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So what's the problem here? These people worked for the company for years at a certain salary with certain skills. You decide they need additional skills that the market is telling you loud and clear merit higher pay, but you evidently don't want to pay them. It's as simple as that. Say I'm a property manager and I oversee staff categorized as "general maintenance" who do things like cut grass, shovel snow, change light bulbs, and do small repairs. I decide they're useless because they can't do any serious electrical work so I train them all as electricians. How shocked can I be when they leave to take higher paying jobs with electrical contractors? When I took over these people were all maintenance men and were being paid like maintenance men. It would be ridiculous of me to expect to have a staff full of certified electricians making maintenance man salaries.
Edit: Reading these comments in tandem with the discussion from earlier in the week has really helped my crystalize my thoughts on the matter, which I didn't really pay attention to until recently. I had asked for some clarification of "abuse" and @SubstantialFrivolity provided me with an example, but now I'm seeing how this works in practice. It helps frame the divide more clearly: On the one had you have Trump, Musk, MTG, Vivek, and others, the common thread among them being that they have owned businesses and know firsthand how hard it can be to get employees. On the other hand, you have Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon, the MAGA base and the Fox News comment section, most of whom don't won businesses and aren't in senior management, who know how hard it can be to find a job.
The sentiments I see expressed among the MAGA faithful are that, if there is specialized work to be done, we should be providing education and training to Americans so that they can fill these desirable jobs rather than simply importing labor from elsewhere. The sentiments I'm seeing on the left are largely echoing that but with the added wrinkle where they suggest that the problem isn't so much a shortage but a shortage at the rates employers want to pay. Like OP's comment above, if an IT head doesn't like that his staff are moving on as soon as they have the training he wants for the job, rather than pay a market rate, he instead cries shortage and imports someone at a lower wage who is tied to the employer by virtue of his immigration status. He gets around the whole "prevailing wage" issue by taking advantage of the lack of granularity: The relevant job category is probably something like "IT person", not "IT person with special training on x, y and z".
I am, however, sensitive to there being actual shortages in certain occupations that we can't just wait 10 years until there are enough qualified people available. It seems that the solution here is eliminating (or greatly restricting) temporary visas and replacing them with more permanent visas. If we're talking about truly exceptional people, the sponsoring company should be willing to take on the risk that they'll jump ship. They should also be willing to pay a relatively high application fee. In other words, hiring foreign workers should be more expensive than hiring native workers. If bringing over a single foreign worker requires a $25,000 nonrefundable application fee, legal fees, and no guarantee that the sponsored immigrant won't jump ship to a company that offers him more money, you're not bringing him over unless there really is a shortage and you're confident you can keep him.
This is the entire sticking point and every single word I have heard from the Vivek/Elon crew is just squid ink trying to cover up this incredibly simple issue. If there aren't enough qualified domestic workers, you can pay a substantial premium to bring in these extremely talented geniuses from India or Haiti or whatever. This is such an insanely simple compromise that neatly answers all of their stated objections - but they'll never agree with it because their unstated motivations are directly opposed to it. I'm very firmly against the H1B program and equivalents like it in other countries (like the god-awful deal my country just signed with India), and I have zero trust for the people on the other side given that there's a perfectly acceptable compromise that accomplishes all of their stated goals which they refuse to touch. Why the fuck should I believe Elon when he says he needs to fly in a genius from Delhi when you can see that Tesla is actually hiring H1Bs for positions paying 75k?
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I'm... less sensitive to this. I think these things almost never happen. Especially because very few occupations really take ten years to ramp up production unless there are significant restrictions in place (the occupation that comes closest in terms of number of years would be doctors, but when there are problems there, the absolute most likely explanation is supply restrictions). For the most part, we should probably just let the price system operate.
As mentioned in the linked comment, it is inherently a political decision as to whether the supply curve should be purely the domestic one or the world one. This is not necessarily an easy choice. You ask Bryan Caplan and he'll take gainz from trade every time; you ask the unions, and they'll take domestic salaries every time. But I think that we should just be honest that that is the political decision to be made, not hiding a political decision inside what would inevitably be a political determination of whether there is a "shortage".
I sort of reject the idea that you can accomplish this by government fiat. Supply curves slope upwards. If the "current price" to hire a domestic employee is $X, but the gov't only allows you to hire a foreign employee for $X+Y, then just look back to the domestic supply curve. You could hire more domestic employees for $X+Y, which would bring the "equilibrium price" of hiring domestic employees up to $X+Y. Which, first, if the price mechanism is actually operating domestically, you don't actually want to do, because the market has already cleared. Second, if our plan is to always make it more expensive to hire foreign workers, it in turn requires the government to bring up the cost of hiring a foreign worker to $X+Y+Z. Rinse and repeat. Like, mayyyyyyybe someone could define a sense of "if the (I don't know) "medium run" supply curve has elasticity below some threshold, then..." but good luck estimating it or having a usable definition of "medium run" to use for your estimation.
I think this would be equivalent to just saying that we're going to choose the world supply curve... but with a tariff. It would essentially require adopting the meaning of "shortage" to be "with respect to the world supply curve". Of course, the tariff would still cause a ""shortage"" (not to be confused with "shortage") with respect to the world market clearing equilibrium that would be obtained without the tariff.
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