I’m an American (born here), but I’ve felt our skilled immigration policies are wrong-headed for a while, especially after dealing with them as a hiring manager. Broadly speaking, I feel we need a better focus on a) getting people who have the skills that our businesses need and b) naturalizing those people as US citizens who are willing to commit their whole careers to our country. The H1-B system seems to be the worst of both worlds…gamified so that bad actors get many of the hires and gamified on the employee side so you get people, say, sacrificing salary for a better green card process.

If I were to propose something different, it would be ratios by job title/salary, with obvious veto ability by government TLA agencies for security risks. Points systems for skilled migration are an in exact proxy and miss out on talented people with less formal educations. I’d rather place the burden of deciding who gets to work here on businesses who are trying to fill actual positions. Let them decide who is actually qualified based on the actual skills they’re looking for. And because they have to hire a requisite number of similar-level Americans, the worst thing that might happen is a sort of jobs program for Americans when companies are forced to employ more Americans to satisfy the ratio needed to hire foreigners.

This would have two other benefits that I can see. First, it would make it much easier for small companies with primarily-American workforces to hire foreigners since they wouldn’t need so much legal help or luck in winning a visa lottery. Second, foreign workers would integrate better because they’d always be working with Americans.

The main weakness that would need to be protected against is companies under-classifying and underpaying foreign workers (i.e. the janitors are American but are up-classified as software engineers and the software engineers are foreign and paid janitorial wages), but I feel these sorts of situations should be addressed by judges when complaints are made against companies trying to game the system.