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Many South Asians are, of course, elite human capital, but I have yet to be persuaded that the average Infosys H-1B is. And again, I say that as someone who has no strong opinion on H1B numbers while so much unskilled immigration is a bigger priority, even though I think the current number of the former is likely too high and they should be auctioned rather than the subject of a lottery.
Absolutely agree on the auction thing, although I personally think the number of H1-Bs is too low. The lottery system is the product of yet another brain worm commonly found in Homo sapiens occidentalis where they are not content to merely pick all of the best because it would be oh so unfair if all the underdogs lose out just because there are better specimens them in the pool...
Would be interesting at the very least to see what the H1-B market clearing price is at different levels of visa availability. We could even have derivatives like H1-B futures which allow firms to hedge away the risk of prices spiking in future years and guarantee a certain steady level of supply years down the line if they know roughly how many people they'll be needing! And of course whereever there's a derivatives market there will be market makers and speculators! I can already sort of think of a simple trading strategy for pricing them...
I can’t speak for H1B specifically but the proper use of lotteries, like sumptuary laws, is preventing the expenditure of much blood and gold for objectively tiny gains. Putting your child through hours of cram school every week to increase their grades by 1%, say.
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I think the auction would be the best system, and would probably also balance out migrant demographics because professionals in Europe would be more willing to apply if there was some certainty; right now the process is dominated by Indians not because nobody else wants to move to the US but because of the specific ‘spray and pray’ strategy that these big tech consulting / outsourcing firms use where they have all 100,000 engineers a year apply and 5,000 or whatever get it.
Lack of certainty is yet another thing which I find absolutely BS about many things in the US. For instance whether or not particular medical treatments are covered on insurance. I know people who were told their procedure wasn't covered but after multiple hours of calling their insurers and angry back and forth finally got told it was. This type of dithering is bad, either you the insurer cover something or you don't; what exactly you cover should be made available in an easy to access list and it should not be possible to argue with you about what the policy you are selling includes to get other treatments OK'd. That just benefits the time rich at the expense of the time poor, who are by and large people who's time is valuable and so those who likely actually contribute to society.
Pick a damn list of treatments, make it public and stick to it. If that list means people stop using you because your product is overpriced for what it offers well then it's your own fault which you can fix by making another product which covers more things at a similar price.
Of course this lack of certainty also extends to other places like College admissions etc.: I was decently (>50%) sure I would be given an offer by the Oxbridge college I applied to at the moment of application based on my assessment of my abilities, you can't say anything like that for any Ivy tier US university unless you're like a legacy athlete or something.
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