To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Mon Apr 8 14:51:13 PDT 2013 In the coming days, we'll likely see a spate of articles similar to the one in today's edition of the San Jose Mercury News, titled, "H-1B Visa Lottery Leaves 40,000 Skilled Foreign Workers Out of Luck." http://www.mercurynews.com/politics-government/ci_22980224/h-1b-visa-lottery-leaves-40-000-skilled Unfortunately, none of them will mention the simple, obvious solution: Hold an auction, not a lottery. This has been proposed by various organizations, including I believe by WashTech and the Programmers Guild. The idea couldn't be simpler--just dole out the visas in the order of offered wage. Market-based solution, easy to implement, no need for legislation. Worried about disparity in occupational wage scales, so that, say, the employers of fashion models would outbid the engineering firms? Well, if the putative STEM shortage isn't translating into high salaries, you SHOULD worry that you're being hoodwinked by the industry lobbyists. But in any case, this problem is easily solved: Dole out the visas in the order of the ratios of the values of offered wage to median overall wage for the given occupation. This system would (by and large) give the visas to the most talented, most valuable workers. Wouldn't it have made sense for the Obama administration to have done that? Yes, of course--unless they are trying to use the visa "scarcity" as a wedge to increase the H-1B cap, motivated in turn by a desire to use that as a wedge to document the undocumented, motivated in turn by a desire to produce more Democratic voters. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/LuckOfTheDraw.txt