Dear Mr. President:
You want to decrease income inequality, and I agree.
You want to increase the minimum wage; yes, that would be helpful for those in the lower-paid parts of the American labor market and would not create costs for run-of-the-mill taxpayers.
You are unlikely to get much help from Congress on either issue, and must rely on your executive powers to bring about change.
With all that in mind, let me make a modest suggestion: impose a minimum wage, of sorts, on foreign workers.
This would lift the wages of the alien workers we admit, which would be good for them, and, more importantly, it would discourage the use of such workers and open up jobs for unemployed citizens and green card holders.
You should take the first step in the next few days.
As you know (or should know) it is highly likely that the H-1B program, which brings alien high-tech workers to the United States for what are supposed to be temporary assignments, is likely to be over-subscribed, in the sense that there will be more applications than the limits set by law, which total 85,000. The filing date is April 1 every year.
The program is very popular with employers not because there is anything like a shortage of skilled workers, but because it allows employers to hire foreign workers at below-market wages, and keeps those workers in a semi-indentured state for years.
What the government has done in the past, when there are more applications than slots, is to run a lottery for these visas; that decision is administrative and not prohibited by the relevant statute.
That is a terrible waste of an opportunity to decrease income inequality.
What you should tell the Department of Homeland Security to do is to award the 85,000 visas to the 85,000 job offers with the highest wage offers. This will reduce the wage-depressing nature of the H-1B program this year, and even more important, set up a vigorous silent auction next year, which should be very helpful regarding the wages paid in the ultra-prosperous high-tech fields in the future.
There are quotas within quotas in this program, with 20,000 of these visas set aside for aliens with U.S. degrees, but the highest-offers-gets-the-visas rule could be applied within each of the sub-quotas.
Bill Gates, Google, and the like will object, and the Indian outsourcing companies that profit so much from H-1B, will complain, but you will have done something very important for our nation.
Once you have set the precedent with the H-1B program, you could start making similar moves in all the other foreign worker programs which, uniformly, lower wages for aliens and citizens alike. This will involve different mechanisms for each program, but your lawyers can figure this out.
Sincerely
David S. North
Center for Immigration Studies
I am grateful to my colleagues John Miano and Jon Feere for their assistance on this subject.