I agree, but the H1B really isn't a general immigration category, or even a general skilled immigration category.
In a free labor market, workers are free to choose a field in response to market conditions and their own personal preferences. Job Factors may include salary, flexibility, job stability, long-term career stability, up front investments, probability of success, prestige, the opportunity to do good and work with people (or not have to work with people).
If people with the freedom of choice prefer to be a lawyer in NY city over becoming a software developer in silicon valley, that's the market's answer. If tech companies want people to make decisions differently, they need to change the incentives.
...or, they could have the government ask the market on their behalf. The H1B visa is immensely restrictive, essentially allowing employers in a few narrow segments of the economy to decide who is allowed to live and work in the US and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain. If the would-be immigrant doesn't like it and quits and can't find a new corporate "sponsor", they have to leave and may lose their spot in a long wait for a green card.
It's nearly impossible to reconcile the H1B visa with the concept of free labor markets. It didn't lead to freer and more efficient markets, it created market distortions that decreased the desirability of software engineering and a few other fields relative to other fields.
To be clear, I'm cool with skilled and general immigration. But once you start talking about corporate "sponsors" who control a would-be immigrant's right to live and work here in a few narrow fields, you're a long, long way from anything even faintly resembling a free labor market.
The H1B is a way for someone who lives elsewhere to wind up living and working in the USA. By definition that's immigration.
As you note, it is a really sucky form of immigration. And Greenspan agrees, he said we should just let high skill individuals come in and become part of our workforce without the weird restrictions.
Instead we have a complicated system that is broken at many levels.
I agree, but I still think this misses the point about the specific impact of the H1B on STEM workers - the focus of the ieee article. The H1B isn't really about generalized high skilled immigration, it's a more narrowly tailored program specially designed to increase the number of STEM workers (among a few other sectors) in the US. I think a lot of people who object to this would not object to a more general immigration system.
For an example - suppose all produce imported to the US faces 100% tarries. Then one day, congress declares a shortage of lemons and decides that there will be no import tax on lemons.
Lemon growers object, and the answer is: free trade makes everyone better off.
Well... ok. But we don't have free trade, we have a situation where almost all produce other than lemons is subject to extreme import restrictions. Under this circumstance, you'd expect overseas farmers who would like to export to the US to increase lemon production, and you'd expect US based farmers to shift production away from lemons.
I think this is very much what we created with decades of the H1B. We left most professions and trades restricted, but created special visas specifically designed to expose US citizens and permanent residents in STEM to augmented competition in the grounds that there is a "shortage". Even without the employer control over the visa, you would expect an action like this to cause more people who would like to access the US job market to study STEM, and cause people who already have that access to study something else. And I think there's strong evidence that exactly this has happened.
In the absence of these restrictions, would immigrants to the US study STEM or engineering? I'm sure many would. And while some would settle in the valley, many would work elsewhere. many would also choose to become coffee shop owners, surfboard shapers, brick layers, hod carriers, mortgage brokers, tax lawyers, itinerant musicians, nurses, dishwasher repair technicians, and so forth. In fact, the 1.2 million immigrants who enter the US legally without these restrictions every year do just that. They don't seem to think that becoming a STEM worker in a place where a small rundown ranch house by the freeway costs 1.5 million sounds any better than many people who were born with US citizenship do.
That is exactly why the tech companies don't really like freedom-based immigration. Free people can choose not to be developers in the valley. That's actually how free markets work, the whole freedom thing, and in the end, it's hard not to conclude that corporations just don't really like it very much. So the lobbied for - and got - control over who is allowed to live and work in the US and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain.
The amazing thing is that they somehow managed to position themselves as "pro-immigrant", and label people who think that immigrants should be free to determine the circumstances of their own lives as the "anti-immigration people".
In a free labor market, workers are free to choose a field in response to market conditions and their own personal preferences. Job Factors may include salary, flexibility, job stability, long-term career stability, up front investments, probability of success, prestige, the opportunity to do good and work with people (or not have to work with people).
If people with the freedom of choice prefer to be a lawyer in NY city over becoming a software developer in silicon valley, that's the market's answer. If tech companies want people to make decisions differently, they need to change the incentives.
...or, they could have the government ask the market on their behalf. The H1B visa is immensely restrictive, essentially allowing employers in a few narrow segments of the economy to decide who is allowed to live and work in the US and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain. If the would-be immigrant doesn't like it and quits and can't find a new corporate "sponsor", they have to leave and may lose their spot in a long wait for a green card.
It's nearly impossible to reconcile the H1B visa with the concept of free labor markets. It didn't lead to freer and more efficient markets, it created market distortions that decreased the desirability of software engineering and a few other fields relative to other fields.
To be clear, I'm cool with skilled and general immigration. But once you start talking about corporate "sponsors" who control a would-be immigrant's right to live and work here in a few narrow fields, you're a long, long way from anything even faintly resembling a free labor market.