Trump To Overhaul H-1B Visa Program To Encourage Hiring Americans (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In a bid to court working class voters, Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday to revamp a temporary visa program used to bring foreign workers to fill jobs in the U.S. The president will use a visit to a manufacturing company in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a crucial state he snatched from Hillary Clinton in the election, to promote his latest "Buy America Hire America" offensive. Trump's executive order will call on government departments to introduce reforms to ensure that H-1B visas are awarded to the "most skilled or highest paid applicants," a senior administration official said. The executive order will also call for the "strict enforcement" of laws governing entry to the U.S. of labor from overseas, with a view to creating higher wages and employment rates for U.S. workers. The order will also call on government departments to "take prompt action to crack down on fraud and abuse" in the immigration system, a senior administration official said. The administration official sad: "Right now H-1B visas are awarded by random lottery and many of you will be surprised to know that about 80% of H-1B workers are paid less than the median wage in their fields. Only 5% to 6%, depending on the year, of H-1B workers command the highest wage tier recognized by the Department of Labor. [...] If you change that current system that awards visas randomly, without regard for skill or wage, to a skills-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers [...] It's a very elegant way of solving very systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa."

Comments

Re:Even simpler, increase the wages

[ghoul]

You say "keep the rubbish out" You do realize that the least qualified H1B has more education and skills than 50% of the US population. You just called 50% of your fellow citizens rubbish. Elitist much? And who will do the work once these "rubbish" are pushed out. Not the high school graduates who can barely read at grade 5 level or the art majors who couldn't be bothered to take a simple requirement spec without a 2 hour discussion on how it affects human rights in Botswana?
If the program is tightened up to only allow top level talent in than the work which needs low level talent (still beyond 50% of the population's capability) will move overseas. This hollowing out of middle level jobs has been going on in USA for a long time because people with middle level capacity expect high level wages and people with economic output worth 2 dollars an hour still expect minimum wage. H1B has been putting a bandage on the problem by preventing some middle level jobs from leaving at the cost of exploiting immigrants (who are willing to be exploited so that their kids get a shot at the American Dream). Note that once a job leaves it never comes back even if the other country becomes rich. Jobs which went to China are not coming back now that Chinese are richer and the wages have risen to a 5 dollar/hr minimum wage. Now the Chinese are installing robots and training their next generation to be robot technicians and using every trick in the book like currency manipulation to hold on to the jobs during the transition. If America wants to keep low level IT jobs till the transition to fully AI driven IT happens H1B is necessary otherwise the transition will happen as US IT->India Based IT->AI based IT with the AI programmers in India.