exactly wrong. Americans are dissuaded from going into these highly skilled fields because anyone talented enough to do those things realizes they can make much more building SAASes or working on wall street.

the Boeingization of the economy is mbas and bean counter middle management realizing that an H1-B is much cheaper than a citizen and opting to buy that labor, even if it's worse quality. as management, you put an ass into a seat, so job accomplished, here's your accolade.

Or... those other parts of the economy increase salaries for skilled labor?

If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)?

And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?

    > hedge fund quants

You could make multiple pools, having separate ones carved out for research and advanced technology.

A lot of H1Bs are not working on anything you described though.

"materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research "

This is a beautiful fantasy for H-1B, that is totally disconnected from reality. What is that 1% of the H-1Bs currently? It is mostly IT and software slop jobs.

Here are the top 40 employers, it isn't going to hurt research in the US to cut them to zero.

Amazon.Com Services

Cognizant Technology Solutions

Ernst & Young

Tata Consultancy Services

Google

Microsoft

Infosys

Meta Platforms

Intel

Hcl America

Amazon Web Services

IBM

Jpmorgan Chase

Walmart

Apple

Accenture

Capgemini

Ltimindtree

Deloitte Consulting

Salesforce

Qualcomm

Tesla

Amazon Development Center

Wipro

Fidelity Technology Group

Tech Mahindra

Compunnel Software Group

Deloitte Touche

Mphasis

Nvidia

Adobe

Bytedance

Goldman, Sachs

Cisco

Linkedin

Pricewaterhousecoopers Advisory Services

Paypal

Ebay

Servicenow

Visa USA

For non-slop jobs, give them a green card and fast track to citizenship. For an IT consultant, no thanks.

source: https://www.myvisajobs.com/reports/h1b/

> Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.

If they're that necessary, let companies hire them on green card visas.

This is just an argument against allowing the market to set wages, which you could make if you wanted to but it is not a strong one.

I don't think the "free" in free market is supposed to mean no rules. I think the "free" is supposed to mean both sides of the transactions get to choose to participate or not which means they are pressured to "meet in the middle" and optimize for mutually beneficial deals. The idea is that this is going to provide better outcomes than trying to plan out what everyone makes and buys from the top.

Overregulation can reduce the effective freedom in a market (usually by increasing costs or reducing choice) but good regulation is there to shepherd this equilibrium of a fair deal between buyers and sellers by doing things like getting externalities priced in (if youre buying x you should pay the cost of x, not your neighbor); preventing monopolies, cartels, other price fixing / choice reducing things that makes one side of the market not have to meet in the middle; and adding standards or visibility so market participants can be more efficient and safe when choosing (instead of having to do things like research all of a company's supply chain and employees to decide if it's safe to eat there or to fly in their planes).

Some things get imposed onto the market intentionally like protection for unions (in theory an alternative/shortcut to grouping up into inefficient passthrough companies), tarrifs to give someone an advantage in what they can offer, subsidies to intentionally prevent the market from contracting to the current size of demand (like if the country wants to maintain a certain ability to produce food or doctors or certain goods), and government programs to effectively set a floor on the price of something (like interest rates so lending/borrowing will never be worse than a certain mark).

All these things are useful tools in a market of self motivated actors trying to maximize their own gain in the short term but, like all tools, they get abused and out maneuvered often so it's a constant game of cat and mouse to keep the system running.

Pros and cons all over the place; most things have a huge downside of vulnerability to truly bad actors having too much control (which is where the idea of democracy comes in but I have to stop myself I already word dumped).

tl;dr yes absolutely call it a free market until people are forced to participate too much

Interestingly, there's a whole category of H1B visas just for fashion models. H-1B3, which is for models with "distinguished merit and ability".

A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.

Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.

this also holds true for chemical, biomedical researchers, mechanical engineers working in deep tech, software engineering is such an anomaly that it's hard to do income based lottery without overindexing on swe market

You're not genuinely curious because it's obviously stupid that we'd need H1B visas for artists.

If their art's got enough value to be valuable in the real sense, they're well above all this. Otherwise they're nothing.

L1 employees require that the company employ the person for a year at an international branch so this is only available to multi-national companies.

Why get hung out on the example profession and not the fact that some jobs pay drastically disproportionate rates?

Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.

Short answer - yes.

There's no long answer.

AI literally produces more mesmerising art, for pennies, than an artist ever could, because their whole shtick was "out-there visual concepts", which was a wide open space of anything that's "not normal", which now and AI can pump out copiously.

Artistic talent is not important.

I now write code related to biomedical research. Checkmate