H1B

I've been thinking a lot about the H1B shortage recently. I think it's likely that the availability of foreign-born indentured servants through a training period probably does depress the starting wages in the market, simply by availability. (The availability of a pool of H1B candidate makes the prevailing local wage a cap instead of a median. Since this is iterated, it serves to artificially depress the local wage for all candidates over time.) Moreover, not only do artificially depressed starting wages directly depress wages for more senior employees, but the inability of those workers to seek employment elsewhere further depresses wages throughout the first few years of employment, the time when most salaried workers see their fastest wage growth. The net result is a broad negative impact on the incomes of technical workers.

Now, to be fair, this is a problem which could be easily fixed by changing the terms of hiring. If, instead of setting the price of an H1B hire to be the prevailing wage, employers were required to pay each H1B at or above the 90th percentile of comparable workers in the local economy, to publish their pay, and to maintain parity at that level throughout the training period, H1B holders would become net inflationary to all wages in the market. That would make them less desirable hires for "average" workers, and would actually reserve them for only the superstars who we, as a country, want to hire and for whom the H1B program is allegedly designed.