FWIW, I paid for the legal expenses of H1-B entrants, and paid them the same as the others.
My employer just told me to pay for it out of the general relocation allowance they gave me. The INS demanded a $1000 fee to process my application in one month... I had to absorb that...
However, there is an incentive as an employer because it seems to keep general wages lower than they would be otherwise.
At the economywide level this could be the case for service jobs which are largely non-tradeable such as professors like me. In manufacturing/engineering and even software it seems that the effect shouldn't be so strong as design/production can go to Israel India or wherever. So if you bring workers to the US at least the income tax is going to the US government and there may be a multiplier effect due to the workers expenditures in the US. So from that point of view it is a benefit to US workers.
It's an obvious benefit to the US to attract the best and the brightest in the world, to avoid stagnation of Empire, like England after 1900.
Australia is very open to employing Americans. You can become a citizen in 2 years. You don't even need a job to go there if you are skilled. So if as one poster suggested there are better opportunities there, they are welcome to go get them. Often one hears American and Canadian accents in interviews with executives etc. on Australian radio.
Besides the interesting economic question whether there should be some control of the borders and immigration, for security reasons the whole apparatus is clearly out of control, judging by the control the Saudis have over our INS.
It seems designed to cause hassles to people who can benefit the US and play by the rules and let all kinds of undesirables in somehow. I have a friend in Germany who teaches German to students planning on studying at German universities. 5 years ago most of his students were Latin American. Now almost all are Chinese as the US is making it tougher and tougher for Chinese students to get visas (I have plenty of personl experience in this area).
Re salaries, I met some surgeons in England while tending a friend of mine, who told me the education they get is superb, but their salaries are $50K/yr, and they all wished to move to the US.... The garbage collectors here make more than that, an honest living, but not exactly highly-trained. The dock workers average pay is over $100k. ETc. Pay doesn't always correspond very precisely to education and ability, sometimes more to political power, unfortunately.
I think a surgeon in the government sector in the UK would do better than $50k maybe £50k would be pretty low. If they take private cases they can considerably boost that. But few would make incomes comparable to the US. I earn more than a full professor does typically in the UK and am not particularly well paid for economics associate professors in the US (not because I am an H1-B but because this is a cheap area to live in and our department is small).
Moomin |
