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Daniel Greco's avatar

I know it's not the case people are mostly thinking about, but the EO would also be super disruptive to academia. We hire plenty of foreign professors, postdocs, etc., and my understanding is that they rely on H1Bs. If this goes through, it's another way the US will be shooting itself in the foot with respect to our long run scientific and technological development.

If you want to lose the AI race to China, this has got to be one of the best policies you could pursue.

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Michael Hermens's avatar

I agree that Trump should not be stopping H1B visa program by raising the cost.

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Tombadil's avatar

Some of the demand is inelastic so prices can go up and other costs will have to go down to balance

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

It was always about importing cheap scab slave labor. Now that you have to pay it will turn out that they aren’t actually all that skilled.

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Tombadil's avatar

They will probably issue just as many visas at $100,000 so it will change who gets the visa but there's plenty of people who are worth it anyway.

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

Good. That's $8.5B a year. If people buy the gold/platinum/etc visas that's even more.

It will be like the tariffs. People will just pay up and we'll get a bunch of money.

US visa's are a valuable resource. They were giving them away at under market price.

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Tombadil's avatar

Votes are being given away well under market price. A $500 poll tax would probably cut out two-thirds of the voters

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Aurelien's avatar

I think the second to last paragraph has a typo, the H1-B Twitter debate was in December 2024?

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