Every year, hundreds of thousands of college-educated foreigners compete for a chance to work in the US.
With just 85,000 slots available, the odds are against them. H-1B visas are awarded not by merit but by lottery.
This random allocation never made much sense. For almost two decades, it’s imposed an inefficient and unpredictable standard that prevents employers from hiring the best candidates.
And, to the detriment of aspiring visa holders and US workers alike, the lottery is far too easily gamed.
Congress established the H-1B visa in 1990 to help fill shortages for highly specialized jobs that require at least a bachelor’s degree.
Employers — often in the technology sector — use it to draw the world’s best and brightest to the US. Many say H-1B workers are critical to maintaining American competitiveness with China.
Congress initially established an annual cap of 65,000 visas. That increased to 85,000 in 2005 and has remained steady since. Demand for such visas typically far exceeds supply.
The lottery was established in 2008 to ensure a “fair and orderly” visa allocation. In recent years, the process has been anything but.
According to a Bloomberg News investigation, IT staffing firms have flooded the lottery with entries to boost their shot at getting picked.
Records also show that outsourcing companies often apply for more visas than they need, edging out other employers who play by the rules. Officials have described some of these practices as “fraudulent.”
The staffing industry, for its part, says its workers help tech companies and other businesses operate effectively.
Whatever their merits, these companies are in many cases gaming the system: Almost half of H-1B visas went to the sector from 2020 through 2023. Regulators have done little to stop well-documented abuses.
Creating a better skilled-visa program should be a priority. Hiring workers to fill jobs Americans can’t do is great for the economy; hiring workers to fill jobs Americans can do is likely to suppress wages.
Thus, the lottery not only favors companies that bend the rules — crowding out the likes of Google, Meta and Microsoft — but it also gives highly coveted visas to back-office IT employees, potentially undercutting the domestic labor market.
To their credit, regulators are starting to crack down. Earlier this year, US Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a rule that seeks to eliminate multiple entries for the same person.
Though well intentioned, the regulation doesn’t go far enough to sanction bad actors or stop them from flooding the applicant pool — and it keeps the ill-conceived lottery intact.
A better approach would be to scrap the lottery in favor of a merit-based system. The US could look to other countries such as Australia and Canada that assign points to various criteria, including education, work experience, skills, age and English proficiency.
Another option is to prioritize higher-wage earners, who are typically more skilled.
A rule proposed by Donald Trump’s administration — and revoked because of a technicality — would’ve scaled allocation based on wage levels, with the most visas going to the best-paid workers.
Such a policy would favor high earners relative to their peers in the same occupation and region (say, a well-compensated accountant in Baton Rouge) over those with the biggest paychecks on an absolute basis (for example, a relatively low-paid software engineer in Redwood City).
Source : https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/migrate/h-1b-lottery-is-too-easily-gamed-heres-how-to-fix-it/articleshow/112495113.cms
