This article's idea will immediately makes everything worse. The only good outcome from this program is higher revenue for the government. Good companies will suffer. Foreign workers will suffer. American economy will suffer. All this revenue you collect from higher H-1B fees, you lose out in tax revenues because many companies will fail. The best way for government to enjoy healthy revenue is to have a super healthy economy! There is no other way around it.

The spirit of H-1B program is such that foreign workers get equal pay for equal work compared to their American counterpart. Assuming that is true, employers are already paying a premium for foreign workers because they have to pay thousands more dollars for the visa. The only reason they would do this is that they cannot find enough American workers. If they have to pay the same salary, why would any company in the right mind hire foreigners instead of Americans? If this very fact is not enough for you to show there is shortage of qualified American workers, read on.

Foreign workers will only hurt American workers if they cost less to companies and out-prices American workers. This could be the case for companies that do not follow wage requirement established by the H-1B program. However, if this is the case, then enforcement of H-1B wage requirement should be the thing that needs to be addressed. A new program based on H-1B auction is really addressing the wrong problem, in the wrong way.

Making H-1B fee auction-based will simply drive up the cost of hiring on H-1B. Yes it will become a disincentive to hire foreign workers, however given the same H-1B quota, companies that is able to get away with lower wage for foreign workers are more likely to be willing to pay more for the right to hire H-1B. Companies that are paying foreign workers competitively has no incentive to bid up and will just give up and suffer from under-staffed engineering team. So this program will reward employers who are fraudulent and who depress wages for H-1B worker and punish good companies who provide equal pay for equal work. And guess what, those employers who uncut pay for foreign workers will now undercut their pay even more because the foreign workers have fewer choices of good employers and all the potential employers remaining are the ones who want to pay foreign workers less to justify the higher cost of hiring them. Alas, you have the exact opposite outcome one would expect.

The shortage of highly skilled tech workers in this country needs no further proof. Do you really believe if you kick out all the foreign workers or making them really expensive to hire, then all the Americans who can't find job because their skills are irrelevant can suddenly find a job? They still won't find a job until they learned the things necessary to make them relevant again! Do you know why coding bootcamps are so popular? It is because the Americans who attend these programs know that they need to learn the new skills that will make them relevant in the tech sector.

If anyone works at one of those bootcamps, let's do a survey among your students and publish the results on the Internet. Do your students feel they are disadvantaged from foreign engineers/workers when it comes to finding a job? Which is going to help them more in finding a job they want and like? Attending a coding bootcamp, or sending all foreign engineers home.

The notion that foreign workers are taking jobs away from Americans is an ill-informed one. Illegal Mexicans are doing dirty work that many Americans don't want to do. Foreign tech workers are doing work that many Americans don't have the capacity to do. The pampered Americans(just some of Americans, not all) need to stop whining about their job being taken away and start to up their game and think about how they can contribute to this economy. To quote JFK, My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Ask not what easy job your country can hand out to you, ask what you can do to stay relevant and useful for this country's economy. Take a coding class, become a uber driver. If you really want to work, you will find a job. If you just wanna find scapegoats, you will find many but it won't help you become a better and more useful person.

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