H‑1B visas: talent, fees and fair competition

And you encourage US companies to try to fill those jobs with Americans first. And so I think, you know, putting aside some of the details, I think the big picture here is that they're using market forces to put some scarcity around the H1B application. And I think what that's going to do is encourage applicants to actually be these higher paid, higher skilled jobs that the program is supposed to be for, instead of these lower end IT job shops.

Yeah, these are supposed to be for highly specialized workers. I can tell you, you know, when I was in IT in the early 90s, the abuse was happening all the time. And it was indentured servitude. It was disgraceful. The IT people would hire, typically Indians, and they would say stuff to the effect of, these guys are going to work for half as much and twice as long. And they can't say no. That's the best part of it. They can't say no when we put them on weekend coverage. They can't say no if we want to do a build out and they have to work 10 days in a row because we can kick them out of the country and they have 30 days to find a new job.

I had a bipartisan bill actually that would have reformed it, requiring paying a prevailing wage, requiring making sure that the categories actually were skilled categories. I don't love the blanket $100,000 fee. I think that that's not the best way to reform it, but if, partly because it puts an unfair burden on startups, it actually may hurt with talent. But if you want it to say, look, there's going to be some prevailing wage standard and we need reforms, I'm open to that.

Do you think that the president is on the right direction then in actually trying to reform the system?

I had a bipartisan bill actually that would have reformed it, requiring paying a prevailing wage, requiring making sure that the categories actually were skilled categories. I don't love the blanket $100,000 fee. I think that that's not the best way to reform it, but if, partly because it puts an unfair burden on startups, it actually may hurt with talent. But if you want it to say, look, there's going to be some prevailing wage standard and we need reforms, I'm open to that.

Do you think that the president is on the right direction then in actually trying to reform the system?

It's really unfair, actually, how it works. What he described is that when the application window opens, for what is a very small number of H-1Bs, a company that has, you know, call it 300,000 employees abroad, will apply on behalf of all 300,000, because they're all roughly the same kind of employee, whoever gets it gets to come over. Now, if you're filing 300,000 applications, obviously you have a disproportionately larger chance than Friedberg's company or my company or your company, Jason, who's filing one, obviously. And so, when those kinds of things happen and you can now use the data to understand it, you have to fix it. So, that's one very material and obvious change we need to make right away, which is we have to allow American companies to find these folks and have it be very precise.

So, but there's a process and that this process is going along, fixing the immigration system, right? Not letting people come in by lottery, selecting who they are, not bringing in people who would take a trainee job, right? People who graduate universities around the world, fixing the H1B. Yeah. I mean, look, I think H1B is fantastic for someone who makes $500,000, who's a cool engineer. But it's not okay if it's a $60,000 college graduate. Hire from the universities of America. Don't hire from the universities of the world. It just doesn't make sense.

Yeah, these are supposed to be for highly specialized workers. I can tell you, you know, when I was in IT in the early 90s, the abuse was happening all the time. And it was indentured servitude. It was disgraceful. The IT people would hire, typically Indians, and they would say stuff to the effect of, these guys are going to work for half as much and twice as long. And they can't say no. That's the best part of it. They can't say no when we put them on weekend coverage. They can't say no if we want to do a build out and they have to work 10 days in a row because we can kick them out of the country and they have 30 days to find a new job. And so it's a giant scam on the bottom half of these. I witnessed it firsthand. Every discussion I've ever had about H1Bs in relation to IT and consulting has always been about saving money. And the truth is, it's been abused. And I talked about this in 2015 on CNBC, Chamath, when Trump first started to talk about it. He's been on this for a while. And it's just great to see them. I had suggested 20K a year and that's kind of where they wound up. I additionally think they should do an auction for one-third of these. Let all these big tech companies that are truly trying to get in very unique PhDs from Oxford in AI, man, let them just put out how many they want to buy and at what price do a reverse auction and fill one-third of them with, I don't know, maybe OpenAI or XAI or Microsoft jumps the fence and pays $100K, $200K per person. What do you think Chamath is broadly speaking on this and the policy, the abuse, everything?

I think there needs to be an H1B program. I don't think the national waiver and the other programs are enough. A lot of times, look how Sundar Pichai came or Satya came, who are now leading Google and Microsoft. They came, they studied here, and then they got an H1B. But I would also make it that you don't stay on an H1B indefinitely, that we move towards a green card, which, by the way, President Trump said on your show, in one of your episodes. He said, I'm going to make sure that we actually move folks quickly to a green card. That to me seems like a win-win because you're then not exploiting an individual. You're going to pay them the market wage as they have flexibility of moving. And at the same time, they're going to stay in the United States instead of going back to China or to India. By the way, a lot of these companies, if you just limit H1Bs, they all have overseas, a lot of the big companies have overseas headquarters. So they're going to just offshore the jobs instead of bringing the jobs here.

I think there needs to be an H1B program. I don't think the national waiver and the other programs are enough. A lot of times, look how Sundar Pichai came or Satya came, who are now leading Google and Microsoft. They came, they studied here, and then they got an H1B. But I would also make it that you don't stay on an H1B indefinitely, that we move towards a green card, which, by the way, President Trump said on your show, in one of your episodes. He said, I'm going to make sure that we actually move folks quickly to a green card. That to me seems like a win-win because you're then not exploiting an individual. You're going to pay them the market wage as they have flexibility of moving. And at the same time, they're going to stay in the United States instead of going back to China or to India. By the way, a lot of these companies, if you just limit H1Bs, they all have overseas, a lot of the big companies have overseas headquarters. So they're going to just offshore the jobs instead of bringing the jobs here.

I think the US has always indexed on human safety over speed to market and that has cost us in some ways. However, some other countries are indexed in the opposite direction which costs lives. There's a balance there. But there's research going on in China and other places, experiments and cloning and all things that, that as far as I know, aren't happening here. Yes, and I think the gutting of the CDC and the NIH and an anti-science vibe that has now pervades this country has driven a lot of mindshare elsewhere as funding is drying up for basic research.