If you want an immigration system to recruit high-skilled workers, how should you go about it? I think Connor O’Brien makes sense here:
The one imperative of a successful high-skilled immigration system, to state the burningly obvious, is to attract and admit the highest-skilled immigrants.
The new plan from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for H-1B visas fails this simple precondition. As we explained in an earlier post, rather than prioritize immigrants with the highest salaries overall — the best available proxy of an immigrant’s future economic contributions to the country — the DHS plan boosts applicants with the highest salaries within their own occupations. The result is that public relations specialists further along in their careers will be prioritized higher than than early-career physicists, even if the latter earn twice the salary.
This is the wrong way to go about selecting applicants for scarce visas. In fact, the immigration system probably shouldn’t care about your occupation at all. . . .
(He qualifies that “shouldn’t care at all” comment later in the post.)