With the big ongoing debate on immigration, it’s been amazing/horrifying watching people muddle everyone together into one bucket and then act like they’re all the same.
For sanity’s sake, let’s split immigration into four buckets:
- The first are the absolute top tier people. These are the ones redefining their industries, creating patents in their spare time, and looking at the world in radically different ways. They come from various cultures, and there are likely 5 digits worth of these people worldwide.
- The next are the undifferentiated middle. There’s a skills gradient in here with thoughtful, smart engineers on one end and copy/paste masters on the other end but the bulk are somewhere in the middle. There are hundreds of thousands in this group.
- The third group are low-skilled and serves needs in areas such as agriculture. There are hundreds of thousands to millions and generally come from Mexico and Central America.
- The final group are the illegal immigrants. There are tens of millions in this group, and they are from all over the world.
Caveats: After 20 years in tech, I’ve mostly worked with the first two groups. On the policy side in DC, I worked with the last two.
Whenever we discuss illegal immigration, the deceptive pundits will say “without immigration, we wouldn’t have [Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, etc, etc]!” this is technically true but they’re acting like the first and fourth groups are the same. NONE of these groups are interchangeable and they’re not all desirable for a country or community.
- The top tier people often fall under the O-1 Visa, which is for exceptional or specialized talent. Any country should collect these people like Pokemon and reap the windfall as they change the world.
- The third group has an agriculture visa that allows them to travel along with the seasons. There are flaws with it but that’s outside the scope of this conversation.
- The fourth group are in this group because they can’t fit into any other. Some are truly refugees from war-torn or gang-infested countries; others are the warlords or the criminals fleeing the groups they’ve grown. If you aren’t allowed to differentiate, you have to say NO to all of them. (Some of you are saying “nuh uh!” right now but the data on this group has been freely available online since at least 2003. Ask me how I know.)
Another important thing here.
The other group – the undifferentiated middle – is where the H-1B visa comes in, and it’s where everything goes crazy. The purpose of the H-1B is to fill temporary slots for special/high skill roles instead companies have turned it into modern indentured servitude.
Don’t believe me?
Look at the H-1B roles discovered from that database this week. You have everything from entry-level accountants ($80k/year) to line cooks ($20k/year). How you successfully describe a $20k/year line cook as a “special/high skill role” is still a mystery to me. Regardless, these companies are despicable and should be ridiculed and punished to the fullest extent of the law financially and criminally, if possible. For bonus points, make them pay double market rates for the H-1B people they’ve abused.
Unfortunately for the skilled immigrant who want to come to the US, your timing sucks.
People’s patience is GONE on immigration for two reasons:
First, our quickly sundowning sunsetting Administration allowed illegal immigrants to enter without restriction, review, or even decency to US communities or the people being trafficked. When you read about stabbings, subway burnings, or apartment buildings being conquered, those perpetrators are exclusively this group.
In tech, we’ve had our teams outsourced and were forced to train our own replacements. Most of those were not H-1B visas, but the global body shops that got the work used H-1Bs to build their US presense.
So overall:
- Elon is correct that we need more exceptionally high skilled people.
- The online right is correct that the how do I-1B has been abused.
- Everyone is corrrect that our immigration system is exceptionally broken.
Therefore, we need short-term and long-term changes:
Short term – we should let the existing H-1Bs expire and prosecute the companies that have abused either or both programs. Further, we should expand the O-1 visa focusing on contributions to STEM without regard towards education credentials and country of origin. Finally, we should punish and deport the fourth group, starting with the criminals first.
Long term – we need to rebuild our own homegrown talent and activate the top tier people while simultaneously recruiting other countries’ top tier people. That doesn’t happen by “stapling a green card to every college diploma” but by focusing on people making significant contributions in STEM – regardless of their education credentials or country of origin. That will take rebuilding our education system to one that values merit first which is another topic..