $250k.
And this would also dramatically decrease the incentive for the employers to game the system, as H-1B visas would no longer be a source of cheap skilled labor.
(I personally know visa holders who were dramatically underpaid by tech companies and who did not feel like they could shop around.)
[0] I made this up, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true.
If it's not a high paying job, does the US really need plastic tooling expertise? Unless by "plastic tooling" you mean something that is of national security, then yes. But in that case, they should issue more special visas, not put them in a pool for lottery. Why would you put in a lottery for important roles?
Keeping a profession in a lottery system tells me it can't be too important for the US. If it's not so important, then why not implement an income based system and get the most out of it (get the best paid workers, not some random ones). This is the case for diversity visas, they are 50k lottery based visas. Income does not matter at all there, the US just wants diverse people coming in. Now we're treating doctors, nurses, software devs the same way, with a lottery? You can get a 60k wage slave or a 600k specialized worker in the same batch?
By switching to an income based system, those other professions would have an even harder time.
https://www.myvisajobs.com/Elementary-and-Secondary-Schools-...
https://www.myvisajobs.com/Medical-and-Clinical-Laboratory-T...
...
And you'd have it dominated by doctors (rather than developers)
https://www.myvisajobs.com/Offices-of-Physicians-6211-2022IN...
Nothing wrong with that...it would probably reduce the cost of healthcare in the US.
For nurses you can have special visas, because healthcare is so important. Why would you leave nurses and doctors up to lottery? I would say: get them in now, no lottery required.
It needs an overhaul. The visa fraud that this (and the previous) article is pointing out is indirectly making healthcare more expensive and contributing to a teacher shortage.
Going to an auction would make these shortages in not-high-paying professions even worse.
The entire H-x visa process has some significant issues that were ok when it was designed, but now are showing problems as they scale to much larger volumes than it was set up for.
Things like the H-2A and H-2B (unskilled agricultural and non-agricultural) visas make it difficult for many small businesses to staff up to their needs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/10/26/anoth...
> “Our novel survey of a sample of the firms who participated in the 2021 lottery reveals little benefit, and substantial costs, due to restricting firms’ access to these visas,” write Clemens and Lewis. “Comparing firms that were able to hire more workers on these visas to those that were able to hire fewer—by random chance—we find that gaining access to immigrant hires raises firm revenues . . . and also weakly raises, rather than lowers, their employment of U.S. workers.”
Recognizing that this represents a "not an easy change"... but it's a mess and it does need to get fixed.
Other than noting that there are problems, I'm going to defer to "I'm not sure how to fix them nor am I familiar enough the the intricacies of the immigration and visa process to say if any fix that I could think of would run into some known existing (worse) problems that the current system avoids."
That is true, also whatever you do, it will be an ethically hard choice.
I was just saying that an auction style (or top N salaries) would be superior to what we have today, not that it's a perfect system.
I think the UK and Australian systems are more thought out, with critical categories, where you go in almost automatically, then less critical categories, where you have a system with points (how young you are, how well you speak English, what education you have, do you have a job offer etc.), then you have a general category, where it's much more difficult to get in.
The US is doing well (comparatively) for the last category, it's incredibly easy (comparing to other countries) to get in as an illegal, or as a low skilled immigrant (e.g. just apply to diversity lottery every year). For the people in this category it's easier to get into the US than most other developed countries. But other countries make it significantly easier as you go up the ladder (e.g. it's easy to get into Australia with a Phd and a job offer), while the US keeps the "higher level" immigrants into the same insane treatment: randomness, bureaucracy, whims of government employees, years(or decades) of waiting etc.
The mistake that the US has is that there are only three categories under the "H-x" set of visas.
There's the H-1B (which we're familiar with for all skilled workers requiring a college degree) and the H-2A for agricultural work and H-2B for workers that don't require a college degree and are not agricultural.
The H-1A was originally for nursing and expired in 1995. The H-1C was also created for using from 1999 to 2009.
The thing is... it's 3 big categories that date back to 1990s (The H visa was established in the 1950s and was a "everything" bucket). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990#Non-im... . In 1990, both the house and the senate were democratic and G H.W. Bush was president. Getting the big comprehensive reforms through takes a unified congress and that being a goal (a lot of political capital is spent on getting that through - to the point where trying to do two big reforms in one presidential term gets difficult)... and immigration reform keeps getting deprioritized compared to other things.
Going to a per field model (22 top level in https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm ) would be a marked improvement.
Adding to your list of UK and Australia - Canada. https://www.immigration.ca/fast-track-high-demand-occupation...